Maria Montessori was an
ItalianItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
physician and educator, a noted humanitarian and devout
CatholicCatholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
best known for the
philosophy of education which bears her nameMontessori education is an educational approach developed by Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori. Montessori education is practiced in an estimated 20,000 schools worldwide, serving children from birth to eighteen years old.-Overview:...
. Her educational method is in use today in public as well as private schools throughout the world.
Life and career
Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in Chiaravalle,
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, to Alessandro Montessori and Renilde Stoppani (niece of
Antonio StoppaniAntonio Stoppani was an Italian geologist and palaeontologist. He died in 1891 aged 67Born in Lecco, he became professor of geology in the Royal Technical Institute of Milan, and was distinguished for his researches on the Triassic and Liassic formations of northern Italy.Among his works...
). At the age of thirteen she attended an all-boy technical school in preparation for her dream of becoming an engineer. At the time, she insisted specifically that she did not want to be a teacher because the teaching profession was one of the few that women were encouraged to take part in at the time. Montessori was the first woman to graduate from the
University of Rome La SapienzaThe Sapienza University of Rome, officially Sapienza – Università di Roma, formerly known as Università degli studi di Roma "La Sapienza", is a coeducational, autonomous state university in Rome, Italy...
Medical School, becoming one of the first female doctors in Italy. She was a member of the University's Psychiatric Clinic and became intrigued with trying to educate the "
special needsIn the USA, special needs is a term used in clinical diagnostic and functional development to describe individuals who require assistance for disabilities that may be medical, mental, or psychological. For instance, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the International...
" or "unhappy little ones" and the "uneducable" in
RomeRome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
. In 1896, she gave a lecture at the Educational Congress in Torino about the training of the disabled. The Italian Minister of Education was in attendance, and, sufficiently impressed by her arguments, appointed her the same year as director of the Scuola Ortofrenica, an institution devoted to the care and education of the mentally retarded. She accepted, in order to put her theories to the test. Her first notable success was to have several of her 8 year old students apply to take the State examinations for reading and writing. The "defective" children not only passed, but had above-average scores, an achievement described as "the first Montessori miracle." Montessori's response to their success was "if mentally disabled children could be brought to the level of normal children then (she) wanted to study the potential of 'normal' children".
"Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives;
education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is
acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of
the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over
a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference.
Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the
master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the
rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision
to direct and shape the future of human society".
Because of her success with these children, she was asked to start a school for children in a housing project in Rome, which opened on January 6, 1907, and which she called "Casa dei Bambini" or Children's House. Children's House was a child care center in an apartment building in the poor neighborhood of Rome. She was focused on teaching the students ways to develop their own skills at a pace they set, which was a principle Montessori called "spontaneous self-development". A wide variety of special equipment of increasing complexity is used to help direct the interests of the child and hasten development. When a child is ready to learn new and more difficult tasks, the teacher guides the child's first endeavors in order to avoid wasted effort and the learning of wrong habits; otherwise the child learns alone. It has been reported that the Montessori method of teaching has enabled children to learn to read and write much more quickly and with greater facility than has otherwise been possible. The Montessori Method of teaching concentrates on quality rather than quantity.
The success of this school sparked the opening of many more, and a worldwide interest in Montessori's methods of education.
After the 1907 establishment of Montessori's first school in Rome, by 1917 there was an intense interest in her method in
North AmericaNorth America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
, which later waned, in large part due to the publication of a small booklet entitled "The Montessori System Examined" by
William Heard KilpatrickWilliam Heard Kilpatrick was a US American pedagogue and a pupil, a colleague and a successor of John Dewey. He was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th century.-Biography:...
– a follower of
John DeweyJohn Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
. (Nancy McCormick Rambusch contributed to the revival of the method in America by establishing the
American Montessori SocietyThe American Montessori Society is a non-profit, member supported, organization which promotes the use of the Montessori teaching approach in private and public schools.-History:...
in 1960); at the same time Margaret Stephenson came to the US from Europe and began a long history of training Montessori teachers under the auspices of the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI). Montessori was exiled by
MussoliniBenito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....
mostly because she refused to compromise her principles and make the children into soldiers. She moved to Spain and lived there until 1936 when the
Spanish Civil WarThe Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
broke out. She then moved to the Netherlands until 1939.
In 1939, the
Theosophical SocietyThe Theosophical Society is an organization formed in 1875 to advance the spiritual principles and search for Truth known as Theosophy. The original organization, after splits and realignments has several successors...
of India extended an invitation asking Maria Montessori to visit India. She accepted the invitation and reached India in the same year accompanied by her only son, Mario Montessori Sr. This heralded the beginning of her special relationship with India. She made the international Headquarters of the Theosophical Society at Adyar, Chennai, her home. However the war forced her to extend her stay in India. With the help of her son, she conducted sixteen batches of courses called the Indian Montessori Training Courses. These courses laid a strong foundation for the Montessori Movement in India. In 1949 when she left for The Netherlands she appointed Albert Max Joosten as her personal representative, and assigned him the responsibility of conducting the Indian Montessori Training Courses. Joosten along with Swamy S R, another disciple of Montessori, continued her work and ensured that the Montessori Movement in India was on a sound footing.
During a teachers conference in
IndiaIndia , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
she was interned by the authorities and lived there for the duration of the war. Montessori lived out the remainder of her life in the Netherlands, which now hosts the headquarters of the AMI, or
Association Montessori Internationale. She died in
Noordwijk aan ZeeNoordwijk is a town and municipality in the western Netherlands, in the province of South Holland. The municipality covers an area of 51.53 km² and had a population of 24,707 in May 2006....
. Her son Mario headed the AMI until his death in 1982.
Maria Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952, after a lifetime devoted to the study of child development. Her success in Italy led to international recognition, and for over 40 years she traveled all over the world, lecturing, writing and establishing training programs. In later years, "Educate for Peace" became a guiding principle which underpinned her work.
Pedagogy
Aside from a new
pedagogyPedagogy is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. The term generally refers to strategies of instruction, or a style of instruction....
, among the premier contributions to educational thought by Montessori are:
- instruction in 3-year age groups, corresponding to sensitive periods of development (example: Birth-3, 3–6, 6–9, 9–12, 12–15 year olds) with an Erdkinder (German for "Land Children") program for early teens
- children as competent beings, encouraged to make maximal decisions
- observation of the child in the prepared environment as the basis for ongoing curriculum development (presentation of subsequent exercises for skill development and information accumulation)
- small, child-sized furniture and creation of a small, child-sized environment (microcosm) in which each can be competent to produce overall a self-running small children's world
- creation of a scale of sensitive periods
Sensitive periods is a term coined by the Dutch geneticist Hugo de Vries and adopted by the Italian educator Maria Montessori to refer to important periods of childhood development....
of development, which provides a focus for class work that is appropriate and uniquely stimulating and motivating to the child (including sensitive periods for language developmentLanguage development is a process starting early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. Children's language development moves from simple to complex. Infants start without language. Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and...
, sensorial experimentation and refinement, and various levels of social interaction)
- the importance of the "absorbent mind," the limitless motivation of the young child to achieve competence over his or her environment and to perfect his or her skills and understandings as they occur within each sensitive period. The phenomenon is characterized by the young child's capacity for repetition of activities within sensitive period categories (Example: exhaustive babbling
Babbling is a stage in child development and a state in language acquisition, during which an infant appears to be experimenting with uttering sounds of language, but not yet producing any recognizable words...
as language practice leading to language competence).
- self-correcting "auto-didactic" materials (some based on work of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
Jean Marc Gaspard Itard was a French physician born in Provence.Without a university education and working at a bank, he was forced to enter the army during the French Revolution but presented himself as a physician at that time...
and Edouard SeguinÉdouard Séguin was a physician and educationist who was born in Clamecy, Nièvre. He is remembered for his work with children having cognitive impairments in France and the United States....
)
Influence
A conference in Rome on 6–7 January 2007 heralded the start of a year of celebrations for children and schools around the world.
Dr. Montessori’s innovative approach was that “Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.”
What followed worldwide has been called the "discovery of the child" and the realization that: "...mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.”
The efficacy of Montessori teaching methods has most recently been demonstrated by the results of a study published in the US journal, Science (29 September 2006) which indicates that Montessori children have improved behavioral and academic skills compared with a control group from the mainstream system. The authors concluded that "when strictly implemented, Montessori education fosters social and academic skills that are equal or superior to those fostered by a pool of other types of schools."
The
Montessori methodMontessori education is an educational approach developed by Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori. Montessori education is practiced in an estimated 20,000 schools worldwide, serving children from birth to eighteen years old.-Overview:...
of
educationEducation in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
that she derived from this experience has subsequently been applied successfully to children and is quite popular in many parts of the world. Despite much criticism of her method in the early 1930s–1940s, her method of education has been applied and has undergone a revival. It can now be found on six continents, but is still subject to some criticism.
The Association Montessori Internationale is a member of the
International Coalition for the DecadeOn 10 November 1998, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed the first decade of the 21st century and the third millennium, the years 2001 to 2010, as the International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World.Since 2001, some national...
for the Culture of Peace and Nonviolence.
Montessori's image was the last to be featured on the 1000
Italian LiraThe lira was the currency of Italy between 1861 and 2002. Between 1999 and 2002, the Italian lira was officially a “national subunit” of the euro...
banknote before the lira itself was phased out of circulation and replaced by the
EuroThe euro is the official currency of the eurozone: 17 of the 27 member states of the European Union. It is also the currency used by the Institutions of the European Union. The eurozone consists of Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg,...
.
Works
- Antropologia pedagogica (Eng. trans. by F. T. Cooper, Pedagogic Anthropology, New York, 1913)
- Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all'educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini (Eng. trans. by A. E. George, The Montessori Method, New York, 1912).
Further reading
- Foschi, Renato. "Science and culture around the Montessori's first "Children's Houses" in Rome (1907–1915)." Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences 44 (2008): 238–257. 10.1002/jhbs.20313 http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120748779/abstract
- Burnett, Alice. "Montessori Education Today and Yesterday." The Elementary School Journal 63 (1962): 71–77.
- Montessori, Mario. "Maria Montessori's Contribution to the Cultivation of the Mathematical Mind" International Review of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft / Revue Internationale de l'Education 7 (1961): 134–41.
- Gardner, Riley W. "A Psychologist Looks at Montessori." The Elementary School Journal 67 (1966): 72–83.
External links