Comprehensive information and links about Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori (August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian educator, scientist, physician, philosopher, feminist, and humanitarian.

She was born in Chiaravalle (Ancona), Italy. Montessori was the first female Italian physician in the modern era. As such, she was given a "menial" task: to try to educate the "mentally retarded" and the "uneducable" in Rome. She opened her first school, in Rome, on January 6, 1907.

The Montessori method of education 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 and throughout the United States.

By 1907 Montessori had established the first Casa dei Bambini or Children's House, in Rome. By 1913, there was an intense interest in her method in North America, which later waned. (Nancy McCormick Rambusch revived the method in America by establishing the American Montessori Society in 1960.) From the Netherlands - where she lived since 1936 - Montessori travelled to India on invitation by the Theosophical Society. She gave courses on various sites like Madras and Karachi and conducted her own school in Kodaikanal, for the duration of World War II. After her stay in India Montessori lived the remainder of her life in the Netherlands, which is now the headquarters of the AMI, or , which she founded in 1929. She died and was buried in Noordwijk aan Zee. Her son Mario headed the AMI until his death in 1982.

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Pedagogy

Aside from a new pedagogy, among the premier contributions to educational thought by Montessori are:

instruction of children in 3-year age groups, corresponding to sensitive periods of development (example: Birth-3, 3-6, 6-9, and 9-12 year olds with an Erdkinder program for early teens)observation of the child in the environment as the basis for ongoing curriculum development (presentation of subsequent exercises for skill development and information accumulation)child-sized furniture and creation of a child-sized environment (microcosm) in which each can be competent to produce overall a self-running children's worldparent participation to include basic and proper attention to health screening and hygiene as a prerequisite to schoolingdelineation of a scale of sensitive periods 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 development, 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 as language practice leading to language competence).

Trivia

Through the 1990s, Maria Montessori was pictured on the Italian 200 lire coin and the 1000 lire bill, by far the most common one, replacing Marco Polo, until Italy adopted the Euro.

Career

At technical school, Maria managed to get high marks in all of her subjects with a final score of 137 out of 150. After that she attended Regio Instituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci from 1886 to 1890 (Kramer, 1976). There she studied modern languages and natural sciences. Of all of her classes, her favorite was math. By the time she was ready to graduate, she had decided she wanted to go into the biological sciences. Her family, mostly her father, was shocked and disapproving. It was considered impossible for a woman to be accepted into a medical school. Her father actually stopped just short of forbidding her to study medicine. The following, concerning Maria's attempts to study are recorded in Kramer's Biography of Maria Montessori and also available through the Internet sites listed in the references. She checked first with the University of Rome and spoke with Guido Baccelli. Not surprising, however, they did not admit women into the medical program. She decided instead to enroll at the University of Rome to study physics, mathematics and natural sciences. While other students were reading novels, dreaming of romance and husbands, she was studying as much as possible. In 1892, she passed her exams with an eight out of ten and received a Diploma di licenza that made her eligible to study medicine. The problem of course was she was a woman. There is not much recorded on how she did it but she persisted until she was accepted into the school. In Kramer it was mentioned that Pope Leo XIII helped her somehow (1976). It was incredibly shocking that a woman was accepted into the school during this time period. It was also considered odd to find a woman working side by side with men looking at a patient or studying the human . During the time she was at school, she lived at home and had very little campus life experience, however, gradually other students began to accept her. Her and her father did not talk a lot because he was still upset about her studying medicine. Her mother continued to support her and sometimes helped her study.

In 1896 she had to present her thesis to a board of ten men. They were highly impressed with her work and granted her the degree of doctor of medicine. This made her the first woman to graduate from medical school in Italy. Not only did she graduate, but with a very impressive record. At this time anything over a 100 was considered brilliant. Maria scored a 105 (Kramer, 1976).

Shortly after, she was chosen as a representative of Italy at two different women's conferences (Maria Montessori: A Brief Biography). The first was in Berlin in 1896 and the second in 1900 in London. In November of 1896, she was asked to replace a surgical assistant at the place she was a medical assistant the previous year, Santo Spirito. While there she cared for patients more than was expected. She continued doing research at the University of Rome. Maria also found time for other interests such as cooking and needlework. In 1897, she joined the staff at the University of Rome as a voluntary assistant.

One of her responsibilities is what led her to her most loved occupation. She was to visit asylums for the insane. Here she came across feebleminded children, unable to function in schools or families and had no other public provisions. She saw that they were starving for experience and started to think about what she could do to help out. So in 1901 she returned to University with a desire to study the mind instead of the (Maria Montessori: A Brief Biography). So in 1904 she was offered a job teaching as the professor of anthropology at the University of Rome. She accepted but in 1906 gave the job up to work with sixty young children of working families. This is were she developed all of her educational methods which became so successful that even learning disabled children began to pass examinations for normal children. Her methods will be discussed later in the paper. With these sixty children she started a "Children's House" in San Lorenzo Rome (Maria Montessori: A Brief Biography). This children's home was an environment that was offered to the child so he may be given an opportunity to develop his activities (Kramer, 1976). Of course it was very dependent on financial resources and opportunities in the environment. She began to notice how the children would absorb knowledge almost effortlessly from their surroundings. She felt the children were teaching themselves, which helped inspire her lifelong pursuit of educational reform.

In 1913, she made her first visit to the United States. It was during this year that Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel, founded the Montessori Educational Association in Washington D.C. (Maria Montessori: A Brief Biography). Other American supporters were Thomas Edison and Helen Keller. In 1929 she founded the Association Montessori International in Denmark. The first office of AMI was in Berlin. Later on the office moved to Amsterdam. In 1938 she opened the Montessori Training Center in Laren, Netherlands. In 1919, she founded a Montessori Center in London, nowadays called the Maria Montessori Institute. And in 1949, 1950, and 1951 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (Maria Montessori: A Brief Biography).

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