Montessori, Maria

The Montessori method

Influence

WORKS BY MONTESSORI

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Maria Montessori (1870-1952), Italian educator, was born in the provincial town of Chiaravalle. Her father, a conservative army officer, had little sympathy with his daughter’s desire for a career, but she received encouragement from her mother. Montessori attended a lay state school until she was 12, when the family moved to Rome for better educational opportunities. At 14, because of an interest in mathematics and engineering, she went to classes at the technical institute; this interest gave way to an interest in biology, which led ultimately to her decision to study medicine. She be-came the first woman graduate of a medical school in Italy, despite difficulties which surely enhanced her strong feminist leanings. (She attended several international feminist congresses.)

As an assistant doctor at the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome, she had her first encounter with defective children, and this early experience convinced her that the problem of handicapped children is a pedagogical as well as a medical one. Previous advocates of this approach were Jean Itard, who worked with deaf-mutes as well as with “the wild boy of Aveyron,” and Itard’s student Edouard Séguin, who founded a school for defectives in Rome; their work reinforced her conviction that the difficulties of the handicapped could be ameliorated by special educational treatment.

In 1899 Montessori became the directress of the State Orthophrenic School in Rome, which served the “hopelessly deficient” children of the city, and later also the “idiot” children. There she taught the children and trained other teachers to work with them. She visited London and Paris to exchange ideas on methods of treatment with others in this field. The mentality of the children in the institution developed so remarkably and unexpectedly that she received considerable attention. Her success made her want to try the same methods and techniques with normal children, and the opportunity came when in 1906 the Italian government gave her the responsibility for 60 children aged three to six from the slums of the San Lorenzo quarter of Rome—the beginning of her famous Casa dei Bambini.

Meanwhile, in 1901 she had left the Orthophrenic School to resume studies at the University of Rome; she sought “further study and meditation” in psychology and philosophy. She was then holding the chair of hygiene at the Scuola di Magistero Femminile in Rome and was a permanent external examiner in the faculty of pedagogy. In 1904 she became a professor at the University of Rome, and from 1904 until 1908 held a chair of anthropology there. In addition to lecturing (some of her published works were based on her auditors’ lecture notes), she was practicing not only in hospitals and clinics but also privately, and it was through this extensive practical application of her methods and principles that she came to formulate her conception of the nature of the child that underlay the program of the Casa dei Bambini.

The Montessori method

It was in the early years of the Casa dei Bambini that the fundamentals of what we now know as the Montessori method were developed. This “Children’s House,” as well as subsequent ones, proved to be an excellent way of dealing with cultural deprivation. The “prepared environment” set a basic atmosphere for learning, with room for “the liberty of the pupils in their spontaneous manifestations.” In keeping with her belief that the teacher must be kept in the background, guiding and disciplining minimally, the entire staff consisted of herself and two untrained young women. The activity materials provided an opportunity for the child to acquire important percepts through sensory-motor means. Each “game” was designed to teach a skill or a fact. There were no benches, desks, or stationary chairs (standard equipment in schools prior to Montessori) but, rather, small chairs and tables, a low washstand, and low blackboards, all making the daily routine easy for the child. Long low cupboards contained the didactic materials, the care of which was entrusted to the children: these materials included counting beads in blocks of ten; two-dimensional geometric puzzles; graduated prisms, rods, and cubes; letters of the alphabet made of sandpaper, cardboard, and wood, for obtaining direct sensory impression of the letters; and series of tuned bells. In this “prepared environment” the child practiced the education of his senses, reading, metrics, grammar, music, manual training, and gymnastics, and he also learned cleanliness, order, poise, absorption, and patience. The pleasure the children took in silently concentrating on the materials was remarkable. Montessori had the ability to learn from observing the children at work on the apparatus and constantly made constructive changes in the “work situation.”

Montessori made certain generalizations on the basis of her observations: that children go through a series of “sensitive periods” with their “creative moments,” when they show spontaneous interest in learning and have maximal ability to do so; that children prefer “work” with creative materials to “play” with objects defined as toys; that they have an extraordinary capacity for mental concentration, a desire to repeat activities over and over, and a love of order, for which witness their concern that materials be returned where they “belong”; that “work is its own reward” and there is no need for external reward; and that since spontaneous self-discipline is created by the liberty and independence of the school situation, there is no need for punishment (other than isolation). Indeed, Montessori became quite mystical about this notion of self-discipline: she saw it as a continuation of the cosmic discipline that orders the stars. A further general pattern that she identified was the existence of spontaneous “advanced interests,” for example, “the burst into writing,” which precedes by several months the “burst into reading”; by virtue of these “advanced interests,” three- and four-year-old children begin to read and write with the materials available to them in the classroom.

Influence

Montessori’s work grew out of a dedication to individual self-expression that goes back to the eighteenth century; she belongs in the tradition of Rousseau, Froebel, and Pestalozzi. Also, her work is related to that strain in evolutionary thought which stresses development. But the hereditarian stress in Darwin’s theory runs counter to her own emphasis on the importance of early experience, and her work was not in harmony with other strong intellectual trends of the first half of the twentieth century: behaviorism, with its emphasis on stimulus-response learning; the notion of fixed intelligence, based on intelligence testing; and the psychoanalytic emphasis on instinctual, and especially psychosexual, determination of personality and behavior. “Progressive education,” as conceived primarily by John Dewey, was more in keeping with these trends, and as it came to dominate education, the Montessori system was all but forgotten.

Although the Montessori method did spread abroad from Rome after 1918—Montessori’s publications were translated into 20 languages, and training courses were set up in England, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Ceylon, and Argentina—there was only a brief flurry of interest in it in the United States when Montessori visited there in 1913. Recently, beginning in the 1950s, there has been a resurgence of interest, related perhaps to such developments as reforms in the mathematics and science curricula in the schools and new concern for handicapped children—handicapped genetically or environmentally. This renewed interest has produced many new Montessori schools and training centers. It may well be that the Montessori method is more than a fad, that it deals, instead, with fundamental aspects of learning.

Jacqueline Y. Sutton

[See also Developmental psychology; Educational psychology; Intellectual development;and the biographies of ClaparÈde; Dewey; Gesell.]

WORKS BY MONTESSORI

(1909) 1964 The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in “The Children’s Houses.” Cambridge, Mass.: Bentley. → First published as II metodo della pedagogia scientifica. . . . A paperback edition was published by Schocken with an Introduction by J. McV. Hunt.

(1910) 1913 Pedagogical Anthropology. New York: Stokes. → First published as Antropologia pedagogica.

(1914) 1966 A Montessori Handbook: “Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook.” Edited by R. C. Orem. New York: Putnam.

(1916-1917) 1964 The Advanced Montessori Method. 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Bentley. → Volume 1: SpontaneousActivity in Education. Volume 2:Montessori Elementary Material. First published in Italian.

(1924) 1965 Child in the Church: Essays on the Religious Education of Children and the Training of Character. 2d ed. Edited by Edward M. Standing. St. Paul (Minn.) Catechetical Guild. → A collection of essays, excerpts, and conversations first published in Italian.

1936 The Secret of Childhood. London: Longmans. → A second edition was published in 1950 in Italian as II segreto dell’ infanzia.

1946 Education for a New World. Asundale Montessori Training Center, Adyar, Madras Publication Series, No. 1. Madras (India): Kalakshetra.

(1949 a) 1964 The Absorbent Mind. 5th ed. Madras (India): Theosophical Publishing House.

(1949 b) 1955The Formation of Man. Madras (India): Theosophical Publishing House. → First published in Italian.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bruner, Jerome S. 1960 The Process of Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Donahue, Gilbert E. 1962 Dr. Maria Montessori and the Montessori Movement: A General Bibliography of Materials in the English Language, 1909-1961. Pages 141-175 in Nancy M. Rambusch, Learning How to Learn: An American Approach to Montessori. Baltimore and Dublin: Helicon.

Itard, Jean M. G. (1801) 1932 Wild Boy of Aveyron. New York: Century. → First published as De I’education d’un homme sauvage, ou des premiers developpements physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de VAveyron.

Lewin, Kurt (1931) 1935 Education for Reality. Pages 171-179 in Kurt Lewin, A Dynamic Theory of Personality: Selected Papers. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Piaget, Jean (1923) 1959 The Language and Thought of the Child. 3d ed., rev. New York: Humanities Press. → First published as Le langage et la pensee chez l’enfant.

Rambusch, Nancy M. 1962 Learning How to Learn: An American Approach to Montessori. Baltimore and Dublin: Helicon.

SÉguin, Edouard 1846 Traitement moral, hygiène et éducation des idiots. Paris: Baillière.

Standing, Edward M. 1959 Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work. Fresno, Calif.: Academy Library Guild.

Standing, Edward M. 1962 The Montessori Method: A Revolution in Education. Fresno, Calif.: Academy Library Guild.

Maria Montessori

The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was the originator of the Montessori method of education for children.

On Aug. 31, 1870, Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle. Her father, a tradition-bound army officer, discouraged her interest in a professional career; however, with the encouragement and support of her mother, she prepared herself for her later career. When she was 12, the family moved to Rome to take advantage of the better educational facilities. An interest in engineering technology and mathematics led her to enroll in classes at a technical institute at the age of 14. Later an interest in biology led to her decision to study medicine. This decision required some courage and tenacity, as it was in utter defiance of the customs of a society which excluded women from such endeavors.

In 1894 Maria Montessori became the first woman to receive a medical degree in Italy. Her experiences in the pursuit of this degree reinforced her already well-developed feminist ideas. Throughout her life she was a frequent participant in international feminist congresses.

Maria Montessori's first appointment was as an assistant doctor in the psychiatric clinic of the University of Rome, where she had her first prolonged contact with mentally challanged children. She became convinced that the problem of handling these defectives was as much one of instructional method as of medical treatment. In 1898 she was appointed director of the State Orthophrenic School in Rome, whose function was to care for the "hopelessly deficient" and "idiot" children of the city. She enjoyed tremendous success in teaching the children herself, while refining and applying her innovative methods and training other teachers to work with the children.

In 1901 Dr. Montessori left the school to pursue further studies and research. At the same time she was holding the chair of hygiene at the Scuola di Magistero Femminile in Rome, where she was also a permanent external examiner in the faculty of pedagogy. In 1904 she became a full professor at the University of Rome and from 1904 to 1908 held the chair of anthropology there. She was also a government inspector of schools, a lecturer, and a practicing physician.

In 1906 the Italian government put Dr. Montessori in charge of a state-supported slum school in the San Lorenzo quarter of Rome which had 60 children aged 3 to 6 from poverty-stricken families. By this time her early successes with mentally challanged children suggested to her the idea of trying the same educational methods with normal children. Dealing with culturally deprived children, she used what she termed a "prepared environment" to provide an atmosphere for learning, that is, small chairs and tables instead of rows of desks. The basic features of the method are development of the child's initiative through responsible individual freedom of behavior, improvement of sense perception through training, and development of bodily coordination through games and exercise. The function of the teacher is to provide didactic material, such as counting beads or geometric puzzles, and act as an adviser and guide, staying as much as possible in the background.

Dr. Montessori's view of the nature of the child, on which the Montessori method is based, is that children go through a series of "sensitive periods" with "creative moments," when they show spontaneous interest in learning. It is then that the children have the greatest ability to learn, and these periods should be utilized to the fullest so that the children learn as much as possible; and they should not be held back by nonnatural curricula or classes. Work, she believed, is its own reward to the child, and there is no necessity for other rewards. Self-discipline emerges out of the independence of the atmosphere of learning. Influenced by astrology, she saw self-discipline as something that emerges as a result of a natural law, if all restraints are removed, and as a continuation of the cosmic discipline that governs the movements of the stars.

Dr. Montessori's method was basically at odds with behaviorism, Freudianism, and other major 20th-century trends. Thus it was used only by a relatively few private schools. Since the early 1950s, however, her system has enjoyed a revival, related to curricula reforms and a renewed interest in handicapped children. Her works have been translated into at least 20 languages, and training schools for Montessori teachers have been established in several nations.

Further Reading

Maria Montessori's Spontaneous Activity in Education, translated by F. Simmonds (1917; repr. 1965), is particularly useful for beginning students. A recent biography of her life is Edward M. Standing, Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work (1957). Among the works on her system are Nancy McCormick Rambusch, Learning How to Learn: An American Approach to Montessori (1962), and Edward M. Standing, The Montessori Method: A Revolution in Education (1962). For other works see Gilbert E. Donahue, Dr. Maria Montessori and the Montessori Movement: A General Bibliography of Materials in the English Language (1962). □

Maria Montessori

1870-1952
Innovative Italian educator.

Maria Montessori is best known for the progressive method of education that bears her name. She earned her medical degree from the University of Rome in 1894, the first Italian woman to do so. A psychiatrist by training, Montessorri worked with deprived and retarded children at the Orthophrenic School in Rome starting in 1899. Her observations of the educational challenges facing these children lead to the formulation of her theories of cognitive development and early childhood education. As she observed the progress of pupils previously considered to be uneducable, Montessori pondered the poor performance of normal children in regular schools. These schools, she concluded, were unable to address the individual educational needs of children and therefore stifled, rather than encouraged, learning. She described children in standard classrooms as butterflies mounted on pins, wings motionless with useless knowledge. To see whether her ideas could be adapted to the education of normal children, Montessori opened her own school in 1907, the Casa dei Bambini, for 3-7-year-olds living in the tenements of Rome.

Montessori believed that children learn what they are ready to learn, and that there may be considerable differences among children in what phase they might be going through and to what materials they might be receptive at any given time. Therefore, Montessori individualized her educational method. Children were free to work at their own pace and to choose what they would like to do and where they would like to do it without competition with others. The materials in Montessori's classrooms reflected her value in self selected and pursued activity, training of the senses through the manipulation of physical objects, and individualized cognitive growth facilitated by items that allowed the child to monitor and correct his or her own errors—boards in which pegs of various shapes were to be fitted into corresponding holes, lacing boards, and sandpaper alphabets so that children could feel the letters as they worked with them while beginning to read and write, for example. While other schools at the beginning of the 20th century emphasized rote learning and "toeing the line," self absorption in discovery and mastery tasks was the trademark of Montessori classrooms. Still, her classrooms combined this seemingly playful self direction with Montessori self discipline and respect for authority. Continued effort and progress was sustained by the satisfaction and enjoyment children received from mastering tasks and from engaging in activities they themselves have chosen. Montessori believed that these methods would lead to maximal independence for each child from dressing him or herself to organizing his or her day.

Interestingly, Montessori's educational approach also reflected the Darwinian notion that the development of each individual is a microcosm of the development of the entire species, or that "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." She therefore advocated that even young children be taught to grow plants and tend animals so that, like their agrarian ancestors, they would ultimately achieve the highest level of civilization.

In 1922 Montessori became the government inspector of schools in Italy. She left Italy in 1934, traveled, and

eventually moved to the Netherlands where she died in 1952. Maria Montessori left behind a rich legacy. Her educational approach to young and special needs children quickly became a popular progressive alternative to traditional classrooms. Today Montessori schools are common in many communities, and even traditional approaches to education embrace many of Montessori's ideas.

Doreen Arcus Ph.D.

Further Reading

Britton, L. Montessori Play and Learn. New York: Crown, 1992.

Hainstock, E.G. Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Preschool Years. New York: NAL-Dutto, 1976.

Hainstock, E.G. Teaching Montessori in the Home: The School Years. New York: NAL-Dutton, 1989.

Montessori, M. The Montessori Method. 1939

Montessori, M. The Secret of Childhood. New York: Ballantine, 1982.

Montessori, M. Spontaneous Activity in Education. Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1964.

Further Information

American Montessori Society. 150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 203, New York, NY 10011, (212) 924–3209.

Maria Montessori , 1870–1952, Italian educator and physician. She was the originator of the Montessori method of education for young children and was the first woman to receive (1894) a medical degree in Italy.

After working with subnormal children as a psychiatrist at the Univ. of Rome, Dr. Montessori was appointed (1898) director of the Orthophrenic School. There she pioneered in the instruction of retarded children, especially through the use of an environment rich in manipulative materials. In 1901 she left the school to embark on further study and to serve (1901–7) as lecturer in pedagogical anthropology at the Univ. of Rome. The success of her program at the Orthophrenic School, however, led her to believe that similar improvements could be made in the education of normal preschool children, and in 1907 she opened the first case dei bambini [children's house] as a day-care center in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. The success of this venture led Montessori and her followers to establish similar institutions in other parts of Europe and in the United States, where the first Montessori school was established (1912) in Tarrytown, N.Y.

In 1929 the Association Montessori Internationale was established to further the Montessori method by sponsoring conventions and training courses for teachers. By this time, however, interest in Montessori education had declined in a number of countries, especially the United States, mainly because of opposition from those who felt that the method was destructive of school discipline. The Montessori method experienced a renaissance in many American schools during the late 1950s, and in 1960 the American Montessori Society was formed.

The Montessori Method

The chief components of the Montessori method are self-motivation and autoeducation. Followers of the Montessori method believe that a child will learn naturally if put in an environment containing the proper materials. These materials, consisting of "learning games" suited to a child's abilities and interests, are set up by a teacher-observer who intervenes only when individual help is needed. In this way, Montessori educators try to reverse the traditional system of an active teacher instructing a passive class. The typical classroom in a Montessori school consists of readily available games and toys, household utensils, plants and animals that are cared for by the children, and child-sized furniture—the invention of which is generally attributed to Dr. Montessori. Montessori educators also stress physical exercise, in accordance with their belief that motor abilities should be developed along with sensory and intellectual capacities. The major outlines of the Montessori system are based on Dr. Montessori's writings, which include The Montessori Method (1912), Pedagogical Anthropology (1913), The Advanced Montessori Method (2 vol., 1917), and The Secret of Childhood (1936).

Bibliography

See E. M. Standing, Maria Montessori (1958, repr. 1962) and The Montessori Revolution (1966); biography by R. Kramer (1983).

Montessori, Maria (1870–1952) Italian educator who believed that pre-school children, given an environment rich in manipulative materials and free from restraint, would develop their creative and academic potential. Her method was adapted for use in many of the school systems in Britain and the USA.