Mother Caspari: A Montessori Apostle


   One hundred and eight people from around the country gathered in Bozeman, Mont. on September 5, 2000 to celebrate the hundredth birthday of Mother Caspari. “I thank you for being here at the beginning of a new cycle of my life,” she told guests at the banquet held in her honor. “And I thank the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God who brought us here together.”

 

 

   “It is your commitment to shaping the future, not passively witnessing it, that makes you an outstanding citizen of the twenty first century,” Patti Tepper- Rasmussen, President of the American Montessori Society, told Mother Caspari. “Your genuine love of the uniqueness of each child gives us pause. You have said, ‘The child is the way to the light.’ Thank you for guiding many back to the children in such a gentle, respectful spirit. You have been an influence to many generations. May your influence be felt by many more.”

   Mother Caspari witnessed three centuries. Her journey began in 1899 in the mountains of her native Switzerland. She spent the first years of her life studying plants, flowers and herbs with her father, a renowned botanist. A leg injury in childhood forced her to spend most of her youth in hospitals and healing centers, where she says she learned patience and compassion for human suffering.

   After receiving the medical treatment she needed, she began studying music, earned a doctorate in music and pedagogy, and founded a flourishing music school. She created an innovative method of teaching music to children using color, and even taught Belgium’s King Beaudoin as a child.

   She married Charles Caspari in 1930 and in the late 1930’s, the couple left for India to prepare for a pilgrimage to Tibetan monasteries. When the war broke out in 1939, the Casparis had no way to go home. They were forced to stay in India and taught music and languages at a school for missionary children. That was when Mother Caspari met Dr. Maria Montessori. The two became close friends and worked side by side for four years. When Maria Montessori first observed Mother Caspari, she remarked, "You were a Montessorian before you met me."

   “Every day after Charles and I finished our classes, we would gallop to her bungalow and there, we would spend many hours together,” Mother Caspari told me. “Dr. Montessori’s mission was to unite the world through children. It is not a method. It is help to life, to the ‘mind in the making.’ Her message is that the child is the way to the light. People see the light through the work they do with children. When an adult teaches a child, the child transforms the adult.”

   During their stay in India, the Casparis became very interested in the Unity School of Christianity and after the war, they left for Unity headquarters in Lee’s Summit Mo., where they founded a Montessori school. Over the years, they became known as Montessori gypsies and opened schools and teacher training centers in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Missouri, California, South Carolina and Mexico. Together with Dr. Feland Meadows Jr., they founded the Pan American Montessori Society to teach students and train teachers. The society, which started with one center in Mexico City twenty five years ago, now has two centers in Mexico City, and centers in Costa Rica, Panama City, San Francisco, Atlanta, Lausanne, Switzerland and Paris, France. “We try to do what Elizabeth has taught us,” said Meadows. “To share the love of the child and to go beyond the intellect.”

   Meadows told the story about a teacher from Hawaii who was having a hard time at his school. When Caspari arrived there, she told him she was going to observe the classroom. Caspari heard the teacher say that she was very nervous. She put her arm around her and said, “I have not come to criticize. I have come to bless.” When the teacher took Caspari’s course, all of the classroom problems disappeared. “It was a miracle,” said Meadows. “The children became normalized and the neighbors no longer complained about noise. She received not only instruction, she received the inspiration that made it possible for her to change herself into the kind of person who could effectively serve the little children in her class.”

   Elizabeth Kelly, a social worker and Montessori teacher-trainer from Pennsylvania shared another story about Caspari’s legacy from many years ago, when the two were training inner city teachers in Savannah, Georgia. One student, Meraldine Allbright, cleaned a nearby school and loved little children. She participated in the class and paid rapt attention to the lectures and demonstrations, but had a big challenge. She couldn’t read or write. Elizabeth spoke to Caspari and the two decided that since Meraldine couldn’t take the exams or write the papers, they couldn’t give her a teacher’s credential. “I saw Mother Caspari treat this poor woman with utmost respect and regard,” said Kelly. “How was she going to help Meraldine keep the self-esteem and the interest that she had? She took the matter into her heart, pondered it there and came up with a grand idea. Meraldine would take the exams orally and then we would give her an associate diploma, so she wouldn’t be the only one not receiving credentials.”

   On graduation day, Meraldine walked down the aisle of the church all dressed up and no one but Caspari, Kelly, the director and Meraldine herself knew she had received a different diploma. Ten years later, Kelly was back in Savannah giving exams and Meraldine Allbright walked in. “You can imagine my amazement,” she said. “She walked in tall and straight, and sure of herself. She had her albums typed up like everyone else. She proceeded through the exams and passed with flying colors.

   “Meraldine later told me that she was so inoculated with the spirit of Montessori through Elizabeth Caspari that she went back to literacy training, learned to read and write, went to high school through adult education, retook the entire Montessori training and presented herself for the exams. Today, she continues to work as a full fledged Montessori teacher, thanks to the inspiration, the love and the respect of her teacher Elizabeth Caspari.”

   “The Casparis are pioneers of Montessori, friends of children and servants of God,” said Miami school owner Jim McGhee. “She is not just a Montessori gypsy, she is a Montessori apostle. Whenever the call comes, she responds in the manner of Saint Paul.”

   “She’s always known the strength of love and her classrooms were always a place of great joy,” said Janet Nielsen, a Montessori director from Minneapolis who taught in Caspari’s first Montessori school in the 1950s. “She leaves her signature on our lives and hearts.”