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This, I say, was the explanation given me at first, but later, when I came to know more intimately the little group of Montessori enthusiasts in Rome, I learned more about the matter. One of my Montessori friends told me laughingly, “We found that nobody would believe us at all when we told the simple truth, when we said that we never, literally never, do encounter that hypothetical, ferociously naughty, small child. They look at us with such an obvious incredulity that, for the honor of the system, we had to devise some expedient. So we ransacked our memories for one or two temporary examples of ‘badness’ which we met at first before the system was well organized, and remembered how we had dealt with them. Now, when people ask us what we do when the children begin to scratch and kick each other, instead of insisting that children as young as ours, when properly interested, never do these things, we tell them the old story of our device of years ago.”

I have said that the real translation for Casa dei Bambini is The Children’s Home, and I feel like insisting upon this rendering, which gives us so much more idea of the character of the institution. At least, from now on, in this book, that English phrase will be used from time to time to designate a Montessori school. It is, for instance, their very own home not only in the sense that it is a place arranged specially for their comfort and convenience, but furthermore a place for which they feel that steadying sense of responsibility which is one of the greatest moral advantages of a home over a boarding-house, a moral advantage of home life which children in ordinary circumstances are rarely allowed to share with their elders. They are boarders (though gratuitous ones) with their father and mother, and, as a natural consequence, they have the remote, detached, unsympathetic aloofness from the problem of running the house which is characteristic of the race of boarders.