IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MONTESSORI SYSTEM AND THE KINDERGARTEN?
No one realizes more acutely than I that the composition of this chapter presupposes an amount of courage on my part which it is perhaps hardly exaggeration to call foolhardiness. That I am really venturing upon a battleground is evident to me from the note of rather fierce anticipatory disapproval which I hear in the voice of everyone who asks me the question which heads this chapter. It always accented, “_Is_ there any real difference between the Montessori system and the kindergarten?” with the evident design of forcing a negative answer.
Oddly enough, the same reluctance to grant the possibility of anything new in the Italian method characterizes the attitude of those who intensely dislike the kindergartens, as well as that of its devoted adherents. People who consider the kindergarten “all sentimental, enervating twaddle” ask the question with a truculent tone which makes their query mean, “This new system is just the same sort of nonsense, isn’t it now?”; while those who feel that the kindergarten is one of the vital, purifying, and uplifting forces in modern society evidently use the question as a means of stating, “It can’t be anything different from the best kindergarten ideas, for they are the best possible.”
I have seen too much beautiful kindergarten work and have too sincere an affection for the sweet and pure character of Froebel to have much community of feeling with the rather brutal negations of the first class of inquirers. If they can see nothing in kindergartens but the sentimentality which is undoubtedly there, but which cannot possibly, even in the most exaggerated manifestations of it, vitiate all the finely uplifting elements in those institutions, it is of no use to expect from them an understanding of a system which, like the Froebelian, rests ultimately upon a religious faith in the strength of the instinct for perfection in the human race.
It is therefore largely for the sake of people like myself, with a natural sympathy for the kindergarten, that I am setting out upon the difficult undertaking of stating what in my mind are the differences between a Froebelian and a Montessori school for infants.