Montessori mother - Kamelini Montessori

A MONTESSORI MOTHER 9
Mit accent of good-breeding, "Good-morning!
"
They then instantly went off about
Good-morning !
their own affairs, which were evidently of absorbing
interest, for after that, except for an occasional
friendly look or smile, or a momentary halt by my
side to show me something, none of the little scholars
paid the least attention to me.
Now I myself, like all the American matrons of my
circle of acquaintances, am laboring conscientiously
to teach my children " good manners," but I decided,
on the instant, nothing would induce me to collect
twenty children of our town and have a Montessori
teacher enter the room to be greeted by them. The
contrast would be too painful. These were mostly
children of very poor, ignorant, and utterly untrained
parents, and ours are children of people who
flatter themselves that they are the opposite of all
that; but I shuddered to think of the long silent,
discourteous stare which is the only recognition of
the presence of a visitor in our schools. And yet I
felt at once that I was attaching too much im-
portance to a detail, the merest trifle, the slightest,
most superficial indication of the life beneath. We
Anglo-Saxons notice too acutely, I thought, these surface
differences of manner.
But, on the other hand, I was forced to consider
that I knew from bitter experience that children of
that age are still near enough babyhood to be abso-
lutely primeval in their sincerity, and that it is prac-
tically impossible to make them, with any certainty