I seized on this opportunity to voice some of the mother’s jealousy which underlay all my extreme admiration and astonishment at the sights of the morning, “If you didn’t keep such an octopus clutch on the children, separating them all day in this way from their own families, if they were sent home to eat their luncheons, why, there would be mothers enough to go around. _They_ would be only too glad to tuck the little napkins in!”
The teacher looked at me, level-browed, and said, with a dry, enigmatic accent which made me reflect uneasily, long afterwards, on her words, “They certainly would. Do you really think that would be an improvement?”
MORE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS IN A CASA DEI BAMBINI
Of course one day’s observations do not give even a bird’s-eye view of all the operations of a Montessori school, and this chapter is intended to supplement somewhat the very incomplete survey of the last and to touch at least, in passing, upon some of the other important activities in which the children are engaged. If this description seems lacking in continuity and uniformity, it represents all the more faithfully the impressions of an observer of a Casa dei Bambini. For there one sees no trace of the slightly Prussian uniformity of action to which we are accustomed in even the freest of our primary schools and kindergartens. You need not expect at ten o’clock to hear the “ten-o’clock class in reading,” for possibly on that day no child will happen to feel like reading. You need not think that the teacher will call up the star pupil to have him write for you. He may be lying on the floor absorbed in an arithmetical game and a Montessori teacher would as soon blow up her schoolroom with dynamite as interfere with the natural direction, taken for the moment by the self-educating instincts of her children.
In planning a visit to a Casa dei Bambini, you can be sure of only one thing, not, however, an inconsiderable thing, and that is that all the children will be happily absorbed in some profitable undertaking. It never fails. There are no “blue Mondays.” Rain or shine outdoors, inside the big room there always blows across the heart of the visitor a fine, tonic breath of free, and hence, never listless life. On days in winter when the sirocco blows, the debilitating wind from Africa, which reduces the whole population of Rome to inert and melancholy passivity, the children in the Casa are perhaps not quite so briskly energetic as usual in their self-imposed task of teaching and governing themselves, but they are by far the most briskly energetic Romans in the city.