Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in Ancona, Italy, to an educated but poor lower middle class family. When she was twelve, her parents moved to Rome to enable their only daughter to receive a better education. They encouraged her to become a teacher, which was the only career open to women at that time. Maria excelled at mathematics and had originally chosen a career in engineering but she became interested in biology while attending a technical school for boys and enrolled in medical school.

n 1896, Maria Montessori became the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome Medical School, and joined the staff of the University’s Psychiatric Clinic. Through the university's free clinics and her private practice, she came into frequent contact with children and families of the working class. When she was invited to represent her country in two international women's conventions and other speaking engagements in Europe she spoke vehemently supporting peace efforts, the women's movement, and child labor law reform.

In 1901, Montessori became the Director of the University of Rome's new orthophrenic school where she began to work with the reform wave for mentally handicapped children. She was was among the first to take a scientific approach to the education of these children, following the clinical studies by Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin., two French physicians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After research and trials with a boy "raised in the wild" Itard postulated the existence of developmental periods in normal human growth. This idea later became the cornerstone of Dr. Montessori’s philosophy. From Edouard Seguin, she drew further confirmation of Itard’s work, along with a more organized and specific system for applying it to the everyday education of challenged students. Through Dr. Montessori’s study of Seguin, she came to attune herself more actively to the “normal” child, applying all that she had previously learned.

Montessori combined these studies and developed educational studies based on observation and experimentation. This approach was referred to as the Child Study School of Thought. The next few years were devoted to work based upon the careful training and objectivity she had learned as a biologist.

In 1906, Dr. Montessori was invited to head the organization and orientation of preschools in one of the model tenements in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. The first Casa dei Bambini or "Children’s House" was opened on January 6, 1907. From her experience here, Dr. Montessori developed her philosophy and observations/experimentation methods for the education of young children.

The busy schools turned out to be very hectic, however, she had the older children help out and provided some puzzles that she had invented for the handicapped children. The results were that the children began to settle themselves, played with the puzzles, and learned daily living skills. Through observational studies Montessori discovered that children teach themselves when given the proper tools and environment. They have an almost effortless ability to absorb knowledge from their surroundings, as well as a tireless interest in manipulating materials. This self-creating process of the child is the cornerstone of what has been known as the Montessori Method. Eventually she was teaching these young students to read and write - four and five year olds were working on problems originally intended for third grade students. She would continue to develop equipment, exercises, toys, and methods based on what she observed children to do "naturally," by themselves, unassisted by adults. She also built tables and chairs instead of desks so the students could interact and learn more with each other.

As Montessori schools were set up throughout Europe and in America, Dr. Montessori ended her medical career in order to devote all of her energy to advocating the intellectual potential and rights of children. A good portion of modern traditional education is based on Dr. Montessori’s philosophy and resources, including the development of personalized instruction, manipulative learning materials, educational games, programmed instruction and the developmental classroom concept.

She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times—in 1949, 1950, and 1951. Maria Montessori died in Holland in 1952, but her work lives on in teachings based on her methods and through the Association Montessori Internationale, the Amsterdam-based organization she founded in 1929 in order to continue developing and teaching the methods most conducive to children teaching themselves.

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Posted by: Ramona at March 14, 2006 8:50 PM

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