Montessori, Maria
Montessori, Maria
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.