Word: slum
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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...
...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...
...Montessori boom will collapse, just as it did early in the century when John Dewey's brand of progressive education won out. On the other hand, others are just as sure that the current Montessori revival, coinciding with national concern for preschool education in general and for slum kids in particular, will profoundly change U.S. education...
...will eventually force the public school system into running nursery schools. And the only thing on the horizon with the theoretical base and the classroom hardware for a modern nursery is the Montessori system." Adds Nancy Rambusch: "We've come full circle. We're back with the slum kids Maria Montessori started with...
...screech and honk with the aggressive dissonance of city traffic. They have the staccato beat of a pneumatic drill. The strident reds, blues, and yellows blare with neon. And the stray words that seem squiggled from a toothpaste tube onto his paintings are like the hip, harsh expletives that slum kids spew into the summer air. Davis had violence without anger, gaiety without abandon, and his paintings swing and jump with such durable joy that it is as if he had dipped his brush in some eternal fountain of youth...