Maria Montessori

Italian educator and social reformer

• Born: August 31, 1870
• Birthplace: Chiaravalle, Italy
• Died: May 6, 1952
• Place of death: Noordwijk aan Zee, the Netherlands

The first woman to earn a medical degree and to practice medicine in Italy, Montessori became a spokesperson for human liberation and a pioneer in scientific pedagogy. She developed an educational theory based on children’s spontaneous desire to learn in a prepared, free, child-centered environment that won international acclaim during her lifetime and enjoyed continued success after her death.

Early Life

Maria Montessori was born in 1870, the year of Italian unification. She was the only child of Renilde Stoppani Montessori, an educated, patriotic daughter of a landed family, and Alessandro Montessori, a conservative civil servant. The family moved to Rome in 1875. In Rome, Montessori attended a public elementary school and, at age thirteen, elected to study mathematics at a technical school. After graduating from technical school with high marks, Montessori attended a technical institute from 1886 to 1890. Then, to the shock of her father and the Italian academic community, she decided to study medicine and to become Italy’s first female medical doctor. Montessori’s ultimate graduation from the Medical College in Rome as a doctor of medicine and surgery in 1896 was a triumph of self-discipline, persistence, and courage.

On graduation, Montessori was chosen to represent Italian women at an international women’s congress in Berlin, where her speeches on behalf of educational opportunity and equal pay for women won much praise. In November, 1896, Montessori was appointed a surgical assistant at a hospital for men, a medical assistant at the university hospital, and a visiting doctor at a women’s and a children’s hospital, all in Rome; in addition, she opened a private practice. She also continued her research at the psychiatric clinic of the University of Rome. As a voluntary assistant there, Montessori visited mental asylums to select patients for treatment at the clinic. Sorely troubled by the neglect of children with mental disabilities in the city’s asylums, Montessori increasingly directed her research toward the children’s possible treatment. Her determination that the best treatment was not medical, but pedagogical, turned Montessori’s gaze and energy to the study of educational theory and method.

Montessori undertook this new project with her customary thoroughness, auditing education and physical anthropology courses at the university in 1897–1898 and reading all the pedagogical theory advanced over the last two hundred years. Ultimately, Montessori combined the century-old pedagogical ideas of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel (both of whom stressed the interrelationship of sensory, intellectual, and moral education and the need to move from the concrete to the abstract) with the early-nineteenth-century reformer Édouard Séguin’s graduated exercises in sensory and motor development for developmentally disabled children and the new measurement techniques of physiology and anthropology. She tested her ideas about special education for mentally disabled children at the psychiatric clinic, at national medical and teachers’ conferences, on public lecture tours around Italy, and finally, in 1900, as the director of a new Roman medical-pedagogical institute for teachers of developmentally disabled children. In the demonstration school attached to this institute, Montessori experimented with new teaching methods and materials to foster sensory, motor, and intellectual skills in developmentally disabled kindergarten and primary students. The results were impressive: Under Montessori’s care, many of the supposedly unteachable children mastered basic skills, learned to read and write, and even passed the examinations given to all Italian elementary-school students. In two short years, Montessori had become the most successful and famous educator of children with mental disabilities in Rome. At last she was ready to devote her attention to the education of all children.

Life’s Work

In 1901, at the age of thirty-one, Montessori resigned her directorship of the medical-pedagogical institute, gave up her medical practice, and launched a new career. She reasoned that if her classes of disabled children could outperform other children on standard tests, there had to be something dreadfully wrong with traditional elementary education. Simultaneously reading voraciously in educational philosophy and observing in local primary schools, Montessori was struck by the disjunction between the two: While educational theorists preached the need for individual development and freedom to learn, educators practiced a deadening rote instruction, physical restraint and silence, and reliance on external rewards and punishments. Montessori became convinced that her new methods and materials, if “applied to normal children, would develop or set free their personality in a marvelous and surprising way.” As a lecturer in the Pedagogic School of the University of Rome from 1904 to 1908, she refined her view that education should develop from the nature of the child rather than the other way around, as in traditional elementary education. She called this innovative approach “scientific pedagogy,” but it was at least as concerned with spiritual and moral development and human autonomy as with scientific observation and prediction. Montessori was increasingly certain that her scientific and mystical pedagogy could reform not only the schools but also all of society.

Montessori won the opportunity to prove her theory’s worth in 1907. A group of bankers had recently renovated a tenement house in a poor section of Rome and wished to establish a day-care center in the building, to keep the children of working parents from destroying the property. They turned to Montessori to direct the children’s center. To the surprise and dismay of her faculty colleagues, she accepted the challenge with alacrity and transformed the empty room and fifty undisciplined, culturally disadvantaged preschool children into a research laboratory and subjects. There she would observe the children’s natures, test various approaches and materials, and ultimately develop the Montessori method.

In this unusual laboratory, Montessori quickly discovered that the children possessed a natural desire to learn and actually preferred challenging educational materials to frivolous toys. The previously unruly children developed tremendous powers of concentration and displayed great contentment when they were permitted to work with interesting, self-correcting materials, such as blocks or cylinders of graduated size, bells along a scale, or colors arranged according to the spectrum. Moreover, learning became joyful and easy when these didactic materials and exercises were introduced in an order that logically developed and coordinated sensory, motor, and intellectual skills. The teacher had only to demonstrate the proper use of the materials to a few children and then stand back and watch them teach themselves and one another. With special child-sized furniture, cupboards, dishes, and washstands, the children eagerly learned to choose and put away their own materials, fix their own lunches, and wash up. Even more impressively, these four- and five-year-olds painlessly and happily “exploded into writing and reading” in less than two months, through the carefully designed sequence of graduated exercises. In her Children’s House in the slums of Rome, Montessori demonstrated that children’s “spontaneous activity in a prepared environment” was more effective than the traditional coercive methods and rote instruction. Her respect for children’s autonomy, desire to learn and grow, and inner dignity yielded rich rewards.

From the very start of the experiment at the Children’s House, Montessori had encouraged community involvement. Uniquely at the time, she invited the working-class parents to visit the school often and confer about their children’s progress. In an inaugural address at the opening of a second Children’s House just three months after the first, Montessori stressed the community’s ownership of the school, which she hoped would not only free working mothers from undue stress but also transform the local environment and thus redeem “the entire community.” Montessori did not rest there. She also invited the attention and support of the wider community of educators, journalists, philanthropists, and religious and political leaders. Particularly after the children’s miraculous initiation into writing and reading gained highly favorable press notices, a group of dedicated young women encircled Montessori and gradually relieved her of many daily operations in the schools. They also frequently served as missionaries for her method, setting up new Children’s Houses in other Italian cities and towns. Meanwhile, convinced of the educational and social value of her work, Montessori began a lifelong campaign to publicize and spread her method.

This campaign was truly launched with the publication of Montessori’s first book about education, Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all’ educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini (1909; The Montessori Method , 1912). In her book she outlined the history of her “scientific pedagogy” and its realization in the Children’s Houses, described her noncoercive methods and self-correcting materials in detail, postulated the existence of “sensitive periods” or stages of development in young children, and restated her basic belief in education as spontaneous self-development in a prepared but free environment.

This mixture of pedagogical theory and practical details also marked Montessori’s other books in these years: Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook (1914), originally published in English as a concise summary of her theory and method, and L’autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari (1916; The Advanced Montessori Method , 2 vols., 1917), which introduced materials for teaching grammar and mathematics to older primary students. These books enjoyed great popularity in more than twenty languages; The Montessori Method alone sold five thousand copies in four days in the United States and became the second nonfiction best seller of 1912.

Montessori’s true genius for promotion, however, was manifested in her personal appearances to deliver public lectures and give teacher-training institutes around the world. Her deep conviction in the worth of her method and her charming personality led many who came to hear a celebrity leave converted to the Montessori movement. At the age of forty, Montessori decided to devote all of her time to foster that movement. Over the next forty years, she traveled intensively and extensively, to reach those who could not attend her teacher-training institutes in Italy. Everywhere the pattern followed that of her triumphal visit to the United States in 1913: enthusiastic publicity drew huge crowds to Montessori’s public lectures and institutes, which in turn sparked the formation or growth of Montessori societies and schools. With or without government sponsorship, Montessori schools were established in the United States, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, France, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, China, Korea, Syria, and India, and the movement continued to gain momentum and scope throughout Montessori’s life.

At the age of sixty-nine, Montessori spent the years of World War II in India, where she personally trained more than one thousand new teachers. Her striking success in this region that was new to her simply redoubled her energy; she returned to India in 1947 and Pakistan in 1949. Montessori was just planning a lecture tour in Africa when she died suddenly at Noordwijk aan Zee in the Netherlands on May 6, 1952, at the age of eighty-one.

Significance

Wherever she went and whomever she addressed over a long and phenomenally active career, Montessori stressed two interrelated themes: the desperate need for educational reform to develop the true potential of all children and the equally important need for human liberation around the world. While she believed fervently in the power of education to transform individuals and society, she never neglected other social issues and approaches to her desired goals. From her early advocacy of women’s rights as a young medical doctor, through her proposal for an international “White Cross” to nurse and teach the children of war in 1917, to her frequent calls for recognition of the rights of children in the family and the dangers of international competition in the 1920s and 1930s, Montessori proved herself to be a tireless and determined spokesperson for the powerless. While she refused to politicize her educational method and movement and accepted simultaneous support from the Italian government, the Viennese socialist government, and the Dutch liberal government in the 1920s there was never any doubt about Montessori’s fundamental respect for human dignity.

Montessori was invited to speak to the League of Nations in Geneva in 1926 on “Education and Peace” and lectured on the same subject at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1947. Her long insistence on the interdependence of humanity won for Montessori the French cross of the Legion of Honor in 1949 and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949, 1950, and 1951.

These were fitting tributes, for Montessori was, throughout her life, a bridge between worlds. Her equal faith in science and spirituality allowed her to translate between the early nineteenth century visions of moral education of Pestalozzi and Froebel and the twentieth century cognitive psychology of Jean Piaget (who was an active sponsor of the International Montessori Association). That special combination of scientific pragmatism and spiritual mysticism also permitted Montessori to appeal to an extraordinarily wide audience, ranging from the British Psychological Society of the Royal Society of Medicine to the Theosophical Society of India. She moved easily between the academic and nonacademic worlds, addressing scholars, teachers, social reformers, and working-class parents with equal success. Above all, Montessori’s determination to achieve order and harmony without sacrificing freedom in education, society, and her own life served as an inspiration for advocates of human liberation, social justice, and peace around the world.

Bibliography

Gutek, Gerald Lee, ed. The Montessori Method: The Origins of an Educational Innovation, Including an Abridged and Annotated Edition of Maria Montessori’s “The Montessori Method.” Lanham: Rowman, 2004. Print.

Hainstock, Elizabeth G. Teaching Montessori in the Home. New York: Random House, 1968. Print.

Kocher, Marjorie B. The Montessori Manual of Cultural Subjects: A Guide for Teachers. Minneapolis: Denison, 1973. Print.

Kramer, Rita. Maria Montessori: A Biography. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976. Print.

O'Donnell, Marion. Maria Montessori. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014. Print.

Orem, R. C. ed. Montessori: Her Method and the Movement, What You Need to Know. New York: Putnam, 1974. Print.

Standing, E. M. Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work. Fresno: Academy Library Guild, 1957. Print.