Education: Montessori in Copenhagen

Above the green, copper roofs of Copenhagen in the grey-spired Christiansborg palace, home of the Danish Parliament, a dumpy old lady last week rapped a distinguished gathering to order. Before her sat 203 representatives from 21 nations, including France's bouncing Edouard Herriot, Czechoslovakia's venerable Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, England's Leaguophile Viscount Cecil of Chelwood. The meeting was boycotted by totalitarian Russia, Germany and Italy, but when the old lady, peering sharply from behind high baskets of pink and red roses, began to speak, it was in full-throated Italian. At 67, Dottoressa Maria Montessori had called together a ten-day international Congress on Education & Peace.

A veteran of international congresses, which she has been attending to expound her theories of child education all over Europe since the turn of the Century, the Dottoressa was welcomed by Danish newspapers as "the greatest living Italian orator." Using no notes, waiting patiently for her interpreters, last week the Dottoressa wanted to talk about children from a new point of view. ''The adult," she declared, "must understand the meaning of the moral defence of humanity, not the armed defence of nations. He must realize that the child will be the creator of the new world peace. In a suitable environment the child reveals unsuspected social characteristics. The qualities he shows will be the salvation of the world, showing us all the road to peace. And the new child has been born! He will tell us what is needed!"

As this good Montessori doctrine was roundly applauded. Danish Foreign Minister Dr. Peter Munch got up to add: "We must help by seeing that history books are purged of all biased records which inculcate national hatreds. Brazil, Argentina and Scandinavia have already made great progress." British Author Philip Noel Baker (The Private Manufacture of Armaments) spoke fervently for international government. An enthusiastic delegate offered a resolution to make the League of Nations an instrument of ''international political hygiene to prevent the growth of the diseases of Communism and Fascism." From Barcelona, where Dottoressa Montessori had been conducting a training school for teachers until hostilities caused her to leave last summer, came an excited cable from the Catalonian Government promising that 150 Montessori schools would soon be open for 60,000 young Catalans.