There are lands such as large sections of Africa and many of the Pacific Islands where no education whatever existed, where the language was not even reduced to writing, until Christian missionaries began their work. Other countries gave a certain so-called education to their boys or to the sons of certain privileged classes, leaving the girls absolutely illiterate. They agreed in principle if not in expression with that man in the mountains of Kurdistan who was asked by a missionary to send his bright little daughter down to the mission school at the beginning of the fall term. “Do you want my girl?” questioned the man in amazement and disgust. “Why don’t you take my cow?” Again in other sections girls have a brief chance to learn, but are not expected to keep pace with their brothers or to attain to anything beyond the rudiments of book learning. [Sidenote: Lack of concentration.] A missionary educator from Turkey says that one of the greatest difficulties in school work arises from the fact that the children have no power of concentration, no idea of how to think and study on one line for any length of time. It often takes five or six years for a child really to learn how to study. Obviously, the earlier these preparatory years occur in a child’s life, the more benefit may he hope to derive from his education. [Sidenote: Evils of the memorizing method.] Then again, if children learn their first lessons in the native schools of Turkey, Persia, Korea, and various other countries, they will become fixed in the habit of memorizing without giving any intelligent thought to what they learn. Dr. S. M. Zwemer says: “A Moslem lad is not supposed to know what the words and sentences mean which he must recite every day; to ask a question regarding the _thought_ of the Koran would only result in a rebuke or something more painful. Even grammar, logic, history, and theology are taught by rote in the higher Mohammedan schools.... Thousands of Moslem lads, who know the whole Koran nearly by heart, cannot explain the meaning of the first chapter in every-day language. Tens of thousands can ‘read’ the Koran at random in the Moslem sense of reading, who cannot read an Arabic newspaper intelligently.”[64] How utterly this differs from the theory and practice of Dr. Montessori, who “calls a child disciplined who is master of himself, and therefore able to dispose of or control himself whenever he needs to follow a rule of life. The liberty of the child must have as its limit only the collective interest. To interfere with this spontaneity is, in Dr. Montessori’s view, perhaps to repress the very essential of life itself.”[65] How can a child be master of himself who is not even allowed to inquire into the meaning of what he reads and studies? [Sidenote: Old methods hard to discard.]