Maria Montessori was an Italian physician, educator and innovator acclaimed for her educational method that builds on the way children naturally learn.
Background
Maria Montessori was born on 31st August 1870 in Chiaravalle in Italy. Her father Alessandro Montessori 33 years at the time she was born was an official of the Minister of Finance working in the local state-run tobacco factory. Her mother Renilde Stoppani was 25 years old and was a well educated for the times and was the great-niece of Italian geologist and paleontologist Antonio Stoppani.
She was very close to her mother who readily encouraged her. She had a loving relationship with her father. Beginning in her early childhood years, she grew up in Rome, a paradise of libraries, museums and fine schools.
Education
Montessori entered a public elementary school at the age of six in 1876. She was awarded certificates for good behavior in the first grade. At the age of thirteen, against the wishes of her father but with the support of her mother she began to attend a boys’ technical school.
She entered a secondary technical school, Regia Scoula Tecnica Michelangelo Buonarroti in 1883 and she studied Italian, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, accounting, history, geography, and sciences. She graduated in 1886 with good grades and examination results. That year at the age of 16 she continued at the institute studying Italian, mathematics, history, geography, geometric and ornate drawing, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology and two foreign languages. She did well in the sciences especially mathematics. In 1890 when she was 20, she graduated with a certificate in physics-mathematics and decided to study medicine an unlikely pursuit given cultural norms at the time.
In 1890, she enrolled in the University of Rome in a degree course in natural sciences, passing examinations in botany, zoology, experimental physics, histology, anatomy and general and organic chemistry. She earned her diploma di licenza in 1892. The degree along with additional studies in Italian and Latin qualified her for entrance into the medical program at the university in 1893. She graduated from the University of Rome in 1896 as a doctor of medicine. Her thesis was published in 1897 in the journal policlinico.
In 1902 she enrolled in the philosophy degree course at the University of Rome. She studied theoretical and moral philosophy, the history of philosophy and psychology although she did not graduate.
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. From 1896 to 1901, she worked with and researched on phrenasthenic children; children experiencing some form of mental retardation, disability and illness. She began to travel, speak, study and publish nationally and internationally coming to prominence as an advocate for women’s rights and education for mentally disabled.
As part of her work, she visited asylums in Rome where she observed children with mental disabilities, observations which were fundamental to her future educational work. In 1897, she audited the University courses in pedagogy. 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.
Montessori spoke on societal responsibility for juvenile delinquency at the National Congress of Medicine in Turin. She also wrote several articles and spoke again at the First Pedagogical conference in Turin urging the creation of special classes and institutions for mentally disabled children as well as training for their instructors. She was appointed as a councilor to the newly formed National League for the protection of retarded children in 1899 and was invited to lecture on special methods of education for retarded children at the teacher training school of the College of Rome.
Montessori was appointed the co- director of the newly opened National League Orthophrenic School; for training teachers in educating mentally disabled children with an attached laboratory classroom. During her two years at the school, she developed methods and materials which she would later adapt to use with mainstream children. Her work of developing what she would later call scientific pedagogy continued over the next few years. Montessori presented a report at a second national pedagogical congress in Naples in 1902. She published two articles in pedagogy in 1903 and two more in 1904.
She conducted anthropological research with Italian schoolchildren between 1903 and 1904 and in 1904 she was a qualified free lecturer in anthropology for the University of Rome. She was there after appointed to lecture in the Pedagogic School at the University of Rome and continued in the position until 1908. Her lectures were printed as a book titled Pedagogical Anthropology.
In 1906 she was invited to oversee the care and education of a group of children of working parents in a new apartment building for the low income families in San Lorenzo district in Rome. In 1911 and 1912 her work was popular and widely publicized in the USA. She was forced into exile from Italy because of her antifascist views and lived and worked in India during World War II. She developed many of the ideas taught in her training courses today. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize twice.
Montessori returned to Europe and took up residence in Barcelona, Spain in 1915. She travelled and lectured widely in Europe and gave numerous teachers training courses. Her education experienced significant growth in Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and Italy. She continued her work in Barcelona where a small program sponsored by the Catalan government begun in 1915 had developed into the Escola Montessori, serving children from three to ten years old. In 1917, she published her elementary work which appeared in English as The Advanced Montessori Method.
By mid 1930s there were more than 200 Montessori schools in Netherlands. The headquarters of the Association Montessori Internationale moved permanently to Amsterdam in 1935.
In England, between 1912 and 1914, Montessori education was met with enthusiasm and controversy in England. She came to England for the first time and gave an international training course which was received with high interest. She continued to give training courses in England every year until the beginning of World War II.
In 1922 she was invited to Italy on behalf of the government to give a course of lectures and later to inspect Italian Montessori Schools. She however came into conflict with the Italian government over financial support and ideological issues in 1930 and she and her son Mario were placed under political surveillance. In 1933 she resigned from the Opera Montessori and in 1934 she left Italy. The Italian government ended her activities in the country in 1936.
In 1932 she spoke on peace and education at the second international Montessori Congress in Nice France. In 1932 she spoke at the International Peace Club in Geneva Switzerland on the theme of Peace and Education. She held peace conferences from 1932 to 1939 in Geneva.
Montessori died of a cerebral hemorrhage on May 6, 1952 at the age of 81.
Maria Montessori was the founder of the first Montessori school - the Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House in Rome. She also wrote extensively about her approach to education, attracting many devotees, so she was the originator of the so-called Montessori method of education for children. Her works have been translated into at least 20 languages, for example her famous books: The Montessori Method, Pedagogical Anthropology, The Montessori Elementary Material. Besides, there are now at least 22000 Montessori schools in at least 110 countries worldwide.
Montessori was a devot and practicing Catholic and her beliefs are evident in her approach to educating children. Montessori basically believed in the innate ability of a child to love and respect life deeply. She believed that society, the family and teachers should introduce religious concepts in a living model. She felt that even babies absorbed the church services.
Politics
Montessori was not active in politics and refused to support anyone politically. Around 1920, the Catalan independence movement demanded that she take a political stand and make a public statement favoring Catalan independence and she refused. Official support was withdrawn from her programs.
Views
She had an interest in the diseases of children and the needs of those said to be uneducable. She strived to develop a teaching program that enabled defective children read and write.
Her 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.
Quotations:
“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”
“Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.”
“Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.”
Connections
On 31 March 1898, her only child - a son named Mario Montessori, was born. Mario Montessori was born out of her love affair with Giuseppe Montesano, a fellow doctor who was co-director with her of the Orthophrenic School of Rome.
