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Learning one step at a time, at their own pace, they become more self-reliant and confident. A three-year-old lies on a rubber mat, arranging a washbasin and cups; a five-year-old, blindfolded with a blue eyeshade, feels a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, following out some blueprint in his mind. Ordinary progressive schools have similar equipment, since U.S. toy manufacturers have stolen many of Maria Montessori's original designs and ideas. But where progressive schools use the tools as one of many activities in which the teacher plays a major role, Montessori schools put the teacher in the background while the didactic teaching materials do much of the work.
Profound Change? Some educators, such as Columbia Teachers College Professor Miriam Goldberg, think the Montessori boom will collapse, just as it did early in the century when John Dewey's brand of progressive education won out. On the other hand, others are just as sure that the current Montessori revival, coinciding with national concern for preschool education in general and for slum kids in particular, will profoundly change U.S. education.
"The big" push at the moment," predicts John Henry Martin, superintendent of schools in Freeport, L.I., "will eventually force the public school system into running nursery schools. And the only thing on the horizon with the theoretical base and the classroom hardware for a modern nursery is the Montessori system." Adds Nancy Rambusch: "We've come full circle. We're back with the slum kids Maria Montessori started with."