Who is Maria Montessori !

         Maria Tecia Artemesia Montessori more commonly known as Maria Montessori was born August 31, 1870 in Chiaravelle in Italy to Alessandro and Renilde Montessori. Alessandro was an official of the Ministry of France while Renilde was the great-niece of Italian geologist and paleontologist Antonio Stoppani. Renilde was more educated than the women of her time and she encouraged Maria in her endeavors. Her father, on the other hand, disagreed with her choice to continue her education. Three years after she was born, her family moved to Florence and then to Rome in 1975 because of Alessandro’s work (Maria Montessori).

           Maria entered a public school in Rome in 1876 were she received certificates for good behavior in her first grade and women’s work (lavori donneschi) in her second grade. She progressed to secondary school when she was 13 and attended Regia Scuola Tecnica Michelanelo Buonarroti. Her school was a technical school and she was taught subjects like Italian, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, accounting, history, geography, and sciences. She graduated in 1886 and then entered Regio Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci where she studied Italian, mathematics, history, geography, geometric and ornate drawing, physics, chemistry, botany, zoology, and two foreign languages. Before graduating, she wanted to pursue the study of engineering but decided to go to medical school instead. She graduated in 1890 with a certificate in physics-mathematics. Her choice to study medicine was a very uncommon pursuit for a woman at that time.

         In 1890, she enrolled in the University of Rome to pursue a degree in natural sciences despite being discourage by Guido Baccelli, a professor of clinical medicine in the university. She passed all the examinations in botany, zoology, experimental physics, histology, anatomy, and general and organic chemistry. This allowed her to earn a diploma di licenza in 1892. She studied additional courses in Italian and Latin after obtaining this degree in order to be accepted into the medical program of the University of Rome. She entered the program in 1893and was harassed by her classmates because of her gender. She was required to perform her dissections when her fellow male students were not around since they deemed that a woman should not be allowed with men in a class where a naked body was present. She resorted to smoking tobacco to mask the scent of the formaldehyde she encountered during her dissections. Despite these setbacks, Maria won an academic prize in her first year of medical school. In 1895, after 2 years of study, she was able to attain a position as a hospital assistant which allowed her to gain clinical experience well before she was required to. She focused on the pediatrics and psychiatry parts of medicine and applied her knowledge as a pediatric consultant and responder in the emergency room of the hospital she worked in. She graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1896 then started working in the hospital of the University of Rome as an assistant while starting a private practice. Her thesis for her doctor of medicine degree was published a year after her graduation in the journal Policlinico.

             In the five years following her graduation, Maria studied and worked with mentally disabled children sharing and publishing her findings in local and international journals or talks. She visited asylums all over Rome after she became an assistant at the University of Rome’s psychiatric clinic in 1897. She observed all the mentally disabled children she had come across and read all kinds of work from physicians and educators such as Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Seguin whose words caused Maria to focus on children with learning disabilities. She decided to advocate education for mentally disabled children and real all major woks on educational theory for the past two hundred years to help her in her goal. While she was doing this, she also audited the courses related to pedagogy in the University of Rome. She also spoke about societal responsibility for juvenile delinquency at the National Congress of Medicine in Turin during this time. In 1898, she spoke again in the First Pedagogical Conference of Turin to convince her fellow doctors to create special classes as well as institutions for mentally disabled children. She even proposed the creation of a teaching facility for instructors who would teach in these institutions. This, and her papers and other talks advocating education for mentally disabled children paved the way for her to become appointed as a counselor of the National League for the Protection of Retarded Children in 1899 which caused her to be invited to the teacher training school of the College of Rome to speak on the methods of education she deemed necessary to teach mentally disabled children. In 1900, Maria was appointed co-director for the Scuola Magistrate Ortofrenica, an institute designed to train teachers on how to educate mentally disabled children. She stayed with this school for two years before leaving for further studies. In 1902, she enrolled in the University of Rome to pursue a degree in philosophy where she studied the history of philosophy and its many branches. She also studied anthropology in her spare time and published and presented papers regarding pedagogy. In 1904, she was asked to become to a lecturer in the Pedagogic School at the University of Room and her lectures were printed in 1910 as a book called Pedagogical Anthropology. Throughout these years, she had been developing and refining the materials and methods she deemed would be successful in teaching mentally disabled children.

             Despite her busy life, Maria gave birth to her son Mario on March 31, 1898. He was the result of a love affair Maria had with a fellow doctor who was her co-director in the Orthophrenic School of Rome named Giuseppe Montesano. Maria refused to marry him to continue her career and studies and Giuseppe married another woman causing Maria to put her son in foster care. She would later be reunited with him and he would help her in her research in educating retarded children.

               Maria created a scientific pedagogy where she believed that educational methods should not observe and measure students but instead transform them. This gave rise to the Montessori Method named after her. This method emphasizes the need to develop a child’s natural abilities and bring about his or her own initiative in learning through the use of practical play (Maria Montessori). This method’s goal was to encourage children to embrace and love learning, at their own pace, without being forced or hurried.

           She developed her method in her first ever school for mentally disabled children in 1907 called Casa del Bambini. In this school, she observed the reactions of her students to their environment and the different activities they did throughout the day. From these observations, she came up with her educational theory that children should not be forced or motivated to learn but instead, should be allowed to discover that learning is something natural and that it is fun (Davidson Films, Inc., 2010). Her most fundamental observation was that children have a natural way of developing and learning. She decided that the role that teachers must play is to remove obstacles to this development instead of interfering or forcing a child’s development. She observed the items in her school and the environments that her students responded to and she organized the school program to revolve around these activities which the children responded positively to. Over time, she discovered that the children exhibited spontaneous discipline which was their developmental response to the surroundings that were positive to them.

           Maria Montessori’s method and philosophies have revolutionized teaching not just for mentally disabled children but also for normal children as well. They have spread throughout the world and are being applied in many schools worldwide. Her work has redefined the meaning of education for children regardless of mental ability and has shown that education is not about the words or actions a teacher does. Education is about the development of a child which occurs naturally through the child’s interactions with his or her environment.

Bibliography:

Davidson Films, Inc. (2010, June 22). Maria Montessori: Learn about her teachings, life and lasting legacy (Davidson Films, Inc.) [Video File] Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjOvCC0jVCs

Maria Montessori. (n.d.). Retrieved 13 October 2014 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori