"1.11t4 NEW CEILDREN."
[To THE EDITOR OP TILE " SPECTATOS.")
Sie,—Your reviewer in the article based on my book, The New Children, in your lest issue, asks me several questions. Having been swept up by your reviewer with "the rest of the professed Montessorians," may I retaliate that I think the trouble about fairy-tales and make-believe is an invention of the professed Froebelians? I have spent a day with Dr. Montessori in a school of which she approved, and there were fairy-tales on the shelf. She gave my own children ordinary toys. Dr. Montessori has been very much astonished, in coming to Eng- land, to find herself, as an educator, expected to lay down the law as to the details of children's lives, both in school and out. Latin parents do not depute so much responsibility to the teacher. Just as Latin wives have the habit of good cooking, so Latin mothers, in the centuries, have developed a habit of common-sense about the little things of a child's daily life. I am not saying that Latin children are properly brought up or sent to-bed early enough, but I do think that the-average Latin mother is as comfortably secure of her child developing into a normal human being as pussy is of her kitten growing into a eat. She will not therefore expect the teacher to teach it how to play trains as an emotional preparation for future life.
Dr. Montessori's concern has been not with children's happy harmless play, but with the harm that teachers have been arbi- trarily doing to children in school. As a doctor, with a vast knowledge of the beginnings of lunacy, she knows the danger of that over-stimulation of the immature mind by means of "tales of terror and wonder " which kindergarteners have practised for the purpose of brightening children up. The ten- dency of the race is already towards detachment from reality, and the asylums are filled with sufferers whose illness is that they are not rooted in the realities of daily life.
May I add that The New Children, which is published by Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton, is being sold for the benefit of St. George's Home for Officers' Children, Byfleet, where Montessori nurses can be trained, and where the Duchess of Marlborough. Lady Haig, Lady Betty Balfour, and Miss Hester
Booth hope shortly to welcome visitors to see Montessori children at work and at play P—I am, Sir, &c.,
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