Maria Montessori was born on the 31st August 1870 in the town of Chiaravalle, Italy. Her father, Alessandro, was
an accountant in the civil service, and her mother, Renilde Stoppani, was well
educated and had a passion for reading.
The Montessori family moved to Rome
in 1875, and the following year the young Maria enrolled in the local state
school on the Via di San Nicolo da Tolentino. As her education progressed, she
began to break through the barriers which constrained women’s careers. From
1886 to 1890 she continued her studies at the Regio Instituto Tecnico Leonardo
da Vinci, which she entered with the intention of becoming an engineer. This
was unusual at the time as most girls who pursued secondary education studied the
classics rather than going to technical school.
Upon her graduation, Montessori’s parents encouraged her to take up a career
in teaching, one of the few occupations open to women at the time, but she was
determined to enter medical school and become a doctor. Her father opposed this
course—medical school was then an all-male preserve—and initially Maria was
refused entry by the head of school. She was undeterred, apparently ending the
unsuccessful interview with the professor by saying, “I know I shall become
a doctor”.
Eventually, it seems, Pope Leo XIII interceded on her behalf. In 1890
Montessori enrolled at the University
of Rome to study physics,
maths and natural sciences, receiving her diploma two years later. This and the
Pope’s intercession enabled her to enter the Faculty of Medicine, and she
became the first woman to enter medical school in Italy. Montessori stood out not
just because of her gender, but because she was actually intent on mastering
the subject matter. She won a series of scholarships at medical school which,
together with the money she earned through private tuition, enabled her to pay
for most of her medical education.
Her time at medical school was not easy. She faced prejudice from her male
colleagues and had to work alone on dissections since these were not allowed to
be done in mixed classes. But she was a dedicated student, and on the 10th
July 1896 became the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Italy, and with this distinction
also became known across the country.
She was immediately employed in the San Giovanni Hospital attached to the
University. Later that year she was asked to represent Italy at the
International Congress for Women’s Rights in Berlin, and in her speech to the
Congress she developed a thesis for social reform, arguing that women should be
entitled to equal wages with men. A reporter covering the event asked her how
her patients responded to a female doctor. She replied, “… they know
intuitively when someone really cares about them.… It is only the upper classes
that have a prejudice against women leading a useful existence.”
In November 1896 Montessori added the appointment as surgical assistant at Santo Spirito
Hospital in Rome to her portfolio of tasks. Much of her
work there was with the poor, and particularly with their children. As a doctor
she was noted for the way in which she ‘tended’ her patients, making sure they
were warm and properly fed as well as diagnosing and treating their illnesses.
In 1897 she volunteered to join a research programme at the psychiatric clinic
of the University
of Rome, and it was here
that she worked alongside Giusseppe Montesano, with whom a romance was to
develop.
As part of her work at the clinic she would visit Rome’s asylums for the insane, seeking
patients for treatment at the clinic. She relates how, on one such visit, the
caretaker of a children’s asylum told her with disgust how the children grabbed
crumbs off the floor after their meal. Montessori realised that in such a bare,
unfurnished room the children were desperate for sensorial stimulation and
activities for their hands, and that this deprivation was contributing to their
condition.
She began to read all she could on the subject of mentally retarded
children, and in particular she studied the groundbreaking work of two early 19th
century Frenchmen, Jean-Marc Itard, who had made his name working with the
‘wild boy of Aveyron’, and Edouard Séguin, his student. She was so keen to
understand their work properly that she translated it herself from French into
Italian. Itard had developed a technique of education through the senses, which
Séguin later tried to adapt to mainstream education. Highly critical of the
regimented schooling of the time, Séguin emphasised respect and understanding
for each individual child. He created practical apparatus and equipment to help
develop the child’s sensory perceptions and motor skills, which Montessori was
later to use in new ways. During the 1897-98 University terms she sought to
expand her knowledge of education by attending courses in pedagogy, studying
the works of Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Froebel.
In 1898 Montessori’s work with the asylum children began to receive more
prominence. The 28-year-old Montessori was asked to address the National
Medical Congress in Turin,
where she advocated the controversial theory that the lack of adequate provision
for retarded and disturbed children was a cause of their delinquency. Expanding
on this, she addressed the National Pedagogical Congress the following year,
presenting a vision of social progress and political economy rooted in
educational measures. This notion of social reform through education was an
idea that was to develop and mature in Montessori’s thinking throughout her
life.
Montessori’s involvement with the National League for the Education of
Retarded Children led to her appointment as co-director, with Guisseppe
Montesano, of a new institution called the Orthophrenic School.
The school took children with a broad spectrum of disorders and proved to be a
turning point in Montessori’s life, marking a shift in her professional
identity from physician to educator. Until now her ideas about the development
of children were only theories, but the small school, set up along the lines of
a teaching hospital, allowed her to put these ideas into practice. Montessori
spent 2 years working at the Orthophrenic
School, experimenting
with and refining the materials devised by Itard and Séguin and bringing a
scientific, analytical attitude to the work; teaching and observing the
children by day and writing up her notes by night.
The relationship with Guisseppe Montesano had developed into a love affair,
and in 1898 Maria gave birth to a child, a boy named Mario, who was given into
the care of a family who lived in the countryside near Rome. Maria visited Mario often, but it was
not until he was older that he came to know that Maria was his mother. A strong
bond was nevertheless created, and in later years he collaborated and travelled
with his mother, continuing her work after her death.
In 1901 Montessori left the Orthophrenic
School and immersed
herself in her own studies of educational philosophy and anthropology. In 1904
she took up a post as a lecturer at the Pedagogic
School of the University of Rome,
which she held until 1908. In one lecture she told her students: “The
subject of our study is humanity; our purpose is to become teachers. Now, what
really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that
transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission”
During this period Rome
was growing very rapidly, and in the fever of speculative development, some
construction companies were going bankrupt, leaving unfinished building
projects which quickly attracted squatters. One such development, which stood
in the San Lorenzo district, was rescued by a
group of wealthy bankers who undertook a basic restoration, dividing larger
apartments into small units for impoverished working families. With parents out
at work all day, the younger children wreaked havoc on the newly-completed
buildings. This prompted the developers to approach Dr Montessori to provide
ways of occupying the children during the day to prevent further damage to the
premises.
Montessori grasped the opportunity of working with normal children and,
bringing some of the educational materials she had developed at the Orthophrenic School, she established her first Casa
dei Bambini or ‘Children’s House’, which opened on the 6th
January 1907. A small opening ceremony was organised, but few had any
expectations for the project. Montessori felt differently: “I had a strange
feeling which made me announce emphatically that here was the opening of an
undertaking of which the whole world would one day speak.”
She put many different activities and other materials into the children’s
environment but kept only those that engaged them. What Montessori came to
realise was that children who were placed in an environment where activities
were designed to support their natural development had the power to educate
themselves. She was later to refer to this as auto-education. In 1914 she
wrote, “I did not invent a method of education, I simply gave some little children
a chance to live”.
By the autumn of 1908 there were five Case dei Bambini operating,
four in Rome and one in Milan. Children in a Casa dei Bambini
made extraordinary progress, and soon 5-year-olds were writing and reading.
News of Montessori’s new approach spread rapidly, and visitors arrived to see
for themselves how she was achieving such results. Within a year the
Italian-speaking part of Switzerland
began transforming its kindergartens into Case dei Bambini, and the
spread of the new educational approach began.
In the summer of 1909 Dr Montessori gave the first training course in her
approach to around 100 students. Her notes from this period became her first
book, published that same year in Italy,
which appeared in translation in the United States
in 1912 as The Montessori Method, reaching second place on the U.S. nonfiction
bestseller list. Soon afterwards it was translated into 20 different languages.
It has become a major influence in the field of education.
On 20th December 1912 her mother died at the age of 72. Maria was
deeply affected by this event, and in the year following her mother’s death she
brought her 14-year-old son, Mario, to Rome
to live with her.
A period of great expansion in the Montessori approach now followed.
Montessori societies, training programmes and schools sprang to life all over
the world, and a period of travel with public speaking and lecturing occupied
Dr Montessori, much of it in America, but also in the UK and throughout Europe.
By this time Montessori had given up her other commitments to devote herself
entirely to spreading the approach she had developed. Much of the expansion,
however, was ill-founded and distorted by the events of the First World War.
On returning from the USA
in 1917, and after Mario’s marriage to his first wife, Helen Christy, she based
herself in Barcelona, Spain, where a Seminari-Laboratori
de Pedagogiá had been created for her. Her son and his new wife joined her,
and her four grandchildren were born there: two boys, Mario Jr and Rolando, and
two girls, Marilena and Renilde. Renilde, her youngest grandchild, was until
very recently the General Secretary and then President of the Association
Montessori Internationale, the organisation set up by Maria Montessori in 1929
to continue her work.
Maria nursed an ambition to create a permanent centre for research and
development into her approach to early-years education, but any possibility of
this happening in her lifetime in Spain
was thwarted by the rise of fascism in Europe.
By 1933 all Montessori schools in Germany
had been closed and an effigy of her was burned above a bonfire of her books in
Berlin. In
the same year, after Montessori refused to cooperate with Mussolini’s plans to
incorporate Italian Montessori schools into the fascist youth movement, he
closed them all down. The outbreak of civil war in Spain
forced the family to abandon their home in Barcelona,
and they sailed to England
in the summer of 1936. From England
the refugees travelled to the Netherlands
to stay in the family home of Ada Pierson, the daughter of a Dutch banker.
Mario, by now estranged from his first wife, was later to marry Ada.
In 1939 Mario and Maria embarked on a journey to India
to give a 3-month training course in Madras
followed by a lecture tour; they were not to return for nearly 7 years. With
the outbreak of war, as Italian citizens, Mario was interned and Maria put
under house arrest. She spent the summer in the rural hill station of
Kodaikanal, and this experience guided her thinking towards the nature of the
relationships among all living things, a theme she was to develop until the end
of her life and which became known as cosmic education, an approach for
children aged 6 to 12. Montessori was well looked after in India, where
she met Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore. Her 70th birthday request to the
Indian government—that Mario should be released and restored to her—was
granted, and together they trained over a thousand Indian teachers.
In 1946 they returned to the Netherlands
and to the grandchildren who had spent the war years in the care of Ada
Pierson. In 1947 Montessori, now 76, addressed UNESCO on the theme ‘Education
and Peace’. In 1949 she received the first of three nominations for the Nobel
Peace Prize. Her last public engagement was in London in 1951 when she attended the 9th
International Montessori Congress. On 6th May 1952, at the holiday
home of the Pierson family in the Netherlands, she died in the
company of her son, Mario, to whom she bequeathed the legacy of her work.
