Montessori, Maria (1870–1952)

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Montessori, Maria (1870–1952)

Italian doctor, scientist and pioneer children's educator. Pronunciation: Mont-ES-OR-ee. Born Maria Montessori on August 31, 1870, in Chiaravalle, near Ancona, Italy; died on May 6, 1952, at Noordwijkon-Sea, Holland; only child of Alessandro Montessori (a soldier and civil servant) and Renilde Stoppani; educated at state schools and the University of Rome, graduated Doctor of Medicine, 1890; never married; children: one son, Mario (b. 1898 or 1901).

Awards:

Honorary fellowship from the Educational Institute of Scotland (1946); Legion d'Honneur from the French government (1949).

Selected writings:

The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in the "Children's Houses" (1912); The Advanced Montessori Method (1913); Pedagogical Anthropology (1913); Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook (1914); The Child in the Church (1930); The Mass Explained to Children (1932); The Secret of Childhood (1936); The Reform of Education During and After Adolescence (1939); What You Should Know About Your Child (1940); Education for a New World (1946); The Discovery of the Child (1948); The Absorbent Mind (1949); To Educate the Human Potential (1950).

On a warm evening in early summer, 1914, over 5,000 enthusiasts crammed into Carnegie Hall in New York City. Drawn from all walks of life, they held a common interest: to solve the many difficulties associated with children's education. The principal speaker was Maria Montessori, whose thoughts on that subject were then widely regarded as the most perceptive and influential of their kind anywhere in the world.

Maria was born on August 31, 1870, in the small town of Chiaravalle, near Ancona on the Adriatic coast of Italy. Her father Alessandro, who was descended from one of the numerous petty noble families of the area, had earlier established a distinguished record as a soldier. Following his retirement from the army, he had become a civil servant in Ancona, earning himself a reputation as an implacable bureaucrat and stolid defender of traditional conservative values. Maria's mother Renilde was primarily known for her piety and her lifelong commitment to and encouragement of charitable works among the poor. She seems to have developed a particularly close rapport with her only child. In fact, until Renilde's death in 1912, she and Maria maintained a faithful correspondence.

At the local state schools in Ancona, which she attended from an early age, Montessori displayed no special aptitudes or talents in any particular field of study. Neither did she appear to be an ambitious child, preferring, rather, to spend most of her time helping her mother in charitable endeavors. This situation changed in 1882, following her parents' decision to move to Rome. The standard of education there was far better, and Maria quickly blossomed into an accomplished scholar. At age 14, for example, she displayed an understanding of mathematical principles that was well in advance of her peers.

It was in these circumstances that her parents attempted to encourage her to become a teacher, then a well-regarded career path for women. Ironically, given her later interests, Montessori flatly refused to consider such an option. Rather, she expressed a keen desire to study engineering and to this end enrolled in a small technical school. This desire did not last; shortly thereafter, Montessori's interests turned, first to biology and then to medicine.

Alessandro strongly disapproved of this latter development and tried to discourage his daughter. He pointed out that medicine was an all-male profession and that Montessori would find it impossible to gain admittance to university. Despite this, and with Renilde's covert support, Maria persevered and won a scholarship to enter the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Rome. Though she was faced throughout her student years with many instances of discrimination, petty jealousy and persecution, Montessori never wavered in her determination. In 1896, she qualified as the first female M.D. to be licensed in Italy.

Later the same year, she spoke at a feminist congress in Berlin, Germany. Her experiences as a medical student had given her a unique insight into the plight of women attempting to enter the work force. Montessori's impressive speech, which was widely reported and commented on in the left-wing European press, led to further invitations to similar gatherings. For instance, in London in 1900, she spoke out in a similarly rousing manner against the exploitation of child labor in industry.

From 1896 on, however, Montessori was principally immersed in her medical career. Shortly after her graduation, she was appointed an assistant doctor in Rome University's psychiatric clinic. One of her duties was to visit the various asylums in the city to select patients to be brought to the clinic for treatment. Montessori was shocked to discover the many children who at the time were confined alongside adults in these asylums. Noting that the children's rooms were bare of any form of stimulation, such as toys, she quickly came to the conclusion that their problem was primarily educational and not medical. In 1899, Montessori laid out this view, in an address entitled "Moral Education," before a distinguished educational conference in Turin. As a result, Dr. Guido Bacelli, then minister of education in the Italian government, invited her to give a series of lectures further exploring this issue. This in turn led to the establishment of the first Orthophrenic school in the country, which provided facilities to train teachers in the special needs of retarded children.

Montessori served as the first director of this school and, during her term of office, traveled widely, studying new educational developments in the field. Soon, she was thinking of expanding what she had learned into other areas of children's education. She had a conviction, "so deep as to be of the nature of an intuition," she said, and it "became my controlling idea. I became convinced that similar methods applied to normal children would develop and set free their personality in a marvelous and surprising way."

In 1901, she resigned as director in order to re-register as a student at Rome University. Montessori believed that before she could set about developing new educational principles, she had to understand a great deal more about the methods and arguments of other disciplines, particularly psychology and philosophy. There may also have been a more personal reason. Around this time (some sources cite 1898, the majority favor 1901), Montessori gave birth to a son, Mario. The child's father was a colleague of Montessori's named Dr. Montesano. For reasons unclear, both families opposed the idea of marriage, and Montessori had little choice but to give up her son to a wet nurse. Indeed, until her mother's death in 1912, Montessori had very little contact with the child.

It was not long after these events that the directors of the Institutio Romano Dei Beni Stabili, one of the most prominent building societies in Rome, began formulating plans to build two large blocks of apartments in the city. These apartments were to be erected in the San Lorenzo quarter then infamous for its squalor, poverty, crime, and overcrowding. The new buildings, however, were of high quality and were open to any current resident of the quarter on the condition that he or she would keep the property in good condition, refrain from all manner of social vices, and engage in a positive attempt to reform his or her life.

This project was largely successful but ran into one difficulty. With parents at work and the older children at the local state school, many younger children (aged 3 to 6) were left to fend for themselves. The local authorities moved to rectify this situation and decided to open a small school where these children could receive proper attention. Thanks to her already established reputation, they asked Montessori to assume responsibility for this center. Although she had many other duties and obligations at this time (since 1904 she had held the chair of anthropology at Rome University, and was continuing her medical practice in various clinics and hospitals throughout the city), she had no doubts about the importance of this school and enthusiastically agreed. Montessori later recalled that, during the opening ceremony of the school early in 1906, she "had a strange feeling which made me announce emphatically that here was the opening of an undertaking of which the whole world would one day speak."

Over the next three years, her frequent visits to the school led her to a number of what can only be described as revolutionary insights into the methods of children's education. She became convinced that there were certain important and identifiable characteristics of childhood which were hidden or denied by traditional educational methods. All children, she thought, possessed a range of personal qualities quite different from those normally attributed to them. The purpose

of education, therefore, must be to release these qualities in order to create a new and higher form of personality. It is the principles engaged in this effort to uncover the "New Child" which form the basis of what is still known today as the "Montessori Method."

The Montessori Method is not easily summarized. Montessori always insisted that its foundational principles could only properly be applied by teachers who had undergone a long process of training. In other words, they cannot be read as a simple list applicable anywhere but, rather, as a methodology which must be creatively engaged in specially selected environments with the special needs of each particular child in mind. With that proviso, the following represents the main elements of Montessori's vision.

(1) The mainspring of all children's efforts is their spontaneous interest in their surroundings and so there is no need for adults to use force or persuasion; (2) children have a psychological need to engage in repetitive behavior (no matter how meaningless this might appear); (3) small children have an innate sense of order; (4) all children should be permitted a free choice of activity in order to promote their personal independence; (5) children prefer work to play; (6) no child sets any store by a system of rewards and punishments; (7) each child has a love and need for occasional periods of silence; (8) all children enjoy a profound sense of personal dignity; (9) all children engage in spontaneous self-discipline.

She knew that she had discovered a key which could unlock immeasurable constructive energies for human development.
—E.M. Standing

In a series of books first published in Italian in 1909, Montessori sought to explain the apparent success of her methods. These books were translated into over 20 foreign languages and Montessori found herself acclaimed as an international celebrity. Many teachers traveled to Rome in search of instruction in her methods, and she received numerous requests to tour abroad and lecture. In these circumstances, Montessori realized that she had to resign all her academic and medical positions in order to concentrate completely on spreading her educational principles to all corners of the globe.

In 1911, the first school run on the Montessori Method opened in Tarrytown, New York. The following year, Montessori's book, The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in the "Children's Houses," was published in the United States attracting widespread interest and becoming a bestseller. This eventually prompted Edward McClure, the wealthy publisher of McClure's Magazine, to invite Montessori to the United States with the promise that he would fund an institute dedicated to investigating and promoting her work. Though greatly tempted by this offer, she eventually declined, but she did agree to come in 1914 to conduct a cross-country series of lectures. So successful was this tour that Montessori returned the following year to California to organize the first special training courses for teachers. On this occasion, she was accompanied by her son Mario who remained in Hollywood to open his own Montessori school.

Montessori's ideas found increasingly enthusiastic support throughout the world. In Germany, Austria, Holland, Russia, India, China, Japan, and Chile special "Children's Houses" were built, often with Montessori's direct collaboration. In 1916, she traveled to Barcelona, Spain, where she founded a "Children's Chapel," thereby extending her principles to the specific field of religious education. Throughout this period, however, Montessori was consistently worried that her principles were being misunderstood and misapplied by well-meaning but unqualified individuals. She firmly believed that only she was qualified to interpret her theories in a proper fashion. As a result, she began to spend more of her time organizing and developing a new type of rigorous training course for specially selected groups of teachers. The first of these courses were held in England and Holland between 1918 and 1920.

Throughout the 1920s, however, enthusiasm for Montessori's methods, particularly in Europe, began to wane. As interest in child education developed, new theories evolved which made the Montessori Method appear rigid and inflexible. This situation was not helped by Montessori's own increasingly autocratic manner and her continued insistence that her theories could only be understood by the few who had received her direct instruction.

The only apparent exception to this trend was in Italy. In 1924, Montessori met the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini whom she persuaded into supporting her methods. As a result, she received a great deal of financial backing from the government, which was poured into the funding of schools and training centers. This success, however, was only short lived. In 1934, the state issued a decree requiring all children to wear a special uniform to school and to give the fascist salute each morning. When Montessori refused to countenance these measures, all the Montessori schools and centers were immediately closed.

As Europe drifted closer to war in the 1930s, Montessori's projects in other countries were similarly affected. The Nazi regime in Germany and Austria proscribed her work and the left-wing government that came to power in Barcelona at the beginning of the Spanish civil war in 1936 banned her religious schools. Since Montessori was in Barcelona at the time, she was apparently in some danger before British authorities arranged her escape to London.

In 1939, Montessori organized a training course at Benares University in Madras, India. She had long believed that the Indian sub-continent, with its mass illiteracy and appalling rates of poverty, was a fertile area for the reception of her ideas. When she was there, however, World War II began which meant that she, an Italian citizen, found herself trapped in a part of the British empire. The usual result in these cases would have been for the enemy alien to be interned for the duration of the conflict. Wisely, the British authorities decided that a 70-year-old woman of distinguished international reputation lent no threat to their war effort, and they allowed her to continue to travel and teach throughout India until 1945.

Following the end of the war, Montessori returned to Italy, where the newly formed government asked her to re-establish a system of Montessori schools. Shortly thereafter, she was offered a chair at the University of Berlin but declined the honor in order to return to India to complete her work training a new generation of teachers. For three years running (1949–51), she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1950, after her return from India, she served for a short period as the director of the International Center for Educational Studies at the University of Perugia in Italy.

Increasing ill health, however, eventually caused Montessori to resign from all her public positions and retire to Holland (where the international headquarters of the Montessori movement had been established). She continued to receive a variety of honors, such as an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Amsterdam, but was more pleased to realize that her method was once again beginning to receive widespread and serious attention from educational theorists. Maria Montessori, aged 81, died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at her home in Holland on May 6, 1952.