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The great point of vantage of a Montessori school over an ordinary school in dealing with these morally starved children of too prosperous parents, is that it catches them younger, before the pernicious habit of passive dependence has continued long enough entirely to wreck their natural instincts. Beside the beautiful child of four with the sapped and weakened will-power mentioned above, was an equally beautiful, exquisitely dressed little tot of just three, whose glowing face of happy energy provided the most welcome contrast to the saddening mental torpor of the older child, who, though naturally in every way a normal little girl, stood hopelessly apathetic before all the fascinating lures to her invention which the Montessori apparatus spread before her. The little girl of three, without a word from the teacher, regulated for herself a busy, profitable, happy, purposeful life, getting out one piece of apparatus after another, “playing” with it until her fresh interest was gone, putting it away, and falling with equal ardor upon something else. The older child regarded her with the curious passive wonder of a Hindu when he sees us Occidentals getting our fun out of dancing and engaging in various active sports ourselves instead of reclining upon pillows to watch other people paid thus to exert themselves. She was given a choice of geometric insets, and provided with colored pencils and a big sheet of paper, baits which not even an idiot child can resist, and, sitting uninventive before this delightful array, remarked with a polite indifference that she was used to having people draw pictures for her. The poor child had acquired the habit of having somebody else do even her playing.

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