Maria Montessori: A life for the children
Who was this woman whose life’s work bore such fruit? Maria Montessori’s educational idea and concept went around the world. She passionately advocated for children’s rights to undisturbed development.
Maria Montessori was born the only child of Alessandro and Renilde Montessori on August 31, 1870 in Chiaravalle (Ancona Province, Italy). She later moved to Rome with her parents and spent her teenage and college years there. Because her aptitude for science was obvious, she attended a technical school for boys after elementary school, and after graduating she earned a place in medicine, becoming Italy’s first woman doctor in 1896.
As a resident at the psychiatric hospital in Rome, she realized that caring for mentally and learning disabled children was not only a medical problem, but also an educational one. She explored the possibilities of helping mentally impaired children through sensory education and providing them with learning stimuli through independence with specifically developed didactic material. She achieved surprising success in the process.
During this time, a love affair with the doctor Giuseppe Montesano led to the pregnancy and birth of their son Mario in 1898. Since she would have had to give up all professional opportunities as a single mother at that time, she gave her son to a foster family. She kept in regular contact with him and finally took him in when he was fifteen. Mario became her trusted companion, continuing her life’s work after her death.
Inspired by her successful educational work with mentally handicapped children, Maria Montessori took up further studies, namely psychology, education and philosophy, and looked for an opportunity to transfer her findings and experiences to healthy children. The opportunity to observe healthy children in their development arose when a housing cooperative was rehabilitating houses in a run-down neighborhood and was looking for someone to care for the neglected preschoolers. In 1907, the first children’s home was opened in San Lorenzo, a suburb of Rome. About 50 children were cared for by a woman who had no pedagogical training other than knowledge of the common educational practices of the time. Montessori instructed her in the use of the sensory material she had developed and otherwise let her have her way. Maria Montessori herself was a pediatrician and professor of anthropology at the University of Rome at the time and came regularly to the Children’s House to observe the children. She describes the key experience of her observation and the beginning of her full devotion to pedagogy in her book “Children are Different” (5,119): She observed a child who was absorbed in total concentration on an activity and, after the work cycle ended, seemed transformed: more joyful, freer, more independent. She recognized how the children changed in their working attitude and social behavior through their own activities with the “sensory material” and with the “exercises of daily life” and developed her pedagogical principles through further thorough observation of the children’s activities.
In 1909 she gave up her practice as a pediatrician and devoted herself entirely to training educators for the Montessori children’s homes and schools that were soon founded in large numbers in many countries. World War 2 and totalitarian systems of government in Germany, Italy and Spain partially destroyed her flourishing life’s work, but she immediately began to work again in Europe in 1949.
On May 6, 1952, a few months before her 82nd birthday, Maria Montessori died in Noordwijk aan Zee, Holland.