Maria Montessori was an Italian educator for whom the Montessori method of schooling is named. Born in Italy on August 31, 1870, Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was the daughter of financial minister working in the state-run tobacco industry and a cultured and well-read mother. The family moved to Florence and then Rome early in Montessori’s life.
By her teen years, Montessori aspired to be an engineer and studied at an all-boys technical school. Upon graduation, she changed course, deciding to pursue medical education. Sources indicate that Montessori excelled in math and science. After much preparation, she achieved acceptance to the University of Rome’s medical school, graduating in 1896. Though frequently touted as the first female doctor in Italy, Montessori does not hold claim to that title, but she was certainly the first widely known female doctor. Though rare, women were not barred entirely from what were considered men’s professions.
According to some sources, Montessori’s parents, who were supportive of their bright daughter’s ambition, encouraged her to become a teacher. Often, it is implied that this was rampant sexism on display, holding back their brilliant daughter by constraining her to fields deemed appropriate for women. It’s worth noting, however, that Montessori left the practice of medicine and pursued….education. There are fields women dominate because in those fields many women are well suited to excel.
In the meantime, Montessori worked as a doctor in Rome and was exemplary for her care for patients, many of whom were impoverished children. Throughout this time, Montessori was invited to speak internationally about women in the workplace, amassing a significant collection of photographs and interviews, including one conducted by Queen Victoria.
Montessori’s work, originally focused on psychiatry, began to move more into the field of child growth and development. Montessori was greatly influenced by the though of the Frenchmen Jean-Marc Itard and his student Edouard Séguin. In particular, Montessori began to consider how environment affected the formation of children and how manipulatives could be provided for children to learn of their own free will.
She had the opportunity to put these theories to the test in the Orthophrenic School for children with a wide range of abnormalities. Using tools she developed after studying Séguin, Montessori successfully taught at the school. A serious observer, Montessori took notes about how the children used the tools and revised her methods and the environment she made for the students.
During this time, Montessori engaged in an extra-marital relationship with a fellow doctor Giuseppe Montesano, and she gave birth to a son, Mario Montessori, in 1898. Accounts vary considerably on the circumstances of Mario’s upbringing, but the bare facts are that he spent his childhood with a family in the countryside outside of Rome and Montessori and Montesano never married. Some claim Montesano’s rejection of Montessori to marry a woman advantageous to his social position was personally devastating to her and resulted in changing the course of her professional life.
Montessori left the Orthophrenic School and lectured at the Pedagogic School at the University of Rome. After a few years, Montessori was presented with a chance to bring her budding educational model to typical children. Business owners and developers managed housing for indigent families flooding into the developing city. While parents were at work, many children ran wild and unsupervised. Montessori founded her first Casa dei Bambini, which opened in 1907.
Here, Montessori further refined her materials that she provided students, and the unruly children showed interest in working with the materials, preparing meals, and learning to read and write. Montessori wrote about her work, “I did not invent a method of education, I simply gave some little children a chance to live.”
From these humble beginnings, Montessori’s work became internationally known. The rise of fascism across Europe prompted Montessori to move several times, eventually spending years in quasi-exile in India. A prolific writer, Montessori recorded her thoughts on education and the nature of the child.
Returning to Europe intermittently, Montessori settled in the Netherlands, where she died in 1952.
The extent to which Montessori’s Catholicism was manifest in her educational philosophy is widely debated. Some claim her as a paragon of the Faith, a veritable saint whose every utterance was genius. Others reject her on account of her early feminism and alleged affiliation with theosophy.
One of the close collaborators of Montessori’s early work, Sofia Cavalletti, created a program directly integrating Catholicism and the Montessori method of education called Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Many proponents of the program rave about the orthodoxy and the memorable experience. A loud minority condemn Catechesis of the Good Shepherd as heretical.
Montessori ranks among the likes of Phyllis Schlafly in inspiring extremes of admiration and revulsion. As with Schlafly, people will casually dismiss or interpret significant or trivial details of her life without any basis in fact. The varied interpretations of Montessori’s relationship with the father of her child and with her son, both when he was a child and as an adult, are laughably divergent. With such confidently stated interpretations diametrically opposed, one can conclude very little without delving into whatever personal letters and accounts may be available in the repository of history. What can be said about Montessori is that she was in her capacity as teacher a keen observer of reality. Scientific research continues to confirm observations made by Montessori in her efforts to provide a sensory-based educational model that respects the child as an individual with free will.
