Assignment Module 1

1. Discuss life and work of Dr. Maria Montessori and why is she referred to as a
lady much ahead of her time?

Dr. Maria Montessori was born in Italy in 1870. Most of her life was spent in Rome. Her
father Ale Jandro was an accountant in government services. Her mother, Renilde, had
good education for a woman of her time and was more open to the many transformations
that affected daily life at the end of the 19th Century.
Maria Montessori, an only child, she was a vivacious, strong-willed girl. Her mother
encouraged her curiosity, which the rigid schools of her time did not.

Maria Montessori’s quest for knowledge lasted life long. Maria Montessori attended male
technical secondary school instead of traditional one and her favorite subject there was
mathematics. Initially she wanted to pursue a degree in engineering but she later pursued
a degree in Medicine and became the first lady in Italy to do so.

Maria Montessori graduated at the top of her class in 1896 with a diploma that had to be
hand edited to reflect her gender. 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, 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.

Later, Dr. Montessori developed her medical career. She became involved with the
neediest of patients. The neediest, she soon found, were what were then called “idiot
children.” They were the mentally retarded who were kept 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.

Maria Montessori later returned to university to study Philosophy and Physical

Anthropology and became absorbed with the desire to change educational practice.
Reflecting on her extremely successful work with the mentally retarded, she thought how
similar 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 De Bambini” or “Children’s House.” Offering some of the
materials she had used with the older mentally deficient children, she soon discovered the
normal children ignored the fancy toys and became independently absorbed in more
meaningful tasks.

She believed that the child constructs knowledge from experiencing 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 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.

A unification of mental and physical energies comes about when a child becomes
absorbed in work. Montessori called this “normalization.” And concentration, she said,
was the key. The carefully prepared environment at Montessori schools provides the
opportunity 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 from among them during a long block of unscheduled class
time.

-Activities take place outside as well as inside. Gardening is often a part of the
Montessori experience.

-Children with a 3 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 3 to 6. Dr.
Montessori experimented with activities and materials throughout her lifetime in order to
find which ones engaged the children easily and repeatedly allowing them to integrate the
physical and mental energies.

-The practical life exercises first developed from Dr. Montessori’s desire to improve the
hygiene and nutrition of her slum children. They 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.

-The Montessori approach is based on a delicate balance of freedom and discipline.

Children are free to move about in their classroom and yet their movements are limited to
the confines of the room. By the structure of the exercises, 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 work at their own pace, 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.

-Freedom and discipline go hand in hand. The freedom to work undisturbed results in a
kind of discipline that could never be brought about by threats or rewards; which brings
us to the roll of the trained adult in Montessori classrooms. The adult in a Montessori
classroom has a task that is much different from a traditional teacher. While a teacher in a
traditional classroom is active and the child is 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 is 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.

Montessori 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 remain at the core of Montessori educational practice.

Americans became interested in the Montessori vision of education. She made two well
publicized lecture tours through 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 an 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. There 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 Erickson
attended the training program and created a Montessori inspired school.

In the remaining years of her life, she received many honors and remained a heavy travel
schedule to deliver lectures and training sessions across Europe and even 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 6
years of life or the formation of intellectual and emotional constructs is Montessori ideas
that all accept and is now being demonstrated by Brain Tomography. All 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.

Dr. Montessori leaves behind not only an outstanding body of research work and
observation of children and their abilities to grow and learn, but also a system of
education which promotes the freedom of the child to become more concentrated,
creative and imaginative as he develops intellectually and emotionally. Her lifetime work
studying child development and education remains well known internationally, numerous
organizations promote her methods and Montessori schools are prevalent in both the
United States and many other countries, the reason why she is referred to as a lady ahead
of her time.