Montessori Suey

The other afternoon I wandered back to the South London suburb where I was born and tried to find my first school, a genteel establishment dedicated to following the educational gospel of the Italian pioneer Dr. Maria Montessori. It had been turned into a Chinese restaurant.

I stood staring pensively at the closed door while pedestrians edged around me, probably thinking that I was a compulsive eater, paralyzed by a desire for chicken with almonds, lobster meat balls, and sweet and sour pork. In fact, I was trying to feel emotions of a complexity adequate to the changeover from colored counting rods to chopsticks. Not for the first time, the faculty of instant generalization had deserted me in a crisis. I just didn’t seem to be able to link practical lessons in judging weight, tying bows, and going rigid when the whistle went with the great gastronomic dispersion which has carried the food of Canton into the homelands of snails, pumpkin pie, and beef and Yorkshire pudding.

I felt, as I watched the traffic move along more slowly than in my youth, that this inability to cope intellectually with historical change must be due to my earliest teachers. It would have been contrary to all psychological dogma to blame myself. My few weaknesses that are not due to my parents must be due to the men and women who taught me, and the earlier they came in my development, the heavier their burden of guilt. So deficient were those earnest disciples in any grasp of my adult needs that I doubt whether the Chinese were even mentioned during the course. We old Montessorians are simply not prepared for the Yellow Peril in its mid-twentiethcentury form, with Mao’s Thoughts and noodles blanketing the globe.

I am not quite sure that these ladies, who became so inspired by the Dottoressa’s doctrines that they immediately tried them out on the children of their friends, were very far into the mysteries. The system depended on the unimpeded unfolding of the child’s beautiful nature, of his curiosity and thirst for experience. Placed near apparatus, however complicated, the pupil steadily and systematically explored it. “Apparatus” didn’t mean anything like teaching machines. On my first day I was given a set of wooden blocks of different sizes and was watched eagerly by the teacher in hope that I should, on my own initiative, arrange them in order of size. The curriculum was limited, and discovering a spatial relationship between half a dozen bricks was expected to occupy a good slice of our time and to be a voyage of discovery so delightful that we would undertake it over and over again. Different systems of educational thought might have been less helpless when we used the apparatus to make little buildings and pushed over one another’s constructions and then discovered for ourselves, with no adult prompting, that Authority had issued us with missiles. One boy, creative to the point of delinquency, discovered that a few bricks tied in a scarf and wielded firmly gave him the leadership of the class.

I can’t remember whether leadership was one of the qualities we were supposed to be acquiring, but I think that this part of his education was ex tracurricular.

It is odd that in parts of the world where eating habits have been notoriously unadventurous, change hasn’t come from the cautious adoption of a neighboring cuisine but from wholesale surrender to the exotic, the mysterious, the oriental. Take industrial Britain. It has never been an area sought by lovers of the table. No exclusive club of French chefs makes an annual pilgrimage from Paris and Burgundy and Touraine to sample its stewed tea with nameless fried fish and grayish potatoes, all swamped in bottled sauce.

With its serious attitude toward coal and textiles and its contempt for fancy ways, this is a grim contrast to the smiling Britain of the travel ads. For many years attempts to introduce, not the frivolous, immoral delicacies of Paris, but food of the kind eaten in London railroad termini by travelers too rushed to search out anything better have led to the bankruptcy of the demented restaurateur and cruel smiles at folk who get above themselves. Yet in this wasteland of the palate, crossed by gourmets only to reach the breakfasts of Scotland, and then never without picnic baskets, there has been an eruption of Chinese restaurants as rapid and overwhelming as the rise of the Beatles. And, in the wake of the menus of Canton and San Francisco, those of Athens, Istanbul, and Cyprus have followed.

I wonder whether, in her capacious oeuvre, the Dottoressa considered the educational value of giving the little ones a plate of intertwined bamboo shoots, noodles, blobs of gelatinous fish, and gobbets of pork, putting chopsticks into chubby fists and letting them make their own discoveries. Manual dexterity, observation, determination, the analytical mind — all kinds of essential skills and qualities could be developed by cooperation between the Chinese food industry and the schools.

Now, there, it strikes me, is an idea capable of profitable exploitation. Perhaps I learned more from the Dottoressa’s disciples than I have ever given them credit for. And I wonder what conclusions can be drawn from the fact that the building in which I saw my first movie is now a permanent exhibition of camping equipment.