Montessori mother - Kamelini Montessori

A MONTESSORI MOTHER 23
When I emerged from this brown study, the little
girls had finished their task and there stood before
me tables set for twenty little people, set neatly and
regularly, without an item missing. The children,
called in from their play in the courtyard, came
marching along (they do take collective action when
collective interests genuinely demand it) and sat down
without suggestions, each, I suppose, at the place he
had occupied while working at those same tiny tables.
I held my breath to see the four little waitresses enter
the room, each carrying a big tureen full of hot soup.
I would not have trusted a child of that age to carry
a glass of water across a room. The little girls ad-
vanced slowly, their eyes fixed on the contents of
their tureens, their attention so concentrated on their
all-important enterprise that they seemed entirely ob-
livious of the outer world. A fly lighted on the nose
of one of these solemnly absorbed babies. She twisted
the tip of that feature, making the most grotesque
grimaces in her effort to dislodge the tickling in-
truder, but not until she had reached a table and set
down her sacred tureen in safety, did she raise her
hand to her face. I revised on the instant all my
fixed convictions about the innate heedlessness and
lack of self-control of early childhood; especially as
she turned at once to her task of ladling out the
soup into the plates of the children at her table, a
feat which she accomplished as deftly as any adult
could have done.
The napkins were unfolded, the older children