This week's summary is How Maria Montessori Transformed the Realm of Children's Education.
Most of us have a rudimentary idea of Maria Montessori and her impact on education philosophy and practice.
Much like John Dewey, Montessori was a pioneer of progressive education tenets that shifted schooling away from a mechanical pedagogy of lecture, worksheets, and rote learning to a more child-centered, process-oriented, problem-based focus.
Even though the roots of progressive education can be traced to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Emile in the mid-1700s, it was Montessori and Dewey in the early 20th century who put children’s innate curiosity and desire to learn at the forefront of the classroom.
Rather than viewing the child as a blank slate whose brain needed to be force fed with knowledge, Montessori put trust in her students and developed classroom pedagogy and activities (many of us are familiar with her pink tower) to engage children’s natural instinct to learn. A major belief for Montessori was to allow a child to learn at his/her own pace.
While today she is primarily associated with preschool grades, her beliefs influenced changes at all levels of education.
The article below is a short introduction to her life and influence. For a more comprehensive picture of her, you can read the recent biography of her, The Child is the Teacher.
Joe
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Maria Montessori stood before a crowd of 60 underprivileged children, her students. It was January 6, 1907, and the 36-year-old educator was opening her first school: the Casa dei Bambini or “Children’s House,” a preschool that would revolutionize children’s education.
Today, the legacy of the Italian woman behind Montessori schools lives on in preschools around the globe.
But at the time, the theory that providing children with stimulating activities would help them more than rote learning and academic drills was revolutionary.
Though her innovations inspired a movement in young children’s learning, Montessori saw her work more simply. “I did not invent a method of education,” she wrote in 1914. “I simply gave some little children a chance to live.”
Montessori was passionate about education from a young age. Born in 1870 and raised in Rome, she took a path that defied the era’s expectations for women. Montessori studied engineering, then applied to medical school at the University of Rome, telling a professor during her interview, “I know I shall become a doctor.” The school refused her, so Montessori enrolled in the general university; studied physics, mathematics and natural sciences; and reapplied to medical school. She was finally admitted, becoming the first woman to enter the university’s medical school, and in July 1896, she became Italy’s first female doctor.
Montessori’s medical work led her to the University of Rome’s psychiatric clinic. As part of her job, she visited asylums for children with mental disorders, searching for patients eligible for treatment at the clinic. It was here that her interest in child development intensified.
In 1898, Montessori spoke at the National Medical Congress in Turin, advocating that lack of adequate provisions and care for children with mental and emotional disorders caused them to misbehave. She continued her advocacy at the 1899 National Pedagogical Congress, where she proposed special training for teachers working with special-needs children.
Montessori’s interest in early childhood education strengthened over the next few years. She developed her own teaching materials, and in 1907, she opened her first school.
Her method revolved around engagement. Though Montessori introduced her students to many activities and materials, she retained only those the kids were interested in. She realized that activities could help children socially develop, and she theorized that, surrounded by such activities, students could educate themselves. Montessori’s self-dubbed “auto-education” approach soon had the 5-year-olds at Casa dei Bambini reading and writing.
News of Montessori’s success spread quickly, and by 1908, her name was known around the world. By the fall of 1908, five Case dei Bambini were operating in Italy. Her method soon crossed borders as kindergartens in Switzerland adopted her methods.
A couple of years later, Montessori published a book, The Montessori Method -- over time, it would be translated into 20 different languages. In the following decades, Montessori schools and teacher training programs sprang up around the world.
Before her death in 1952, Montessori lived to see her educational theories enacted around the globe, as more and more “awakened” children—as she called activity-stimulated students—successfully learned their letters.
As Montessori biographer E.M. Standing notes, Montessori proved that the “awakened” child “develops a higher type of personality—more mentally alert, more capable of concentration, more socially adaptable, more independent and at the same time more disciplined and obedient—in a word, a complete being—a ready foundation for the building up of a normalized adult.”
“This is Montessori’s great achievement,” Standing writes, “the discovery of the child.”
