Maria Montessori has recommended that children have to be educated earlier than usual. She gave parents the full responsibility for the education of their children:
“The first 3 years of a child’s life are fundamental. If we consider the transformations, the adaptations, the realizations, the conquest of the environment (…), all activities to which the child must dedicate himself from 0 to 3 years, we can consider this first part of the life functionally longer than that which extends from 3 years to death.
The child’s needs during this period are so imperious that they cannot be overlooked without serious consequences in the future. “
The famous Italian pedagogue, Maria Montessori was born in 1870. At the age of 26, she became one of the first women to graduate in medicine in Italy.
Initially, she was studying the education of children with deficits, and realized that their cognitive development goes through physical action and manipulation. She got interested in Edouard Seguin’s work on the deaf-mutes and some other discoveries of Jean Marc Itard on wild children, and she made some didactic materials inspired on discoveries of two doctors. In the short time, the little ones have made enormous progress.
Maria Montessori therefore thought of extending these methods also to “normal” learning. In 1907, she inaugurated the first “Children’s House” (“La Casa dei Bambini”), where she took care of children from 3 to 6 years of age – uneducated children, abandoned in the streets of the very poor San Lorenzo district, in Rome.
The Children’s House become a real pedagogical research laboratory, where, on the basis of discoveries and observations, Maria will end up developing the method that bears her name.
Within a year, many other “Children’s Houses” were opened in Italy, where teachers are trained. Meanwhile, Maria Montessori continues to refine her ideas and teaching set-up. Subsequently, other institutions of the same kind were created in Europe and the United States.
In 1934 Montessori escapes fascism and reaches Spain, where the Civil War broke out. Then she left for England and landed in Holland. During the Second World War, she also spent a period of stay in India, where she met Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore, and opened numerous schools.
In 1952 she returned to Europe, first to Italy, then to Holland, where she died at the age of 82.
Her son Mario, will continue her work, and today there are about 22,000 Montessori schools all around the globe.
There are many celebrities who have received Montessori education. Between these:
– Larry Page and Sergey Brin, co-founders of GOOGLE.
– Jeffrey Bezos, founder of Amazon.
– Katharine Graham, the legendary owner and editor of the Washington Post.
– Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize for Literature.
“It is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method.
I have studied the child, I have taken what the child has given to me and
expressed it – that is what is called the Montessori Method.”
