Founding the first modern Montessori school
in the U.S. turned red-haired Nancy McCormick Rambusch from a housewife
into a stormy prophetess. Her success in setting up the Whitby School
in Greenwich, Conn., led to so much demand for her advice that she went
on to start the American Montessori Society. “I'm sort of the Mary
Baker Eddy of this organization,” she remarks, a little ruefully. But
Nancy Rambusch is proud that beginning with Whitby in 1958, the
Montessori movement in the U.S. has grown to 100 private schools , and the method may be on the verge of
filling a big new role in big-city slums. Heresy. The Whitby School was chartered from Amsterdam, headquarters of
the international Montessori movement. There, Mario Montessori, natural son of the Italian woman who worked out
the method, has carried on since her death in 1952 at 81. But when Head
mistress Rambusch insisted on relaxing the strict discipline of the
original Montessori dogma, Mario called her a heretic and withdrew the
charter. “My task has been to create a society for the maintenance of
the 'pure' Montessori,” he explains with a sigh. Then Nancy Rambusch quit the Whitby School, after a disagreement with
the board of directors. At the same time, an ex-actor named Tom
Laughlin founded a Montessori school in Santa Monica, quickly made it
the biggest in the U.S., and brought in an authentically European
Montessorian couple to run a teacher-training program. Orthodox
Montessorian Laughlin scorns Nancy Rambusch, confidently expects that
the A.M.S. will die within three years. Despite such bickering, the movement thrives. Thousands of well-off U.S.
couples, many of them Roman Catholics, accept the Montessori principle
that a child's mind, far from being a clean slate, contains a blueprint
of self-civilization; the school and teachers need only provide
conditions for the child to follow the blueprint. Kids who are able to
follow often learn to read, write and do binomial theorems at
six—which is why Montessori schools rise faster than competent
teachers can be found. Hands Unlike Hands. Yet only now is the Montessori method being tried on
the gravest problem facing big-city educators in the U.S. Recalling
that Maria Montessori formed her educational concepts teaching 60 slum
children in Rome almost 60 years ago, some Chicago experimenters are
running a Montessori school that tackles the job of preparing preschool
kids from racial ghettos for the strange world of middle-class public
schools. The children live in Chicago's Cabrini slum-clearance project. They are
mostly fatherless Negroes and Puerto Ricans whose mothers work or are
on relief. “Some of the older ones had hands that didn't even operate
like hands,” says the school's director, Marcella Morrison, who taught
in Chicago public schools before she went to Greenwich for a year of
Montessori training at Nancy Rambusch's Whitby School. “They had never
been given anything to handle.” At first they were a reserved, hostile
bunch, and Director Morrison found that she could barely even talk with
them. Now the Cabrini kids fondly call her “the tall lady,” and follow
her through the grounds of the project as though she were the Pied
Piper.
