THE POSSIBILITY OF AMERICAN ADAPTATIONS OF, OR ADDITIONS TO, THE MONTESSORI APPARATUS
Holding firmly in mind the guiding principle formulated in the paragraph preceding, it may not be presumptuous for us, in addition to exercising our children with the apparatus devised by Dr. Montessori, to attempt to apply her main principles in ways which she has not happened to hit upon. She herself would be the first to urge us to do this, since she constantly reiterates that she has but begun the practical application of her theories, and she calls for the co-operation of the world in the task of working out complete applications suitable for different conditions.
It is my conviction that, as soon as her theories are widely known and fairly well assimilated, she will find, all over the world, a multitude of ingenious co-partners in her enterprise, people who, quite unconscious of her existence, have been for years approximating her system, although never doing so systematically and thoroughly. Is it not said that each new religion finds a congregation ready-made, of those who have been instinctively practising the as yet unformulated doctrines?
An incident in my own life which happened years ago, is an example of this. One of the children of the family, an adored, delicate little boy of five, fell ill while we were all in the country. We sent at once in the greatest haste to the city for a trained nurse, and while awaiting her arrival, devoted ourselves to the task of keeping the child amused and quiet in his little bed. The hours of heart-sickening difficulty and anxiety which followed can be imagined by anyone who has, without experience, embarked on that undertaking. We performed our wildest antics before that pale, listless little spectator, we offered up our choicest possessions for his restless little hands, we set in motion the most complicated of his mechanical toys; and we quite failed either to please or to quiet him.
The nurse arrived, cast one glance at the situation, and swept us out with a gesture. We crept away, exhausted, beaten, wondering by what possible miraculous _tour de force_ she meant single-handed to accomplish what had baffled us all, and holding ourselves ready to secure for her anything she thought necessary, were it the horns of the new moon. In a few moments she thrust her head out of the door and asked pleasantly for a basket of clothes-pins, just common wooden clothes-pins.