With this obvious fact firmly in mind, Dr. Montessori simply looked back over history and drew upon the stores of the world’s painfully acquired wisdom as to the best way to extract the greatest possibilities from the world’s inhabitants. If it is true, she reasoned, that men and women have reached their highest development only when they have had the utmost possible liberty for the growth of their individualities, if it is true that slavery has been the most ruinously unsatisfactory of all social expedients, both for masters and slaves, if society has found it necessary for its own good to abolish not only slavery but caste laws and even guild rules; if, with all its faults, we are agreed that democracy works better than the wisest of paternal despotisms, then it ought to be true that in the schoolroom’s miniature copy of society there should be less paternal despotism, more democracy, less uniformity of regulation and more,--very much more,--individuality.
Therefore, although we cannot allow children as much practical freedom as that suitable for men of ripe experience, it is apparent that it is our first duty as parents to make every effort to give them as full a measure of liberty as possible, exercising our utmost ingenuity to make the family life an enlightened democracy. But this is not an easy matter. A democracy, being a much more complicated machine than an autocracy, is always harder to organize and conduct. Moreover the family is so old a human institution that, like everything else very old, it has acquired barnacle-like accretions of irrelevant tradition. Elements of Russian tyranny have existed in the institution of the family so long that our very familiarity with them prevents us from recognizing them without an effort, and prevents our conceiving family life without them; quite as though in this age of dentistry, we should find it difficult to conceive of old age without the good old characteristic of toothlessness. To renovate this valuable institution of the family (and one of the unconscious aims of the Montessori system is nothing more or less than the renovation of family life), we must engage upon a daily battle with our own moral and intellectual inertia, rising each morning with a fresh resolve to scrutinize with new eyes our relations to our children. We must realize that the idea of the innate “divine right of parents” is as exploded an idea as the “divine right of kings.” Fathers and mothers and kings nowadays hold their positions rightfully only on the same conditions as those governing other modern office-holders, that they are better fitted for the job than anyone else.