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Scope. To expound her system, Dottoressa Montessori has held 14 international training courses. The fifteenth, which begins this week in Rome, will last until the end of June. Thrice a week she will lecture to elementary teachers, students of pedagogy, parents who have "problem children." Under her direction there will be held some 70 practical demonstrations of her "didactic" contraptions.
Italian disciples "and members of religious orders" will pay 1,000 lira ($52) for the five-month course, foreigners will be charged £30 ($146). Although the Dottoressa has understood English since 1917, she speaks it seldom and circumspectly. The lectures will be delivered in Italian. For those who will not be able to understand her, translation will cost one guinea ($5.11) per month.
History. Three principal Roman schools where the Montessori plan is in effect are the Via Trionfale school, the Via Fuà Fusinata school Casa del Bambini, the convent school in the Via Giusti. In none of these institutions has Dottoressa Montessori actively participated since 1914 because of bureaucratical opposition to her method. Although she dislikes travel save by automobile or airplane, she went abroad the previous year. In England she fared well, establishing institutions, receiving an honorary D.Litt. from Durham University. In the state of Victoria, Australia, mental defectives are corrected by her system. South Australia subsidizes Montessori kindergartens.
The Montessori Plan early took root in the U. S. The debut was handled by Anne E. George, onetime teacher in the Chicago Latin School, a graduate of the 1910-11 training course. Through her efforts, Frank Arthur Vanderlip started a Montessori school for his own and neighbors' children in his Scarborough, N. Y., home. Miss George went to Washington to further the Montessori cause. There she met Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell with whom she founded the Montessori Educational Association. Mrs. Bell was the Association's President. A school was begun on Kalorama Road, near the present home of Attorney General Mitchell.
Triumphantly the Dottoressa entered the U. S. in 1913. She was the guest of the Bells, met President Wilson's daughter Margaret, made her way as far West as Chicago.
In 1915 she returned to inspect the application of her methods to New York tenement children in the John Jay Dwelling. This time she crossed the continent, gave two International training courses at the Panama-Pacific exposition in San Francisco. Once more, in 1916, she crossed the Atlantic. Her lecture course that year was sponsored by the Child Education Foundation of New York.
After her mother's death (1912), she foreswore her youthful agnosticism, returned to the Catholic fold. The course this year has been expanded to include "The Principles of Religious Education."