Maria Montessori

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Maria Montessori

1870-1952

Educator and physician

Groundbreaker. Maria Montessori was born into a middleclass, well-educated family in Chiaravalle, Italy, and she lived most of her life in Rome. Her parents, specially her mother, supported her educational goals, and she attended a technical school primarily designed for students planning careers in the sciences. Most nineteenth-century career women were teachers or nurses, but Montessori wanted to become a scientist and entered the University of Rome. She eventually turned to medicine, and in 1896 she became the first modern Italian woman to receive a doctorate in medicine at the University of Rome. During the late 1890s she worked in Rome at institutions for the mentally disabled. During her work with the disabled she became interested in how children learn and respond to their environments.

A New Woman Having defied the traditional path of most bourgeois women of her day, Montessori was one of a new generation of middle-class women who challenged the traditional gender roles established during the nineteenth century. By the final years of that century these “new women” were rejecting domesticity and motherhood as their only occupations. They dressed differently than bourgeois women, rode bicycles, studied subjects considered improper for them, and tried to embark on careers few other women had entered before. In 1899 Montessori traveled throughout Italy for two weeks, delivering a lecture called “The New Woman” in order to raise money to fund shelters for the poor.In her lectures, attended by capacity crowds of admirers, she criticized the male scientific perception of women.

The Montessori Method By the turn of the century, Montessori had become well known for her work with the mentally handicapped. Over the next few years, she changed course and focused on the education of healthy children. In 1907 she opened her first Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House) for young children in a poor, working-class neighborhood of Rome. She went on to publish educational treatises based on her work and research with her students, beginning with II metodo della pedagogia scientifica (The Montessori Method) in 1909. In it she provided a new model for education, rejecting the systems of rote memorization popular at the time and arguing that children learn best when they are allowed to develop their skills freely through useful activities. Montessori wrote that the teacher should not devise tasks for the children to complete but instead should allow them to develop their own tasks and own methods of learning. Rather than guiding children from one activity or subject to the next, teachers should provide materials for various learning activities and allow students to experiment with the ones that interest them until they felt satisfied that they understood them. Spontaneity was crucial to her method, and teachers had to be prepared to adapt to the children’s interests at a given moment. By 1912 stories about her work were being featured in magazines and newspapers throughout Europe and the United States. Before the outbreak of World War I in 1914 hundreds of admirers had established schools in which they employed her methods.