Is this following of personal impulse, as shown in Montessori-trained children, productive of better concentration than we find in our public schools to-day?
Part of the Montessori didactic material for teaching numbers consists of a cardboard case into which cards bearing big black figures may be slipped, giving the child an opportunity to work out number combinations. A little lad of five discovered one morning, when I was observing at the Via Giusti Montessori school in Rome, that he could slip into his case cards in regular succession that would count to one hundred by fives. He spread out his cards upon the sunny floor, provided himself with the polished counting sticks for verifying each operation; then kneeling in front of his counting frame, he went to work, alone, concentrated.
It was visiting day at the School. Tourists, teachers, students lined the room to the number of forty or fifty, leaving the children scant space to work, and as the little boy’s numerical adventure began, they crowded closer to watch him. An American public school child would have grown restive and self-conscious, but this little Montessori lad might have been alone in the Sahara, so quiet, so unheeding of anything but his own occupation was he. The number cards are large, and it took a good many to reach one hundred. The little fellow spread them out in the center of the floor, then carried the row under the chairs of the visitors, not seeming to notice the presence of the grown-ups.
The morning grew gold with noon, and the other children, quietly putting away their materials, spread the low tables for the midday meal. Little white bowls, snowy napkins, carefully laid spoons—then the steaming chicken broth. Still the little counter did not move. He had reached seventy-five, after verifying every number he had registered in the case. One of the wee waitresses for the day carried his red and green luncheon basket and set it down on the floor in front of him; he did not heed it.
“Why doesn’t somebody stop that child’s counting and _make_ him eat his lunch,” expostulated a nervous American school teacher, watching. “Children should be made to do certain things at certain times,” she explained.
