Among her many interests, Ade Bethune was a proponent of the teachings of Maria Montessori. Bethune's
St. Leo Shop became an outlet for Montessori's books, which were imported from India in the late 1950s and 1960s. In addition, Bethune sold her own booklets for writing instruction--"Teaching the Child to Write" (originally published in
Jubilee magazine) and
Uniscript: A New Method for Teaching Handwriting--which were based on Montessori's principles. The Ade Bethune Collection has copies of both of these, along with a set of plaster letters for children to trace with a finger.
I had been meaning to let the Montessori department at St. Kate's know the connection between Ade Bethune and Montessori's work, and had an opportunity to do Friday. One of their faculty members was visiting the Archives for another reason. I told her that Bethune had sold Montessori's books in her shop and we had those and other Montessori-related items in the Collection. After seeing the plaster letters and looking through the writing booklets, she told me she was speechless and wanted to come back later to spend more time looking through the materials. Her comment in the heading is how she described the experience to a colleague.
This encounter reminded me, yet again, how many hidden treasures are in the Ade Bethune Collection. Bethune herself was a complex and talented woman whose work and interests went far beyond her more commonly known tag of "Catholic Worker artist." There are gems to be explored by those involved in many fields, and it is my job to make them more widely known--to the St. Kate's community and beyond.
