The Very First Montessori House Of Children

It was the 6th of January 1907. The day was one of celebration – the day of Epiphany when the three kings came with gifts to the Infant Jesus.

It was the day Signor Eduardo Talamo, head of Beni Stabili, an association of builders and contractors, was waiting for because the tenement at 58 Via dei Marsi in the San Lorenzo Quarters was going to be protected from the misdeeds of the children who kept destroying the walls and dirtying the staircases. It was the opening day of the first Casa dei Bambini.

Going back in time, we find that Italy had emerged as a nation and Rome had been chosen as its capital. It is no wonder that buildings were being constructed at a great pace. Buildings were constructed for the wealthy and the elite. It was also necessary to build for the working class. One such group of tenements was built in the San Lorenzo Quarters. Some of them were unoccupied and that led to their occupation by antisocial inhabitants. Many families lived in inhuman conditions.

Some of them were occupied by families where both the man and the wife went out for daily labour. Very young children went with the mothers. Children above six years of age were sent to schools for compulsory education. So the children between two and six years were left in the tenements. The children left behind uncared for became a great threat to the buildings. They were active and had no guidance. Signor Talamo had to find a way of protecting the buildings. He wanted a way of keeping the children engaged in the absence of the parents. He had heard of Maria Montessori and he requested her to cooperate with him to put the proposal into practice.

Dr. Maria Montessori had agreed to become part of the scheme though she had no idea of educating the children. The promoters of the scheme gave her very little – a room and some heavy furniture and provision for one attendant. She could persuade them to give some midday food. That was all.

She found a couple of assistants but both were uneducated, just partly literate. The room was too small for the number of children. There were no attractive things and the walls were bare. There was a big cupboard in which were kept some material that Madame Montessori had brought. But it was kept locked. The material was intended for some psychometric experiments. Even Dr. Montessori considered the children ineducable as the ages of the children were less than six years.

“Fifty-odd children, poorest of the poor, distrustful of strangers, hostile to the environment, with no contact with human culture, whose parents had neither positive nor negative elements in their treatment” could describe concisely the condition of the children.

“Tearful and frightened, so shy that it was impossible to get them to speak; their faces were expressionless, with bewildered eyes as though they have not seen anything like this before. The poor abandoned children had grown up in dark tumble-down cottages without anything to stimulate their minds – dejected and uncared for. It was not necessary for a doctor to see that they suffered from malnutrition. They were like closed flowers without the freshness of buds, souls concealed in a hermetic cell,” E.M. Standing writes about Montessori’s description of the children.

Friends of Dr. Montessori disapproved of her entering into this venture as this was not her profession. After all she was not qualified to become an educator.

A common friend of Signor Talamo and Dr. Montessori became very enthusiastic about the project and wanted to name it the “Casa dei Bambini”. It was accepted by both.

Dr. Montessori said, “I had been asked to take charge of this institution which ‘might have a future’. I had a strange feeling that made me announce emphatically at the opening that here was a ‘grandiose’ undertaking of which the whole world would one day speak.”

The words of the scripture which, on that day, was read in the churches seemed to be an omen and a prophecy: “For behold darkness shall cover the earth. But the Lord shall arise upon thee and the Gentiles shall walk in thy light”. Perhaps this was what inspired her.

Thirty-five years later she was heard to say, “I don’t know what came over me but I had a vision and inspired by it, I was inflamed and said that this work we were undertaking would prove very important and that some day people would come to see it. What an exaggeration!”

The inaugural ceremony was elaborately planned. Signor Talamo was interested in getting as much publicity as possible. The elite of the city of Rome were there. They brought lovely gifts like dolls for the ‘poor’ children.

“They (children) were dressed all alike in some thick heavy blue drill. They were frightened and being hindered by the stiff material could move neither arms nor legs freely. Apart from their own community they had never seen any people. To get them to move together they were asked to hold hands. The first unwilling child was pulled thus dragging the whole line of the rest. They were crying miserably. The sympathy of the society ladies was aroused.”

Silence descended on the project of Madame Montessori after the grand inauguration. But the peace vanished before the end of the year. The room and the children started arousing interest all over the world. People started coming to visit the Casa crossing deserts and seas. Kings, queens, scientists, politicians, social workers, film stars and even tourists came to see the place where children showed “Miracles”. Perhaps the rich became jealous of the poor.

Dr. Montessori writes in her The Secret of Childhood:

“I began to work like a peasant woman who, having set aside a good store of seed-corn, has found a fertile field in which she may freely sow it. But I was wrong. I had hardly turned over the clods of my field, when I found gold instead of wheat; the clods concealed a precious treasure. I was not the peasant I had thought myself. Rather I was like Alladin who, without knowing it, had in his hand a key that would open hidden treasures. In fact, my work on these normal children brought me a series of surprises. Possibly this fairy tale is worth telling.”

Certain phenomena, psychological in nature, started manifesting themselves. None of them had any educational significance or importance according to what education is thought of today.

These phenomena revealed unknown, unexpected, unsuspected, incredible aspects of the child’s nature, the child’s psyche, and unbelievable capacities of the child. All these had remained unknown.

E.M. Standing writes about this: Children revealed to Dr. Montessori the normal characteristics of childhood hitherto remained concealed under the mask of deviations. Montessori discovered that children possess different and higher qualities than those we usually attribute to them. It was as if a higher form of personality had been liberated and a new child had come into being.

This was the cradle in which the Montessori method was born. It went on like a cycle. Children revealed their nature. Dr. Montessori noticed them and allowed more freedom to work. The children showed more of their true nature and the intrigued Dr. Montessori involved herself even more deeply. There was no turning back.