Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an exceptional person. Her work in the field of children’s development and education in the early 20th century was revolutionary, and her findings are still very much alive today and are respected all over the world.
Montessori was born near Ancona, Italy, in 1870. In 1896 she became the first female physician in Italy. She went on to study philosophy, psychology and anthropology.
As a physician she often dealt with children. At the beginning of her career, Montessori worked often with children with mental disorders, fighting passionately for their rights, as at the time those children were gravely mistreated. That is when she started developing special tools, i.e. educational materials, and those children would learn many things that had been considered impossible before. Montessori considered the period when she worked with those children as the “true degree” of her educational career.
In 1907, she opened her first classroom, the Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House), in a tenement building in a poor neighbourhood of Rome, where she had the opportunity to work with children without mental disorders. She went on to set up several such kindergartens in Italy and other parts of the world.
Her method was largely based on observing children. She would focus on developing children. The two main factors that are crucial for a child’s development are a suitably prepared environment and the educator who prepared that environment. She realised that children can only develop all their inner potentials in an adequately prepared environment which favours concentration, independence, freedom of choice and order. Children in such an environment would become calm, diligent, cheerful and polite; they would learn how to read, write and calculate as early as the preschool period, which was unheard of in the age when Montessori started her career.
After 1913, Maria Montessori started a life of worldwide travels, lectures and numerous publications. She opened kindergartens and training centres for educators in various part of the world. Despite racial and cultural differences among children, she noticed many important similarities. She learnt that every child is a unique, a one-of-a-kind and valuable individual, who should be accepted unconditionally as one of life’s most wonderful creations.
Montessori died in the Netherlands in 1952. During her final years she received numerous honorary titles and recognitions all over the world. A passionate humanitarian who strived for world peace, Montessori was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Montessori Method is thus still very much alive today, as the educational values that it passes on are timeless. There are thousands of Montessori institutions in the world today. They are mostly present in Europe, the US, India, Australia and Japan. The Montessori Method has been present in Slovenia for nearly 20 years.
