Education: Return of Montessori

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Products. Among famed U. S. children who have been educated under the Montessori methods are the grandchildren of Alexander Graham Bell: Lilian Waters, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elsie Alexandra Carolyn, children of Editor Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor; Alexander Graham Bell, Barbara, and Nancy Bell, children of Botanist David Grandison Fairchild. In the Hollywood school, chubby Douglas Fairbanks Jr. learned to button shoes, fit blocks, scrape the second fiddle. The Dottoressa never married but her adopted son Mario is a finished product of the system. He is now 31 years old, married to Helen Christie of Cleveland, who teaches at the Opera Montessori.

Criticism. Most U. S. educators, jealous of the fame of John Dewey, are quick to point out that Dewey, in 1902, was working with auto-education in his University of Chicago-school. The interpretation of his philosophy in the education of young children also emphasized the importance of correlating the infant's use of its hands to its brain.

The system, derived from Dewey philosophy, now used at Columbia University Teachers College, differs from the Montessori plan in that it stresses the child's supervised intellectual growth rather than its undirected development. At Columbia the pupil is taken to see a hangar full of airplanes which he is encouraged to copy in clay, wax or crayon in the classroom. Under the Dewey method, the child has opportunity for creative expression which the less plastic Montessori equipment does not allow.