Montessori mother - Kamelini Montessori

4 A MONTESSORI MOTHER
suffer from our refusal to use our minds fully and
freely on such subjects. It is intolerable that our
callous indifference and incurable triviality should
wreak themselves upon the helpless children committed
to our care. The least we can do, if we will not
do our own thinking, is to accept, with all gratitude,
the thinking that someone else has done for us.
For there is one loop-hole of escape in our modern
world from this self-imprisonment in shiftless ways
of mental life, and that is the creation and wide dif-
fusion of the scientific spirit. There is apparently in
human nature, along with this invincible repugnance
to use reason on matters closely connected with our
daily life, a considerable pleasure in ratiocination if
it is exercised on subjects sufficiently removed from
our personal sphere. The man who will eat hot mince-
pie and rarebit at two in the morning and cry out
upon the Fates as responsible for the inevitable
sequence of suffering, may be, often is, in his chem-
ical laboratory, or his surgical practice, or his bio-
logical research, an investigator of the strictest in-
tegrity of reasoning.
Reflection on this curious trait of human nature may
bring some restoration of self-respect to parents in
the face of the apparently astounding fact that most
of the great educators have been by no means parents
of large families, and a large proportion of them
have been childless. This but follows the usual ec-
centric route taken by discoveries leading to the
amelioration of conditions surrounding man. It was