I must begin by saying that there are a great many resemblances, as is inevitable in the case of two methods which work upon the same material--children from three to six. And of course it is hardly necessary formally to admit that the ultimate aim of the two educators is alike, because the aim which is common to them--an ardent desire to do the best thing possible for the children without regard for the convenience of the adults who teach them--is the sign manual throughout all the ages, from Plato and Quintilian down, which distinguishes the educator from the mere school-teacher.
There are a good many differences in the didactic apparatus and use of it, some of which are too technical to be treated fully here, such as the fact that Froebel, moved by his own extreme interest in crystals and their forms, provides a number of exercises for teaching children the analysis of geometrical forms, whereas Dr. Montessori thinks best not to undertake this with children so young. Kindergarten children are not taught reading and writing, and Montessori children are. Kindergarten children learn more about the relations of wholes to parts in their “number work,” while in the Casa dei Bambini there is more attention paid to numbers in their series.
There are of course many other differences in technic and apparatus, such as might be expected in two systems founded by educators separated from each other by the passage of sixty years and by a difference in race as well as by training and environment. This is especially true in regard to the greater emphasis laid by Dr. Montessori on the careful, minute observation of the children before and during any attempt to instruct them. Trained as she has been in the severely unrelenting rule for exactitude of the positive sciences, in which intelligent observation is elevated to the position of the cardinal virtue necessary to intellectual salvation, her instinct, strengthened since then by much experience, was to give herself plenty of time always to examine the subject of her experimentation. Just as a scientific horticulturist observes minutely the habits of a plant before he tries a new fertilizer on it, and after he has made the experiment goes on observing the plant with even more passionately absorbed attention, so Dr. Montessori trains her teachers to take time, all they need, to observe the children before, during, and after any given exercise. This is, of course, the natural instinct of Froebel, of every born teacher, but the routine of the average school or kindergarten gives the teacher only too few minutes for it, not to speak of the long hours necessary.