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Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war. Dr. Maria Montessori |
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Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was born in Ancona, Italy in 1870. In 1896, she became the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome Medical School and joined the staff of the University’s Psychiatric Clinic. As part of her duties, she visited children committed to the insane asylums. She became convinced these mentally deficient children could profit from special education and studied the work of pioneers Jean Itard and Eduoard Seguin.
Montessori was named director of the State Orthophrenic School in 1898 and worked with the children there for two years. All day she taught in the school and then worked preparing new materials, making notes and observations, and reflecting on her work. These two years she regarded as her “true degree” in education. To her amazement, she found these children could learn many things which had been thought impossible. This conviction led Montessori to devote her energies to the field of education for the remainder of her life.
In 1907, she was asked to direct a day-care center in a housing project in the slums of San Lorenzo, Italy. Montessori accepted, seeing this as her opportunity to begin her work with normal children. The sparse furniture was similar to that used in an office or home, and the only education equipment were the pieces of sensorial apparatus Montessori had used with her mentally defective children.
Montessori says she had no special system of instruction she wished to test at this point. She wanted to compare the reactions of normal children to her special equipment with those of her mental defectives. She attempted to set up as natural an environment as possible for the children, and then she relied on her own observations of what occurred.
In observing the development in the children, Montessori felt she had identified significant and, at that time, unknown facts about children’s behavior. She also knew that, in order to consider these developments as representing universal truths, she must study them under different conditions and be able to reproduce them. In this spirit, other schools were opened in Italy.
Word of Montessori’s work spread rapidly. Visitors from all over the world arrived at the Montessori schools to verify for themselves the reports of these “remarkable children”. The first comprehensive account of her work, The Montessori Method, was published in 1909. Montessori began a life of world travel – establishing schools and teacher training centers, lecturing, and writing.
The Montessori Method was first introduced in the United States in 1912, when Montessori visited for a lecture tour. An American Montessori association was formed with Mrs. Alexander Bell as President and with Miss Margaret Wilson, President Woodrow Wilson’s daughter, as secretary.
Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952, receiving in her later years honorary degrees and tributes for her work throughout the world.
Excerpted from the IMS Newsletter, December, 1973
Maria Montessori Quotes
"Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole, which has roots in the most distant past and climbs towards the infinite future"
Dr. Maria Montessori
"Discipline must come through liberty... We do not consider an individual disciplined when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined."
Dr. Maria Montessori
"No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence..."
Dr. Maria Montessori
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war. "
Dr. Maria Montessori
"If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?"
Dr. Maria Montessori
"If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men."
Dr. Maria Montessori
"The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil."
Dr. Maria Montessori
"The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'"
Dr. Maria Montessori
"To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator."
Dr. Maria Montessori
