MONTESSORI, MARIA

MONTESSORI, MARIA (1870–1952), one of the most influential contributors to western educational thought.

Initially trained as a scientist and doctor, Maria Montessori is best known for developing a child-centered educational approach using instructional toys. A tough, inspired woman with irrepressible enthusiasm, and a remarkable strength of character and capacity to work, Montessori was a complex and controversial figure. For a few years before the outbreak of World War I, she was one of the most famous women in the world.

Maria, the only child of educated, middle-class parents, was born in a small Italian town and grew up in Rome. In an age when girls aspired to be wives, nuns, or teachers, she decided to become an engineer and successfully completed preparatory technical and scientific studies. By the time she enrolled at the University of Rome, Montessori switched from one male-dominated profession to another. Enthusiastically supported by her mother and grudgingly tolerated by her father, she over came the opposition of male professors and students to study medicine. At the age of twenty-six, Montessori graduated with outstanding results to become one of the first women doctors in Italy. Over the next decade, she began private practice, held a number of part-time clinical positions, wrote specialist scientific papers, continued her own studies, and taught natural sciences in university teacher training courses.

To many contemporaries, the young woman doctor embodied the ideal of modern femininity. As a delegate to the 1896 international women's congress in Berlin and later in public lectures, Montessori argued that science had the power to liberate women from domestic drudgery and provide effective education for their children, all without robbing mothers of feminine charm. Throughout her life, she delighted in displaying competence in ladylike virtues; in the press, she was described as combining the delicacy of a talented, graceful young woman with the strength of a man.

In her early clinical work, Montessori developed an interest in the way sensory exercises with specially designed objects improved the treatment of "idiot children." By 1898 she assumed a prominent public role in the newly formed National League for the Education of Retarded Children. "Moral imbeciles," "intellectual idiots," and "congenital delinquents," she argued as the League's representative, should be removed from ordinary schools, provided with scientifically designed training, and transformed from potential burdens and parasites into productive members of society. When, in 1900, the League opened a model school, Montessori and a colleague were appointed codirectors. "I was with the children from early morning till evening as if I were a real teacher," she later recalled, "not a physician conducting an experiment." Through close observation of the children and trial and error with educational toys, Montessori became convinced that the handling of increasingly complicated objects, and sensory exercises more generally, help improve intellectual capacities; self-education through self-directed activity could transform the "unteachable" into literate children. Montessori's association with her codirector also produced an illegitimate son, who later became her closest professional associate.

In 1906 Montessori tried out her approach on "normal" toddlers in an experimental preschool in a slum district of Rome. To the disgust of her learned colleagues, the thirty-six-year-old doctor and professor became involved in the day-to-day care of fifty grubby urchins. Children, she confirmed, thrived on graduated challenges presented to them by self-correcting materials. Motivated by the enjoyment of a sense of mastery, they calmed down and taught themselves. Montessori insisted that such an instructional environment needed to be expertly guided and prepared; she did not hesitate to suppress what she saw as inappropriate behavior and rudeness. The ideal child for her was independent, self-controlled, and courteous, in turn exerting a civilizing influence on parents and, beyond them, the whole society.

Modern states, social theorists note, need self-policing, diligent workers and citizens. Montessori's system, relying on guided self-development rather than external coercion, promised to supply them. Within a year, the slum school and its successors became famous, attracting visitors, patrons, and helpers. Montessori schools and societies were established around the world. In 1910, annoyed by public distortions and commercial exploitation of her ideas, Montessori gave up all professional appointments to focus on the widening international network of schools and societies, the training of teachers, and the production and sale of instructional materials. Montessori's determined attempts to control the dissemination and application of her ideas proved controversial. In a period when children of different social groups experienced vastly different childhoods, and scientists put forward incommensurate theories about people's nature and learning, they blunted the impact of her work.

Montessori lectured, traveled, and taught to the end of her long life. Her ideas helped transform theories of human development; over time, they became part of everyday understandings and experiences of childhood.

See alsoChildhood and Children; Education.

bibliography

Kramer, Rita. Maria Montessori: A Biography. New York, 1976.

Martin, Jane Roland. The Schoolhome: Rethinking Schools for Changing Families. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Montessori, Maria. Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook. Edited by Reginald Calvert Orem. New York, 1965.

——. The Montessori Method: The Origins of An Educational Innovation, Including an Abridged and Annotated Edition of Maria Montessori's The Montessori Method. Edited by Gerald Lee Gutek. Lanham, Md., 2004.

Walkerdine, Valerie. "Developmental Psychology and the Child-Centered Pedagogy: The Insertion of Piaget into Early Education." In Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity, by Julian Henriques et al. London, 1984.

——. "Progressive Pedagogy and Political Struggle." In Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, edited by Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore. New York, 1992. A shorter version of much the same argument as above.

Pavla Miller