CHAPTER SEVEN 

 EDUCATION The School of Living 



WHEN we were considering shaking the dust of the 

 city from our feet, the school question was one which 

 caused us a great deal of worry. Our boys were seven 

 and eight years old; they had been going to school 

 from the time they had entered the kindergarten 

 classes in the city's public schools. At the time we 

 were planning to leave the city they had already made 

 more scholastic progress than other children of their 

 age; one was a half-year ahead, and the other a full 

 year ahead, of their chronological age. The credit for 

 this, we now know, was due less to the elaborately or- 

 ganized public schools of New York City than to our 

 use at home of some of the methods of child-training 

 developed by Dr. Maria Montessori, the Italian educa- 

 tor, in whose theories the country was just then be- 

 coming interested. We had used the Montessori meth- 

 ods from the moment the boys were old enough to 

 start feeding and dressing themselves. So impressed 

 were we by her approach to the problem of child edu- 

 cation that we constructed our own "didactic" ap- 

 paratus because none of it was at that time on sale in 

 this country. 



Without having pushed our boys, but merely by 



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