They find--if they are relentlessly persistent enough to pierce through the protection her friends try to throw about her--only Dr. Montessori herself, a private individual, phenomenally busy with very important work, who does not speak or understand a word of English, who has neither money, time, or strength enough single-handed to cope with the flood of inquiries and inquirers about her ideas. In order to devote herself entirely to the great undertaking of transmuting her divinations of the truth into a definite, logical, and scientific system, she has withdrawn herself more and more from public life. She has resigned from her chair of anthropology in the University of Rome, and last year sent a substitute to do her work in another academic position not connected with her present research--and this although she is far from being a woman of independent means. She has sacrificed everything in her private life in order to have, for the development of her educational ideas, that time and freedom so constantly infringed upon by the well-meaning urgency of our demands for instruction from her.
She lives now in the most intense retirement, never taking a vacation from her passionate absorption in her work, not even giving herself time for the exercise necessary for health, surrounded and aided by a little group of five devoted disciples, young Italian women who live with her, who call her “mother,” and who exist in and for her and her ideas, as ardently and whole-heartedly as nuns about an adored Mother Superior. Together they are giving up their lives to the development of a complete educational system based on the fundamental idea of self-education which gave such brilliant results in the Casa dei Bambini with children from three to six. For the past year, helped spiritually by these disciples and materially by influential Italian friends, Dr. Montessori has been experimenting with the application of her ideas to children from six to nine, and I think it is no violation of her confidence to report that these experiments have been as astonishingly successful as her work with younger children.
It is to this woman burning with eagerness to do her work, absorbed in the exhausting problems of intellectual creation, that students from all over the world are turning for instruction in a phase of her achievement which now lies behind her. The woman in the genius is touched and heartened by the sudden homage of the world, but it is the spirit of the investigating scientist which most often inhabits that powerful, bulky, yet lightly poised body and looks out from those dark, prophetic eyes; and from the point of view of the scientist, the world asks too much when it demands from her that she give herself up to normal teaching. For it must be apparent from the sketch of her present position that she would need to give up her very life were she to accede to all the requests for training teachers in her primary method, since she is simply a private individual, has no connection with the official educational system of her country, is at the head of no normal school, gives no courses of lectures, and has no model schools of her own to which to invite visitors. It is hard to believe her sad yet unembittered statement that there is now in Rome not one primary school which is entirely under her care, which she authorizes in all its detail, which is really a “Montessori School.” There are, it is true, some which she started and which are still conducted according to her ideas in the majority of details, but not one where she is the leading spirit.