Montessori Method
MARIA MONTESSORI
Born in Ancona, Italy in 1870, Maria Montessori was the first woman to graduate from the University of Rome Medical School. Upon her graduation in 1896, she began her work with the university’s Psychiatric Clinic. Her visits with children in asylums for the insane, as well as those with retarded or abnormal development, in Rome prompted her to study the works of Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin, pioneers in special education for the mentally deficient. In 1898 Dr. Montessori became director of the State Orthophrenic School. Basing her educational methods on the insights she had gained from Itard and Seguin, she spent the following two years teaching the children, preparing educational materials, taking notes, and reflecting on her observations and work. As a result of this intensive study and her discovery that these children could learn many things that seemed previously impossible, she devoted her energies to the field of education for the rest of her life.
Montessori returned to the University of Rome to study philosophy, psychology and anthropology. The following years provided her with experiences in clinics, hospitals, a daycare center in a housing project, and in schools which she opened in San Lorenzo, Milan and Rome, the latter for children of well-to-do parents. Studying children in conditions throughout the world in such places as Italy, Spain, India, the South Sea Islands and the United States, she discovered universal principles underlying the development of all children. For more information, see the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) page on Montessori’s life and work.
The first Montessori school in the U.S. was started by the wife of Alexander Graham Bell, Mabel Hubbard Bell, in Washington, DC. In 1915, a working Montessori classroom was one of the exhibits at the San Francisco Exposition. The children demonstrated the remarkable ability to concentrate typical of Montessori students, by doing their school work while Exposition throngs milled about them.
Today, there are over 5,000 Montessori schools in the U.S. and thousands more worldwide. In Rome, January 6, 2007, 1,000+ people from 33 countries participated in the Montessori Centenary celebration. Representatives from China and Japan reported over 10,000 schools in their countries alone.
More and more, writers and experts everywhere are recognizing the power of the Montessori Method to galvanize student learning, and develop the “creative elite,” such as Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, author Anne Frank, French chef Julia Child, and rap star Sean “P.Diddy” Combs, and business methods guru Peter Drucker. It’s about time.