How pioneering teacher Maria Montessori transformed the field of children’s education

Maria Montessori stood before a crowd of sixty underprivileged children, her students. It was January 6, 1907, and the 36-year-old teacher opened her first school: the Casa dei Bambinior ‘Children’s House’, a nursery school that would revolutionize education for children.

“I had a strange feeling that made me emphatically announce that here was the opening of an enterprise that the whole world would one day talk about,” Montessori later said. remembered.

Today, the legacy of the Italian woman behind Montessori schools lives on in kindergartens around the world. But at the time, the theory that providing children with stimulating activities would help more than rote memorization and academic exercises was revolutionary.

Although her innovations inspired a movement in early childhood education, Montessori saw her work more simply. “I didn’t invent a teaching method,” she says wrote in 1914. “I just gave some little kids a chance to live.”

Montessori was passionate about education from an early age. Born in 1870 and raised in Rome, she blazed a trail that defied the expectations for women of the time. Montessori studied engineering, then applied to medical school at the University of Rome, telling a professor during her interview, “I know I’m going to be a doctor.” The school refused her, so Montessori enrolled in general college; studied physics, mathematics and natural sciences; and applied to medical school again. She was admitted and became the first woman to attend college Faculty of Medicineand in July 1896 she became one of Italy’s first female physicians.

Montessori’s medical work led her to the psychiatric clinic of the University of Rome. As part of her work, she visited asylums for children with mental disorders, looking for patients who qualified for treatment at the clinic. It was here that her interest in child development intensified. She read extensively about children with learning disabilities, including the writings of Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itarda 19th century French physician who worked with deaf children and the ‘wild boy of Aveyron”, a teenager who famously raised himself in the woods.

Montessori school education

In 1898, Montessori spoke at the Italian National Medical Congress in Turin, in which he advocated the idea that a lack of adequate provision and care for children with mental and emotional disorders caused them to misbehave. She continued her advocacy at the 1899 National Pedagogical Congress, where she proposed special training for teachers working with children with special needs – part of her idea that better education would lead to social progress.

Montessori’s interest in preschool education continued to grow in the coming years. She developed her own teaching materials and in 1907 she opened her first school.

Her working method revolved around involvement. Although Montessori introduced her students to many activities and materials, she retained only the activities and materials in which the children were interested. She realized that activities could help children develop socially, and she theorized that, surrounded by such activities, students could educate themselves. Montessori’s self-described “self-education” approach soon had the five-year-olds at Casa dei Bambini reading and writing.

News of Montessori’s success spread quickly and by 1908 her name was known around the world. In the autumn of 1908, five Case dei Bambini were active in Italy. Her method soon crossed borders when kindergartens in Italian-speaking Switzerland adopted her methods. A few years later Montessori published a book, The Montessori Methodthat was printed in English in the United States in 1912; over time it would be translated into twenty different languages. In the following decades, Montessori schools and teacher training colleges emerged all over the world.

Before her death in 1952, Montessori was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, although she never won it. She lived to see her educational theories put into practice around the world, as more and more “awakened” children – as she called activity-stimulated students – successfully learned their letters.

Like Montessori biographer EM Standing notesMontessori proved that the “awakened” child “develops a higher type of personality – more mentally alert, more capable of concentration, more socially adaptable, more independent and at the same time more disciplined and obedient – ​​in a word, a complete being – a ready-made basis for building a normalized adult.”

“This is Montessori’s great achievement,” Standing writes, “the ‘discovery of the child.’”