day-dream marries a prince, and, as Maurice
Nicoll says in his _Dream Psychology_, to destroy her phantasy without
putting something in its place is dangerous.

To a child, as to Cinderella, phantasy is a means of overcoming
reality. Father bullies Willie and the boy retires into a day-dream
world where he becomes an all-powerful person . . . hence the fairy
tales of giants (fathers) killed by little Jacks. In later life Willie
takes to drink or identifies himself with the hero of a cinema drama.

The extreme form of phantasy is insanity, where the patient completely
goes over to the unreal world and becomes the Queen of the World. And
it might be objected that phantasying is the first stage of insanity.
Yes, but it is the last stage of poetry. Coleridge's _Kubla Khan_, one
of the most glorious poems in the language, is pure phantasy. I rather
fear that one day a grown-up Montessori child will prove conclusively
that the feet of Maud did not, when they touched the meadows, leave the
daisies rosy.

No, the Montessori world is too scientific for me; it is too orderly,
too didactic. The name "didactic apparatus" frightens me.

I quote a sentence from _The New Children_, by Mrs. Radice.

"'Per carita! Get up at once!' she (Montessori) has exclaimed before
now to a conscientious teacher found dishevelled on the ground with a
class of little Bolshevists sitting on top of her."

In heaven's name, I ask, why get up? Life is more than meat, and
education is more than matching colours and fitting cylinders into
holes.

Montessori was thinking of the conscious mind of the child when she
evolved her system, and the apparatus does not satisfy the whole of the
child's unconscious mind. Noise is suppressed in a Montessori school,
but every child should be allowed to make a noise, for noise means
power to him, and he will use it only as long as it means power to him.
I have watched Norman MacMunn's war orphans at Tiptree Hall at work.
MacMunn, the author of _A Path to Freedom in the School_, did not say
"Hush!"; his boys filled the room with noisy talk as they worked, and
never have I seen children do more work with so much joy.

The Montessori teacher, when she finds that Jimmy is interfering with
the work of Alice, segregates the bad Jimmy, and treats him as a sick
person. But the right thing to do is to solve Jimmy's problem as well
as Alice's. What is behind Jimmy's aggressiveness? Jimmy does not
know, nor doe