First female doctor in Italy,
great defender of women’s rights,
university professor.
Maria Montessori is one of the best known historical figures in the field of education.
  A great traveller, she has spread her vision to the whole world. 
Close to Gandhi, received in the Royal Courts of Europe
and acclaimed by the greatest scientists,
she confronted Mussolini
and saw her work getting destroyed by Hitler.
Maria Montessori:

“the child is a king on the march towards the dawn”
Maria Montessori was born on August 31, 1870 in Chiaravalle
on the Adriatic Sea in Italy.
She was the only child of Alessandro Montessori and Renilde Stoppani.
Her father, Alessandro,
came from a rather conservative middle-class family in Bologna.
After studying rhetoric and arithmetic, he was trained in the military.
A conservative, strict and rigorous man, he joined the “Risorgimento” (1815-1870),
whose aim was the liberation and reunification of Italy,
before taking up the position of accountant for the Vatican’s financial services in 1850s.
He met Renilde in 1865
while working as an inspector of finance for the tobacco and salt industry.
Renilde was the daughter of peasants and landowners
and nice of the famous priest Antonio Stoppani,
an abbot, philosopher, theologian and scientist
whose monument was erected by the University of Milan.
Renilde defended her liberal aspirations and was open to new ideas,
despite the social and cultural limits imposed on women in those times.
Although she was raised with very strict rules of discipline,
she had a close relation with her daughter
and had the greatest respect for her freedom, despite the vicissitudes of her life.
Mother and daughter were very close until Renilde’s death in 1912.
The Montessori family moved to Rome in 1875.
Maria attended elementary school there between 1876 and 1882
and took early interests in mathematics.
Dreaming of becoming an engineer, she faced her first difficulties with her father,
who has envisioned a teaching career for her.
Maria had not yet found the path she wanted to follow,
however she was absolutely certain: anything but teaching!
With the support of her mother, Maria enrolled in a technical college for boys in 1883.
At the age of 13, she already had to face the prejudices of society towards women
Despite everything, she developed a passion for biology
and is now dreaming of becoming a physician.
In 1980, Maria had the opportunity to enrol at a university but
secretly dreamed of attending medical school.
As always, her mother supported her in her goals,
but in the face of hostility from those around her, Maria went from bad to worse.
She initially opted for studies in natural sciences, which was incongruous for a woman,
but in the absolute, tolerable. Maria did not give up, however,
and her tenacity ended up opening the doors of
the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery in Rome.
This time, it is the hostility of an even more uncompromising academic world
that she must face.
Her academic entourage, although erudite, sees this feminine presence in a very negative light.
Indeed, to be in a presence of a woman in the Faculty of Medicine,
the situation is totally unprecedented!
The doctor-to-be did not mind at all
and managed to be seen by the Minister of Education
Guido Bacelli.
The latter informed her, without detour,
of the impossibility for Maria to continue the path she had chosen.
Showing as usual great courtesy to her interlocutor,
Maria, leaving the room shook the Minister’s hand and said in a peaceful tone:
“I know that I will become a doctor”.
Later on, she had an audience with the Pope,
who believed that a woman could very well be a physician,
and offered her the possibility of realizing her dream.
Finally admitted to the Faculty of Medicine, Maria was only at the dawn of her sorrows.
The students, all men, found it difficult to accept her presence in an institution
that was until then exclusively reserved for them.
Thus, for several months,
they subjected Maria to numerous persecutions.
But they soon discovered,
that no one could frighten Maria Montessori.
She put them in their place, and persecution gave way to admiration,
as the following anecdote shows:
One of the students, usually sitting behind her in the lecture hall,
has the annoying habit of constantly wiggling his foot,
which causes vibrations of Maria’s desk.
The annoyed girl turns to face to the heinous person and shoots him with an angry look.
The latter, immediately stopping this disturbance,
turns to his neighbour saying “I am immortal”.
“Why?” replied the other.
“If I wasn’t, I would already be dead! Did you see the look in her eyes?”
Later on, another quote from Maria became well known.
When some people were whistling with contempt when she arrived to the lecture hall,
she replied: “Blow, gentlemen, blow! The more you blow, the farther I will go”.
“At that time I felt capable of anything”, Maria said.
Indeed, she overcame all obstacles.
An old professor at the Faculty of Medicine remembered this incident:
one day, while he was about to give a lecture, a snowstorm paralyzed Rome.
The storm was so severe that no student could get there.
None except Maria, who suggested to postpone the session.
The professor did not accept this suggestion, believing that such zeal should be rewarded.
He performed his lecture for her alone.
Maria faced other difficulties.
At that time, it was unthinkable that a woman could attend corpse dissection classes
in the presence of her male colleagues,
not to mention her father’s disapproval of her chosen career.
She was therefore forced to carry out the practical dissection exercises alone, mainly at night.
In 1896, Maria defended her doctoral thesis on a subject of psychiatry.
The subject of the clinical study was on “antagonistic hallucinations”
with the support of her mentor Ezio Sciamanna,
director of the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Rome.
Her father, who was not hiding his disapproval, changed his mind in a theatrical way,
putting an end to the misunderstanding between a father and his daughter.
On the morning of Maria’s thesis defence,
her father met a friend of his on a street who asked him
why he was not attending Maria’s defence. No longer following his daughter’s work,
Alessandro Montessori was taken aback by the young man’s question.
After giving an explanation, the father finally agreed to attend the thesis defence.
It was a complete triumph for the young physician.
She treated her subject brilliantly, with eloquence and originality.
Her father, overwhelmed with compliments,
was forced to note that the ugly duckling has turned into a magnificent swan.
It is a total success for Maria, who thus at the age of 26
became the first female physician in Italy.
The same year, she got invited to represent her country
at the “International Women’s Congress”
which took place from 20 to 23 September 1896 in Berlin.
She performed several speeches for the emancipation of women
and demanded more humane working conditions and,
among others, equal pay for men and women.
Back in Rome,
she returned to her activities as a surgical assistant
at the Santo Spirite Hospital, and then opened a private practice.
For the next ten years,
Maria worked hard and committed herself tirelessly
for those marginalized by traditional society.
She campaigned for the defence and recognition of the rights of women
as well as mentally deficient children, at the time called “retarded”.
During her medical studies,
when Maria Montessori did an internship in a psychiatric clinic,
she noticed that all the patients were mixed with no distinction of age or pathology.
At that time, the mentally ill were still being tied to the floor or to their beds,
or even shackled by straitjackets. All this people lived together without separation.
Deeply shocked and scandalized by this observation,
her first task was to get the director of the clinic
to separate the children from the other patients.
This she achieved and consequently created the very first child psychiatry ward in Italy.
The director of the clinic naturally asked her to take care of these children,
since it was her idea.
It was where Maria made her first observations.
The first thing she noticed was that the children left on their own find nothing to do,
and that no progress can be made.
In 1898, Maria took part in the Turin Pedagogical Congress
and gave a series of lectures in which she confronted society with its responsibilities.
She declared that so-called “retarded” children are not outlaws.
They have the right to education like any other child.
She would say:
“We must give these unfortunate children back their dignity of human beings”,
and would add:
“Therapeutics and probably more educational than medical”.
Following this congress, the Minister of Education entrusted her
with the direction of the first state school of speech and language therapy,
a project which she was totally involved in for two years (from 1899 to 1901).
The speech therapy school was an elementary school for children with sensory,
mental and social disabilities. Only, Maria was a doctor and not a teacher.
And what she was asked for was to train teachers!
She was therefore continuing her research,
which led her to explore the work of two French doctors:
Jean-Marc Itard and Edouard Seguin,
who have developed educational methods for deficient children
and have designed a new approach to mental illnesses.
Maria came to France to translate Itard’s work into Italian,
the case study concerning Victor, the wild child of Aveyron.
She also translated the work of Seguin, a book of about 300 pages
by rewriting it by hand so to give her time to be inspired
and to well understand the author's thinking
Then, in Paris, Maria took the opportunity to visit and study at the school of Séguin,
located on the Rue Pigalle.
During these two years she devoted herself to teaching
and training a group of teachers specialised in observing weak-minded children.
She said: “these two years of practice have been my one and only real pedagogical diploma”.
Maria had enough time to build Seguin’s materials by an Italian manufacturer.
She then had the material used by these little hands, eager to practice with it
and realised that the impaired children were developing their intelligence.
Within two years they were able to learn to read,
write and to count to the astonishment of the specialists of the time.
The challenge for Maria was great but she thought
“why not give them the certificate of studying?”.
On the day of the exam, no favours were granted to these children,
who were pointed at, taunted and mocked.
To everyone’s amazement, Maria Montessori’s students passed their exams.
Not only did they pass,
but on average they performed better than the so-called “normal” children.
An anecdote highlights this turning point of education
One of the teachers who accompanied his class reportedly walked up to her
and asked what she did to succeed.
Some say that she would have answered:
“And you, what did you do to fail?”.
She would write in her book “Scientific Pedagogy”:
“While everyone admired my idiots,
I wondered what we could achieve with normal children in normal school”.
It was then that Maria Montessori understood
that human potential could be developed.
It was also from that moment that she began to take
an interest in “normal” children.
In this school of speech therapy,
she was the co-director with Dr. Guisepe Montessano
with whom she would eventually develop a love relationship,
but one that would remain secret.
Only the couple's close friends knew about this bond.
They both agreed, that if Maria wants to pursue her respective career,
it is better not to get married.
Indeed, the morals of the time wanted a signora, a married woman,
to give up any professional activity in order to raise her children.
Naturally, it was out of question for Maria Montessori to give in to this socia hindrance!
However, in 1897 Maria got pregnant and gave birth to her son Mario.
At the time, a single mother would expose herself to public vindictiveness
and risks social condemnation by refusing to marry.
When little Mario was born, she made the painful decision not to keep him
but entrusts him to a nanny in the countryside in a farming family.
Maria was suffering this separation as a tear, even though she sometimes visited her son.
How ironic it is for a woman who devotes her life to children
to be a stranger visiting her own son.
She watched him grow up without telling him that she is his mother,
something he would understand only much later.
Montessano and Maria made a deal.
Since they couldn't get married to each other,
they swore that they would never marry anybody else.
Yet, in 1901 Montessano married another woman.
Deeply hurt by this betrayal, Maria left the school of speech therapy,
went back to university, and never forgave her former lover.
In spite of this, Montessano would still recognize the child born out of wedlock
who would thus enjoy father’s legitimacy, but never meet him.
After this painful chapter, Maria threw herself into hard work.
She continued to practice medicine and to teach at the University of Rome
while obtaining a degree in biology.
She also took up anthropology and psychology.
Three years later, she held a chair of anthropology at the University of Rome.
At the same time she continued her work on child development,
determined to free children from social injustice through
a radically different approach to education.
In 1907, the mayor of Rome designed a vast project to rehabilitate
the underprivileged and dilapidated districts outside the wall of Rome:
the San Lorenzo district, today East of the central railway station of the Italian capital.
He found that young children, too young to go to school,
wander the streets all day long and deface public places.
He therefore asked Maria to take them in
and create a place to welcome these disadvantaged children.
Recently, she had become interested in normal children
and so accepted this opportunity to deepen her research.
As usual, she demanded carte blanche and refused any outside interference.
This were be granted to her.
On January 6, 1907, the first Children's Home was opened: the Casa dei Bambini.
This was still a great novelty for Maria who had very little experience with young children.
Thanks to her studies in anthropology, she had an idea to start by
creating furniture that would fit the height and strength of children,
such as tables, chairs, cupboards and shelves.
Then, she asked herself
It is known that at this age the children spend most of their time playing.
It is therefore natural that she made a certain amount of toys available.
But her initial idea was always present in her mind: “how to develop human potential?”.
Today, the Montessori method would be the best answer to this question.
How did she do that?
First, she introduced materials similar to the ones she created
and used with disabled children and little by little she introduced Séguin's tools.
This was the beginning in the 20th century in an underprivileged neighbourhood.
We can easily imagine the cleanliness of these children.
Maria being a doctor, and in the light of recent discoveries
on microbes by Louis Pasteur (and Robert Koch, not to offend anyone),
had jugs and bowls installed at the entrance of the school,
so that the children could enter with clean hands, clean faces and hair.
Very soon, assistants were recruited to take care of all these children.
The assistants that Maria had hired were illiterate, in order not to “pollute”
the children with old methods of education.
Let us keep in mind that this was a scientific experiment for Maria.
Initially, the job was yet preliminary and the caretaker's daughter was recruited.
Later a seamstress, although better educated but without any training as a teacher,
would strengthen the team.
San Lorenzo becomes popular.
Many come from afar to watch these children like no other.
Not only educators and teachers, but people of all kinds, including monarchs.
Queen Margherita of Savoy even declared
"we are at the dawn of a new philosophy of life
and it is the children who will enlighten us about it".
The fame of San Lorenzo reached the ears of the Argentinian ambassador in Rome.
Sceptical, he decided to see for himself what was at stake.
An impromptu visit was organized, but unfortunately,
when he arrived on Thursday, it was closed
As child passing by interrupted the conversation between the Ambassador
and the building’s caretaker,
and said, "Nevermind, do you have the key? (He asked the concierge, who nodded)
and all the children are there! "
The concierge opened the door and the little boy gathered his friends together.
All these small children entered the Children's House and began to work as usual,
under the amazed gaze of the Ambassador.
The Montessori method reveals “a new child”.
Numerous books got published demonstrating that children are born good,
that they tire of being inactive and that they seek to expand their knowledge on their own.
The behaviour of this new child rose universal interest.
A capitalist would speak of "freedom through discipline" while a socialist
would discover "the triumph of individual freedom".
The aristocracy joined in the chorus, saying that this education
would erase the clumsiness and shyness of children.
A second children's home soon opened in a working-class area of the city,
and other cities will eventually follow in its footsteps.
In 1906, Maria Montessori was 36 years old and little known.
In 1908 she was world famous!
Known for having discovered
the inner world of the child and having developed a new method of education,
she resigned from her position at the university and definitively
gave up the practice of medicine to train educators and
write books explaining her pedagogy.
Indeed, many urged her to record her discoveries in a book
with the aim of sharing them with as many people as possible.
It was then 1909, and Maria gave her first training course in her pedagogy,
in which about a hundred teachers took part.
That same year, “The Scientific Pedagogy” was published,
a work in which she explained her method and its origins.
This work was an immediate success, translated into twenty languages
and distributed throughout the world.
For the anecdote, this first book, Maria wrote it in one month.
Very few critics criticized the new method.
One of the few objections she faced was the fallacy of “what in the world”,
some parents said “it is a method that has been used for deficient children!
My child is not impaired, so it doesn't suit him!”
Maria Montessori spent the rest of her life proving otherwise
and fighting the prejudice of her method of letting the child to do whatever it wants.
One day, an inspector visiting the school asked a child
“So here we do whatever we want?”
the boy replied “No, here we want to do what we do”.
Maria wrote in her book, “The Absorbent Mind”:
“Freedom and discipline are each on same side of the coin.
To let loose a child who has not developed yet his will is to betray the sense of freedom.”
A number of Maria's visitors came from the United States,
and asked her to come to the American continent.
In fact, she received an offer from MacClure's Magazine to build an institution
in accordance with her ideas if she agreed to move across the Atlantic.
The offer was very tempting!
Maria was enthusiastic and even made initial plans and projects.
Unfortunately, she eventually declined the offer, thinking that by binding herself
to a country and an organisation, she would risk losing the freedom of action
she needed to realize her ideal on an international level.
However, she still went to America to give lectures, hosting the great Thomas Edison.
An American Montessori association was formed under the presidency of
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone,
and with Margaret Wilson, as the general secretary,
daughter of President Woodrow Wilson.
Between 1911 and 1912, the first Montessori schools opened in the United States,
notably within the White House.
Graham Bell also opened a Montessori class in his own home.
Maria was astonished by the warm welcome she received.
Her conference room: the famous and majestic Carnegie Hall.
Despite the size of the building,
many people who came to see her were unable to enter and left disappointed.
In 1912, Maria got struck by a grief that changed her life.
Renilde, her mother, died that year. It is a great shock, but Maria shows no emotion.
She isolates herself and stops eating for three days.
It is from this moment that she started wearing black dresses,
the colour of mourning, which she did not stop wearing until more than 20 years later.
During a visit to Mario, he told her openly that he knows
she is his mother and asked to join her.
The years of separation were now in the past,
and mother and son would only separate for short periods of time.
However, Maria beame an amoral person in the eyes of Italian society: a single mother.
The year 1915 was the year of the World's Fair in San Francisco.
Maria took the opportunity to present her method.
For the duration of the exhibition (from February to December)
she held a Montessorian class set up under a glass dome, surrounded by bleachers.
Hundreds of people were able to observe the daily life of this class,
under the direction of a former trainee of Maria's: Helen Parkhurst.
The "new child" won the two gold medals at the exhibition.
Montessori schools opened all over the world!
China, Japan, Canada, and even in Russia,
in the Imperial Palace of Nicholas II, the pacific tsar.
The architects asked Maria for advice and to help them design the Children's Houses.
In Barcelona, they even went as far as building a children's chapel.
Maria Montessori was moved to see her principles applying
to the religious education of small children.
Margaret Wilson proposed to Maria
to organize a six-month teacher-training course in Washington.
It is difficult for us today to understand and explain all the reasons for this refusal,
but the consequence is quite clear.
The American Montessorian school cut itself off from its European base.
As time went by, there was a drastic decrease in the number of teachers
who were really familiar with the Montessori method,
which became more and more restricted,
even though the initial challenge was to apply it to the whole country.
In spite of the First World War, Maria travelled a lot and was acclaimed by great names.
In 1917, during her first visit to the Netherlands, where she met the biologist Hugo de Vries,
who helped her to build a scientific explanation of her discovery of sensitive periods.
Sigmund Freud wrote: “Like all those who are interested in the psyche of the child,
I wholeheartedly support your efforts,
which show your love as well as your great understanding of the human being”
Between 1922 and 1923,
Lilli E. Peller-Roubiczek founded the Montessori Children's Home in Vienna.
Emma Planck (daughter of the Nobel Prize winner in Physics Max Planck)
and Anna Freud (daughter of the great psychoanalyst)
also belonged to the Montessori circle in Vienna.
Maria visited their school and published her book “The Child in the Family”.
Once the war was over,
Maria returned to Italy and met one of the most ambitious men in Europe.
Benito Mussolini, leader of the Italian Fascist Party.
He too sees the enormous potential in the Montessori method.
Above all, he sees it as a way to train pro-regime soldiers
whose mission would be to recruit and train children.
Maria didn’t notice his plan immediately.
At least Mussolini’s interest made it possible to create schools,
factories to manufacture educational materials and even the training centre Maria dreamed of.
We could then speak of a marriage of convenience.
Mussolini’s aim was to reform the national education system
and to introduce the Montessori method as the official one.
They were using each other for a while, without finding any satisfaction in it.
That relation didn’t last much longer.
Maria was convinced that children learn best in independence and freedom of thought.
This, of course, did not please the dictator.
In 1931, Mussolini decided that all teachers must swear allegiance to fascism
and that schoolchildren must wear the uniform of the fascist youth.
Maria revolted and decided to leave her homeland and to never return.
In the following months, Mussolini closed all Montessori schools in Italy
and all the facilities closely or even remotely linked to the Montessori method.
Fleeing Italy, pursued and harassed by the regime’s secret services,
Maria almost didn’t make it to the safety.
She boarded a train leaving Italy where the identity check was carried out
by the local police who were looking for her.
Two policemen entered the carriage, one from each end,
and began randomly screening the passengers.
One of them stopped in front of Maria, looked at her,
smiled and continued without checking her.
Maria was sure he had recognized her, since the policeman was one of her former students.
This period in the life of Maria Montessori illustrates well
the expression "being between Charybdis and Scylla".
Fleeing Italy, she exiled to Spain which she quickly left with the arrival of General Franco.
After getting to England aboard a British warship,
she was received in London at Buckingham palace.
Knowing that Mahatma Gandhi was also in the country,
Maria decided to take the opportunity to meet him.
Gandhi greeted her with these words:
“We are part of the same family”.
Indeed, on the community aspects, Gandhi and Montessori are in perfect connection.
He saw the Montessori method as a way to educate the millions of Indian children living in poverty.
Maria found much inspiration in Gandhi,
who followed the perceptions of the Indian philosophy Nai Talim,
literally translated new education,
according to which work and knowledge are inseparable.
Now settled in the Netherlands, Maria had to face a new and growing danger.
In 1933, a person even more intollerant towards freedom of thoughts than Mussolini,
Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany.
All Montessori schools in Germany were closed,
and in Berlin Montessori books were burned on the public square
along with a portrait of the educational theorist.
In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland and the whole of Europe went to war.
Invariably, a totalitarian regime still threatened Maria Montessori,
who had no choice but to flee for the umpteenth time.
Maria fled to India, accompanied by her son, for a trip initially planned for 6 months.
She stayed there for 7 years.
At that time, India was still part of the British Empire.
As Italian nationals, having arrived in a Commonwealth country,
she and her son were considered enemy residents there!
Nevertheless, since they did not represent a great danger,
the local authorities agreed to place them under house arrest for a short time
and then let Maria to move freely.
This wasn’t the case for Mario, who remained imprisoned.
Thanks to Gandhi's intervention, he got released on his mother's 70th birthday.
Allowed to travel, Maria used this exile to spread her method to the entire Indian subcontinent.
She got invited to Madras to set up a training centre there.
In the absence of premises, a hut was built to accommodate 300 students.
Mario stood by his mother's side as her interpreter.
Maria personally trained a thousand teachers.
She then saw Gandhi again and met Nehru and Tagore.
When peace returned to Europe,
Maria and her son came back to the Netherlands to find cities devastated by war.
A colossal task of rehabilitating Montessori schools across Europe ensued.
In 1949, Maria Montessori published her last book,
“The Absorbing Spirit of the Child”,
in which she transmitted her spiritual and philosophical approach to the child,
as well as what she had learned from Hindu philosophy.
Between 1949 and 1951,
Maria Montessori was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize,
but never received it.
At the end of her life Maria felt she was never understood:
“I point to the moon, and they look at my finger”.
She died on 6 May 1952 in Noordwijk aan Zee, the Netherlands.
She was 82 years old.
decorated with the Legion of Honour in France,
an officer of the Orange-Nassau Order in the Netherlands,
Doctor Honoris Causa of several universities including Durham (Ireland)
and Amsterdam, and an honorary citizen of many cities.
If we were to retain only one teaching of the Montessori method,
it would be to be interested in humans before being interested in the system.
Because only then things can change.
Montessori pedagogy is above all a humanistic approach that places the child
at the centre of his or her own education.
This concludes the first part of our series devoted to Maria Montessori.
We will soon be back for a second episode dealing more precisely with the work
of one of the most famous historical figures in education.
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