The Star. TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 1914. A RIGHT BEGINNING IN EDUCATION.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLVI, Issue XLVI, 28 April 1914, Page 4

The Star.

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 1914. A RIGHT BEGINNING IN EDUCATION.

Delivered every evening by 5 o'clock in Hawera, Manaia, Normanby, Okaiawa, Eltham, MangatoM, Kaponga, Awatuna, Opunake, Otakeho, Manutahi, Alton, Hurleyville, Patea, Waverley.

It has been said that nothing is ever well done unless it is begun well. if this is true, it may account for the vast amount of wastage and ineffectiveness in connection with education. I Indeed, a wrong beginning in the training of a young mind must, prima. facie, prove to be more or less a ruinous beginning; just as much so in its sphere and degree as ignorance must prove to 'be in building a house or cultivating a garden. Right methods to begin with are therefore indispensable to true success in the education of the people of a country. We believe that New ZeaI land's present Minister of Education, the Hon. James Allen, is aware of this, for he has more than once since his visit Europe referred to< the Montessori system as, presumptively, the system which, more than any other known at present, ensures a wise and effective beginning in the all-important work of education. Mr Allen has not, however, been "able to act in the matter with the energy of Mr Carmichael, the Minister of Education in New South Wales. After reading newspaper and other articles about Madame Montessori's method, Mr Carmichael at once sent to Europe for that learned lady's book, and when it arrived he handed it to Miss Simpson, lecturer in kindergarten at the Sydney Teachers' College and mistress of the kindergarten practising school at Blackfriars, near Sydney. In doing this he asked Miss Simpson to begin a series of experiments to ascertain whether the Montessori methods weree applicable to Anstralian conditions. The success of the experiments (says a contemporary) was so marked, and Miss Simpson was so impressed with the value of the methods as aids to kindergarten teaching, that the Minister decided to send her to Rome to study the system, at first hand. Since then Miss Simpson has drawn up a report in which she describes what she has seen and learned, and what she thinks concerning the Montessori method. We are told that when Miss Simpson reached Rome she found there eighty students gathered together from widely distant parts of the earth, all intent upon gaining firsthand knowledge of the Montessori system of education. Many of them were sent by Governments, education departments, or colleges, and almost all were teachers of distinction in their own. country. And there was good reasoa for this, for the Montessori system is the result of very special and laborious experience, and very speciaL aptitudes on the part of its founder, Dr. Montessori herself. After taking her degree (says the Evening Star, in summarising Miss Simpson's report) Madame Montessori was engaged as assistant physician to the Psychiatric Clinic at Rome, and while she was so engaged her observations led her to the conclusion that "mental deficiency presented chiefly a pedagogical rather than a medical problem.' This view she set forth so i convincingly before a conference of teachers .and. educationists at Turin in 1898 that th© Italian Minister of Education asked her to deliver to the teachers of Rome a series of lectures on the education of feeble-minded children. The Minister was so impressed with the lectures that he established in Rome a school for children considered hopelessly mentally deficient,, and. later caused to be brought to it all the idiot children in the asylums for the insane in Rome. In this school Dr. Montessori taught the children and trained their teachers for two years. Her experience in that school led her to the conclusion that the methods used with defectives would with normal childrentrain them to self-education "through liberty/" "From the very beginning of my work," she says, "I felt that the metnods I used had in them nothing peculiarly limited to the instruction of idiots. I believed, indeed, that they contained educational principles more rational than those in use; so much so, indeed, that through their means an inferior mentality would be able to grow and develop. Little by little I became convinced that similar methods applied to normal children would develop or set free their personality in a marvellous and surprising way." To qualify herself to prove the truth or the falsity of her conclusions she resigned her position in the school for defectives and entered upon a course of experimental psychology in the Italian universities, at the same time visiting the primary schools for the purpose of studying the children and the methods employed in the teaching of them. In the schools she saw "rows of immobile children nailed to their stationary seats and forced to give over their natural birthright of activity to well-meaning, gesticulating, explaining, always-fa-tigued and always talking teachers."

It was all alien to her experience of what is truly educative and to the teaching of her researches in psychol°gy> philosophy, and anthropology. At the end of six years of thought and research there came to her the opportunity to put into practice methods founded upon her experience with defectives and her researches in psychology; f°r tenements for the housing of the poor had been established in Rome, and in each tenement block there was a house for the children to play in while their mothers were at work. At each of these playhouses there was a woman to supervise the children, and Dr. Montessori was asked to take charge of the houses. She was thus provided with a laboratory that she needed to test the value of her conclusions, and in which she practised the methods that have made her name famous throughout the educational world —methods which, through the enterprise of the Minister of Education in New South Wales and the intelligence of Miss Simpson, have been brought conveniently within the cognisance of all the Australian States and New Zealand. Mr Braik, Director of Education in the Wanganui Education Board's district, looked into the subject during a recent visit to Sydney, and brought back some suggestive observations upon it. But it is desirable that Mr Allen, as Minister of Education, should have the matter comprehensively considered in the interest of the Dominion as a whole, and, as a sympathetic educationist as well as Minister,, he will no doubt have this done. This, indeed, is obligatory, for, prima facie r the Montessori system supplies a proved right method of beginning the work of education, and without such a beginning that work, generally speaking, cannot be w rhat it needs to be in the best interests of the individual and the- nation.