Maria Montessori was born in 1870 in Italy. She spent most of her early life in Rome. Her father, Alejandro was an accountant in government service. He had a conservative and precise nature that led to success in his work. Her mother, Renilde, had had a good education for a woman of her time and was more opened to the many transformations that affected daily life at the end of the 19th century. It was also a time when violent terrorists, who called themselves anarchists, stopped the continent using assassination as a political tool. After a long struggle, Italy had managed to free itself from the Austrian empire and the political dominance of the papacy. The unification of Italy was completed just three months after Maria’s birth. An only child, she was a vivacious, strong-willed girl. Her mother encouraged her curiosity, something the rigid schools of her time did not.
Maria Montessori’s insatiable thirst for knowledge lasted all of her life and influenced the approach she took towards education. As we will see, intrinsic motivation is basic to an understanding of her work.
The young Maria insisted on attending a largely male technical secondary school instead of the traditional classical one. Her favorite subject there was mathematics and she initially wanted to pursue an engineering degree. But instead, she chose to study medicine, the first women in all of Italy to do so. This was a very difficult decision for her traditional father to accept and one that presented many pitfalls for a young woman of her time.
During medical school, Maria Montessori exhibited the same kind of inner strength and willpower she would later want to foster in children. She was not welcome in the masculine world of the dissecting rooms and the laboratories of the university and found much of the work there distasteful to her elegant sensibilities. Indeed, she had to do her dissections alone and after hours because it was not deemed proper for a woman to be in such intimate contact with the human body with men in the room. But she felt herself called to the work and persevered.
Maria Montessori graduated at the top of her class in 1896 with the diploma that had to be hand-edited to reflect her gender. She obtained immediate celebrity. A month after graduation, she was chosen as part of a small Italian delegation to attend the Berlin Women’s Congress that had delegates from all over the world. Extremely pretty and well-spoken, the young Dr. Montessori made a big splash with her speeches about women’s education and work conditions in Italy. In her second speech, she advocated an issue that still has not entirely been resolved in our own times, equal pay for equal work.
During the next few years, Dr. Montessori developed her medical career. And with the social conscience inherited from her mother became involved with the neediest of patients.
The neediest she soon found were what were then called idiot children. The mentally retarded who were housed in horrific conditions in asylums along with adults suffering severe mental illnesses. With her usual energy, she researched methods of helping them and soon gained fame for her remarkable successes. On her 30th birthday, her father presented her with a splendid album of newspaper clippings that he had meticulously gathered and annotated. And these, he wrote in his lovely script, demonstrated her genius. The man who had resisted her feminist breakthroughs could now take pride in her accomplishments. But her most lasting work was still in the future.
What is not chronicled in this album is mentioned of her secret son, Mario, who was then two years old and being raised by family friends. It would not be until after her mother’s death that Montessori would bring the young teenager to live with her. He was to become her most important collaborator.
Educational Principles and Children’s House
After the birth of her child, Maria Montessori gave up all her previous positions and returned to the university. This time she studied philosophy and physical anthropology and became absorbed with a desire to reform educational practice. Reflecting on her extremely successful work with the mentally retarded, she thought similar hands-on activities would benefit normal children. But as a scientist, she needed to test her ideas. She had a chance in 1907. She took on the directorship of a daycare center for preschool children in a newly built housing project in the slums of Rome. Montessori called this center, the “Casa Dei Bambini” or “Children’s House.” Offering some of the materials she had used with the older mentally deficient children, she soon discovered that normal children ignored the fancy toys that rich society matrons had provided them and became independently absorbed in more meaningful tasks.
Dr. Montessori used her observational and experimental proclivities from her medical background to develop what we might now call, a constructivistic understanding of the process of learning. She thought education always involved three elements.
The learner, the prepared environment, and the trained adult.
She believed that the child constructs knowledge from experience in the world. Learning, she said, was not something that needed to be forced or motivated. Instead, learning is something that humans do naturally. The early years especially are ones of a great mental growth. Throughout the early years of life, the child absorbs impressions from the world around him, not with his mind, but with his life.
Montessori saw two streams of energy within the young child. The first is the physical energy of the body expended in voluntary movement. And the second is mental energy, the energy of intellect and will.
She felt that these two streams of energy are often separated by the forces of modern life. And children who are not helped to unite them tend to move aimlessly and clumsily and have unfocused thought patterns. A unification of physical and mental energies comes about when a child becomes absorbed in work. Montessori called this normalization.
The Prepared Environment
The carefully prepared environments of Montessori schools provide opportunities for children to grow intellectually and emotionally. There are several hallmarks of these environments. They are aesthetically pleasing using lovely materials. The materials are readily available and children choose among them during a long block of unscheduled class time. Activities take place outside as well as inside and gardening is often a part of the Montessori experience. Children with a three-year age span work together in the same room and learn from each other. In what Montessorians call primary classes, there are children from ages three to six. Dr. Montessori experimented with activities and materials throughout her lifetime in order to find which ones engaged children deeply and repeatedly allowing them to integrate their physical and mental energies. Some of the experiences available are designed to help children organize and refine their sensorial impressions. Many of these materials are the same ones she had used with the mentally retarded. But she felt all children benefited from discovering abstractions such as larger and smaller or darker and lighter. Through work in the sensorial area, the child learns to choose and make judgments to observe and compare. The practical life exercises first developed from Dr. Montessori’s desire to improve the hygiene and nutrition of a slum children. They have proved their value over the years helping children gain self-confidence as they learned to take care of themselves. The child develops logical thought patterns as she follows through an activity, in this case washing from the beginning to middle, rinsing and drying, to the end cleaning up. A child becomes able to control his impulses and concentrate on the task at hand. Normalization often first takes place with practical life experiences. In the math area, the child works with concrete representations of mathematical concepts and gradually moves towards an internalization of abstract math facts without confusion, fear, or boredom. In this case, these children are combining large numbers that are represented both by physical objects. The cubes represent a thousand, for instance and number cards. Dr. Montessori came to realize that children can take on sophisticated mathematical challenges at a much earlier age when supported by her cleverly designed materials. So, it is with language, learning the sounds of letters and then constructing words from them. Children come to read in what Dr. Montessori called “an explosion of learning.” Art and music are also activities that are available in Montessori classrooms.
Underlying all these activities is the emphasis on self-discipline, what Montessorians call grace and courtesy. The Montessori approach is based on a delicate balance of freedom and discipline. Children are free to move about within their classroom and yet their movements are limited by the confines of the room. By the structure of the exercises, and the scientifically designed materials and by the requirements of the social group of which they are a part. The children work at their own pace. They can choose their own activities, but they cannot work with the materials they do not know how to use. They are not free to disrupt others or misuse materials. They learn to return the material to its correct place and in its original condition so that it will be there ready for the next child.
Within all these lessons is the underlying one of developing the will. A Montessori program for three to six-year old runs for a good three hours of uninterrupted time without a time schedule for snack time, cleanup time or outside time for either children or adults. Rather, individuals and groups come and go work and rest, following self-directed time frames.
Children during this time are making judgments as to what activities to participate in, for how long, and with whom. As the child increases her ability to make decisions, she increases her level of independence. Will power, according to Montessori is built up by the routines of life itself by the little decisions of daily living. Freedom and discipline go hand in hand. The freedom to choose and work undisturbed results in a kind of discipline that could never be brought about by threats or rewards, which brings us to the role of the trained adult in Montessori classrooms.
The adult in a Montessori classroom has a task much different from that of a conventional teacher. While the teacher in the traditional classroom is active and the child passive, in the Montessori approach, the child assumes the active role and the adult often appears passive. This is because Montessori saw the aim of education to free the child from adult domination and allow him to develop along more natural pathways. It is the child who teaches himself when he works with the materials in the prepared environment. First half, the trained adult is the custodian of the environment making sure that it is beautiful, orderly, and complete. Then, she is a dynamic link introducing each object or activity and demonstrating its proper use and care. And then she retreats to allow the child to work independently. Lessons are generally short and presented individually or in small groups. Some lessons are in three periods or parts. The first period is naming. The second period is recognition. The third period is kind of a little test.
A Montessori lesson is designed to elicit activities from the child. In every instance, the child is encouraged to trace, feel, or manipulate the materials in some way. Montessori intuitively understood the need for involvement, mental, physical, and emotional, on the part of the child in order to construct knowledge. About 100 years later, the ideas she developed in Rome about the process of learning and how environments and adults ideally supported still remained at the core of Montessori educational practice.
Expanding the Movement
Montessori’s success in educating the desperately poor children in her Roman daycare center soon became very well known. A second school was established nearby and another in Milan. Training of staff was a new priority. The first training session took place outside of Rome in 1909 with about 100 students. During that summer, she also wrote her first book La Pedagogia Scientifica, called in English The Montessori Method. It has been continuously in print and translated into many languages. But it was not through book learning that Montessori thought her methods should be learned by future teachers, but through an oral tradition of lectures, interactions with children, and hands-on practice with didactic materials. This method of training continues today in special centers and courses around the world.
Very early, Americans became interested in the Montessori vision of education. She made two well-publicized lecture tours to the United States. She was greeted as a celebrity by the notables of her time. The philosopher and educator, John Dewey, introduced the lectures she gave to a standing-room-only audience at New York’s Carnegie Hall. But an even greater opportunity for Montessori to demonstrate her form of education was the celebrated World’s Fair of 1915 in San Francisco, where she was invited to set up a model classroom in the Palace of Education. Fair goers could watch the children at work from bleachers outside the glass walls. Over the next decades, Montessori schools multiplied and she gave training courses throughout Europe and even lectured in Argentina. In Vienna, the young Erik Erikson attended the training program and created a Montessori inspired school. But as the Montessori movement grew with its emphasis on individual freedom, a counter movement was occurring in the politics of Europe. The fascist movement was born in Italy and in 1931, Montessori, no longer able to tolerate the distasteful government, cut her ties with Italy. Now 61, she was a woman without a country or perhaps, better stated, a woman with many. For instance, that same year as a celebrated figure in education, she was presented to the King and Queen of England. During the same visit, she met Gandhi, who was in England to negotiate for the liberation of India. He chided her for the fact that although her schools were started for the very poor, they were now largely serving the rich. She replied that if ever she was in India, she would start a school for the untouchables there. Ten years later, she would keep that pledge. But first, she would establish an international organization headquartered in Amsterdam which continues today to support her work and spread her message. During the 1930s, Montessori sadly saw her schools shut down in Italy, Germany, Austria, and Spain as fascism spread across Europe. She and her son went to India in 1939 intending to have a brief visit for a training course. It ended up a seven year stay as World War II prevented their return to Europe.
This enforced break from her previously constant life of travel proved to be a real benefit to Montessori’s work. For almost the first time since her youth, she was settled in a community able to participate in the everyday life around her. She was able to use her sharp observational skills to focus on the commonalities in human experience. Not that she stopped her normal activities. With her son, she gave training sessions and supervised new schools including one for Gandhi’s beloved untouchables. But she had time to consolidate some of her ideas of development that have had strong impacts on the delivery of Montessori education. The child does not grow like a tree, merely increasing in size. But like the caterpillar, she begins life in a form very unlike what she is destined to become and passes through distinct stages. The child behaves differently at each stage because at each stage her developmental needs are different.
Montessori saw that the developmental years divided themselves into six-year periods. The first period, Montessori labeled that of the absorbent mind. It features an amazing mode of effortless learning not available to people over about six years of age. She observed that the mind of the newborn baby is without reason, memory, or will. But has a powerful potential to create those faculties through her senses during the first three years of life. The baby absorbs billions of impressions of her world that will be indelible. The sights and textures of her environment, the sounds and structure of her native language, and the way things move. No one teaches these things. They are absorbed by the child unconsciously. In recent years, some Montessori schools have set up separate rooms for toddlers with specially trained staff. They are largely furnished with objects found in the real world and with some specialized apparatus that aids development. From three to six years of age, the child still possesses a marvelously absorbent mind. But now the child begins to actively participate in her own self-construction. No longer is her mental growth an unconscious process. She explores her environment handling objects, manipulating, sorting, stacking as her mind continually categorizes, compares, and makes judgments.
Montessori felt the second phase of the absorbent mind was one in which the organization of the mind takes place. And children in a prepared environment are given the opportunity to clarify and classify the myriad impressions they have accumulated since birth.
As all developmental theorists have observed and now brain scans confirm, around the age of 6, marked changes occur. Physically, the child begins to grow longer, leaner, and stronger. She now turns outward to others and becomes increasingly social. This according to most theorists is the period for the acquisition of culture and of symbolic thinking. The child can assimilate a huge amount of intellectual material. Reflecting the changes in this period of life, the Montessori classroom experience is different for older children. Children still work independently, but now they call as into groups. Concrete manipulative is still used to introduce mathematical concepts, but the level of abstraction is higher. The red pegs represent hundreds, the blue, tens, and the green, units as these girls calculate the square root of quite large numbers. Sensorial activities become exercises in using symbols to represent variations. In this case, up tones.
A trained adult becomes more active overseeing a curriculum that assures the children learn of the interdependencies of all physical and biological phenomena in our universe.
The years between 12 and 18 are again, a period of transformation and creation parallel to and at times equaling the intensity of the first six years of life. Montessori was not able to directly work with adolescents, but she had some strong ideas of the kind of situation they should be provided. They should have real work and use their energies in purposeful activities. Educational practice in the Montessori movement is based on her conception of development. Children’s ways of learning and their interests change over time and the educational opportunities should as well.
Montessori based her understanding of the changes in children’s mental capacities and interests on her keen observations of children in both school and non-school settings. Modern tomography has verified many of these observations. At UCLA’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, scientists have periodically scanned the brain of healthy children from the ages of 3 to 15 and have found evidence that corroborates Montessori’s theories.
With the war finally over, Montessori, now 76, returned to Europe to find major devastation there, but order in her study. In the six remaining years of her life, she received many honors and maintained a heavy travel schedule to deliver lectures and training sessions across Europe and even back in India. Maria Montessori died at age 81, just an hour after actively discussing a trip to Africa to train teachers there. Her schools are her greatest legacy. All over the world, her ideas shaped schools whose teachers have been trained in her philosophy. Her work has also greatly influenced educational practice outside the Montessori world. The critical importance of the first six years of life for the formation of intellectual and emotional constructs is a Montessori idea that all accept and is now being demonstrated by brain tomography. All good early education classrooms now have the child-size furniture with the open shelving she first designed and often some of the same materials. Multi-age grouping and the provision of non-scheduled blocks of time for independent work are legacies of Montessori’s contributions to educational practice, seldom credited to her. Citing Piaget and Vygotsky, educators today speak of the construction of knowledge, a concept Montessori came to while Piaget and Vygotsky were still student.
But her greatest legacy, only now being recognized, is the notion that learning is a basic human trait. Intrinsic motivation is the natural mode. When properly provided far, humans don’t need external motivators such as grades, prizes, or stars to pursue knowledge. When children are given a supportive environment they naturally express the finest of their innate human tendencies.
Maria Montessori felt her Pedagogy had the potential to enable humans to become new men and women. People able to fulfill their destinies, free of the selfish and mean aggression that had so afflicted her generation. “Establishing lasting peace is the work of education,” she said. “All politics can do is keep us out of war. If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.”
