The Joy of Learning

The U.S. has all but forgotten Maria Montessori, the practical Italian idealist who founded her own brand of progressive education in 1907. Though once Americans acclaimed her, John Dewey's permissive disciples pooh-poohed her as too rigid, and only in Europe have Montessori schools made real headway. But last week, in a handsome new building in Greenwich, Conn., the nation's only "pure" Montessori school was dedicated. Whitby School is startling on at least two counts: it was founded by firmly anti-permissive Roman Catholics, and its old Montessori methods turn out to be a showcase of nearly every "new" idea that U.S. education has lately discovered.

Whitby is proudly "a work school, not a play school," and in their uniform grey skirts and shorts the children at first seem unduly solemn. Silence fills the classrooms; tears and giggles are rare; even teachers speak in near whispers. The visitor is sure that something is drastically wrong. Actually, the children are absorbed in a series of graded "jobs" that each feels compelled to complete--on his own. With almost no visible goading, Whitby's kids learn numbers at three, write at four, read at five, parse sentences at seven. Whitby is at least two years ahead of other private schools and three years ahead of public schools.

Come to the Stable. Whitby is the creation of intense, redheaded Nancy McCormick Rambusch, 34, the Milwaukee-born wife of a church designer, and mother of two, who picked up her passion for Montessori methods while studying languages at the University of Paris. Trained as a Montessori teacher, she began with a small nursery group in her Manhattan apartment. Moving to Connecticut a few years later, she found fellow Catholic neighbors eager to try Montessori teaching, and in 1958 opened Whitby School in a renovated stable, naming it after the ancient Yorkshire abbey where Caedmon, the poet-stableboy, sang his verses.

Headmistress Rambusch was so successful that last fall her neighbors began raising $260,000 to build a full-scale school on 37 acres. Opened in January, it now has 150 children aged three to twelve (many of them non-Catholic) and 13 teachers, including recruits from Montessori schools in France, England and Ireland. Whitby is headquarters of the newly formed American Montessori Association, and as such is training a dozen Americans to launch new Montessori schools across the U.S.

Order & Self-Discipline. Whitby's inspiration, Maria Montessori, who died in 1952 at 81, was a mathematical prodigy and the first woman to get an M.D. at the University of Rome. Physician Montessori became an educator by salvaging feeble-minded children. By giving them things to touch and twist with their hands, she got their brains to function responsively. Soon the Dottoressa had supposedly moronic pupils outstripping normal children on public school examinations.

The soul of a child, argued Montessori, develops through "periods of sensitivity," when he has a preternatural bent to walk, talk, or advance in some other respect. These periods must be nurtured; the child must be allowed to take utmost advantage of his yearning to master chaos. Since success encourages learning, the child must also move at his own pace, step by step, gaining confidence through competence. To guarantee all this, Montessori developed what she called "the prepared environment"--a system in essence much like today's programed learning.

Seeing & Stretching. In 1907 she set up a school in Rome for obstreperous slum kids, using an arsenal of ingenious devices that moved from the sensory to the abstract. By handling and copying letters cut out of cardboard, the kids at four simply fell into writing and then reading. By feeling beads strung on wires in units of ten, they "saw" numbers and learned to compute in their heads. With the teacher acting only as guide, each child worked alone at his own little table or on a small rug, where he could lay out beads and blocks, and incidentally stretch his muscles. Yet the children, divided into three-year age groups, stimulated one another as though in a family--precisely the advantage of the now much-touted ungraded primary school.

At Whitby School last week, the children, uninterrupted by any "rest" bell, worked happily, rarely disturbed one another, automatically tidied up after each task. To learn the continents, three-year-olds used special jigsaw puzzles. To strengthen muscles for early writing, they traced complex metal plates that also introduced formal geometrical shapes. To practice the alphabet, one tot used big cards with the letters pasted on in sandpaper that he could feel. Four-year-olds used cut-out letters to spell the names of animals in pictures; many wrote the names, and several five-year-olds sat quietly reading books to themselves.

By endlessly rearranging "golden beads," the children quickly learn the rational order of tens, hundreds and thousands, then addition, multiplication, subtraction and division, in that logical order, going on to square roots and the binomial theorem at the age of six. They are so fascinated with numbers that they sit around adding enormous sums for fun, or writing higher and higher numbers on long strips of paper. "I'm going to 60,000 today," said one somber four-year-old last week, as the teacher handed him another yard of paper.

Whitby's main problem is adapting Montessori self-discipline to U.S. children. "These are American kids," says Headmistress Rambusch. "They check their guns at the door, and we can't escape the fact that they need activity." From the intent look of her kids, who confine their whoops and hollers entirely to the playground, she seems to have the problem in hand. Whitby is well launched in a pursuit not always found in U.S. schools: "introducing the joy of learning to children at an early age."

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