Maria Montessori

     Maria Montessori was born in the town of Chiaravalle, Italy.  (1870 - 1952)  She is the legacy behind the Monetssori School and is sometimes referred to as the one who discovered and revealed the qualities of children different from and higher than those usually attributed to them.  When she began her work, large groups of children were supposed to do the same thing at the same time and in the same way. She knew there was a better way to teach children. She based most of her approach to teaching on truths about human nature. E. Mortimer Standing, a former associate of Montessori's wrote, "No one has so completely understood the soul of the child in its depth and greatness, in its immense potentialities, and in the mysterious law of its development.".  Montessori considered the child often at a disadvantage because adults fail to realize that children possess knowing and willing faculties, which are greater than their ability to express themselves; therefore, she emphasizes the importance of trying to understand the child. From the hands to the mind is an expression often used in Montessori training. "The materials used by the senses are a doorway to the mind."

     Through giving children some freedom in a specially prepared environment that was rich in activities, children of 4-6 years learned to read on their own, chose to work rather than play most of the time, loved order and silence, and developed a real social life in which they worked together instead of competing against one another. In Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook, it describes a typical room found in the Montessori school system. There is usually a central room for intellectual work with some small rooms off to the side. A lot of outside space and the choice to work outside. The furniture in the room is light so the children can arrange it how they are comfortable. Cabinets containing items the children could use were set low so the children could reach them. When it was time for their meals, they were to help prepare their place at a table, wash their hands, and also clean up after a meal.

     The book also gives a lot of little exercises for the children to do which will help them in three major focuses in this method which include motor education, sensory education, and language. Montessori felt it was necessary for a teacher to guide a child with out them being able to feel her presence too much. The teacher was never supposed to be an obstacle between the child and the experience. The 1912 first edition of Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook was sold out (5,000 copies) in four days.
     The basic Montessori concepts are pretty well known by now.
1 - The teacher must pay attention to the child, rather than the child paying attention to the teacher.

2 - The child proceeds at his own pace in an environment controlled to provide means of learning.
3 - Imaginative teaching materials are the heart of the process.
4 - Each of them is self-correcting, thus enabling the child to proceed at his own pace and see his own mistakes.
     If you were to look inside a Montessori classroom, you would get the impression of "controlled chaos" because each child would be quietly working at his private encounter with whatever learning task he or she chose. Montessori often reminded teachers in her course, "When you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of education."  Maria's theories of the sensitive periods in the development of a child were new to people at this time, however, now they seem to correspond with what we consider to be the "needs" of a child at different stages of their development.
     In Maria's book, The Montessori Method, she further describes her system. Educators in the field set up special environments to meet the needs of the students in three age groups: two and a half years, two and a half to six years, and six and a half to twelve years. The students learn through activities that involve exploration, manipulations, order, repetition, abstraction, and communication. The teacher is to encourage children in the first two age groups to use their senses to explore and manipulate materials in their immediate environment. Children in the last age group deal with abstract concepts based on their newly developed powers of reasoning, imagination, and creativity.

     The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described her as, "a woman who revolutionized the educational system of the world...the woman who taught the idiot and the insane to read and write - whose success has been so wonderful that the Montessori method has spread into nation after nation..."
     Maria managed to succeed in school, go to college, and become the first woman in Italy to graduate from medical school. Maria was almost eighty-two when she died in Noordwijk, Holland in 1952.  It was written that Maria was, "no longer considered a major influence in education, but a historical relic," when she died.

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