Historical Context of

Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori

On 31st August 1870 Maria Montessori was born in

Chiaravalle, in the abuzzian province of Ancona, Italy,
the decade when the first typewriter, the telegraph and
incandescent lamp were invented, the Impressionists
exhibited their first works, the Renaixença arose in
Catalonia and the European countries expanded their
colonies in Africa. Her parents were Alessandro
Montessori, an official of the Ministry of Finance
working in a local state-run factory, and Renilde
Stoppani, a pious well-educated woman. When Maria
was twelve years old, the family moved to Rome
because of her father’s work.
The first gasoline-powered cars appeared, the Eiffel tower was built in Paris and the tuberculosis
bacillus had been discovered. Despite her interest in Mathematics and ignoring her father's
recommendation to become a teacher, Maria Montessori decided to study Medicine, a very
unusual job for a woman of that time and the reason why she was denied entry to the University
(her father also opposed this idea). But this did not stop her; she stood outside of the classrooms,
taking notes through the windows, until she finally managed to be admitted, although she had
to carry out the dissections of corpses at night, separated from her classmates. She was met
with hostility and harassment from some students and professors because of her gender.
Montessori won an academic prize in her first year, and in 1895 secured a position as a hospital
assistant, gaining early clinical experience. In her last two years she studied paediatrics and
psychiatry, and worked in the paediatric consulting room and emergency service, becoming an
expert in paediatric medicine.
In 1896, while Freud was developing his theory of Psychoanalysis, X-rays appeared and Lumière
brothers made the first film screenings, Maria Montessori became the first Italian woman to
receive the Doctor’s degree, in a ceremony where she delivered the speech on behalf of the
students, received a standing ovation.
She was also interested in women's rights and represented her country in feminist congresses
abroad. She held the chair of Hygiene at the Normal School for Female in Rome and collaborated
as a permanent examiner at the Faculty of Pedagogy.
Through her great capacity for work, she also began working as an assistant at the Psychiatric
Clinic of the University of Rome. One of her responsibilities was to visit hospitals to select
patients for that clinic and that's how she came into contact with children who were considered
“deficient” and had been hospitalised.

INTERNATIONAL MONTESSORI INSTITUTE © 1

Montessori became interested in these children who fell to the ground after eating to pick up
the crumbs, and she felt that they were looking for something to do, since they had no exercise.
She considered this situation as a more medical than a pedagogical issue, as exposed in a
Pedagogical Congress in 1898, where she spoke about the Moral Education of Deficient Children.
At that time, Special Education and Psychology were at a very early stage. Montessori found
through her research how to treat these children, through studying the works of two French
doctors: Jean Itard and Édouard Séguin. She translated the publications into Italian as she
worked intensively with children, naming this period of her life like the one that had brought her
“The first and true degree in pedagogy”.

“After this study of the methods in use throughout Europe I concluded my experiments upon
the deficients of Rome, and taught them throughout two years. I followed Séguin's book, and
also derived much help from the remarkable experiments of Itard. Guided by the work of these
two men, I had manufactured a great variety of didactic material. These materials, which I have
never seen complete in any institution, became in the hands of those who knew how to apply
them, a most remarkable and efficient means, but unless rightly presented, they failed to attract
the attention of the deficients.
Having through actual experience justified my faith in Séguin's method, I withdrew from active
work among deficients, and began a more thorough study of the works of Itard and Séguin. I felt
the need for meditation. I did a thing which I had not done before, and which perhaps few
students have been willing to do, –I translated into Italian and copied out with my own hand,
the writings of these men, from beginning to end, making for myself books as the old
Benedictines used to do before the diffusion of printing. I chose to do this by hand, in order that
I might have time to weigh the sense of each word, and to read, in truth, the spirit of the author”.
Maria Montessori, The Discovery of Child

Montessori spent the day working with the children from eight o'clock in the morning until eight
o'clock at night and then she stayed up late making notes, reflecting and preparing new
materials. The result of this work was so successful that many of the children learned to read
and write and passed a test for children who attended regular schools. Montessori's reflection
was this: "While everyone was admiring my idiots, I was searching for the reasons which could
keep back the healthy and happy children of the ordinary schools on such a low plane that they
could be equalled in tests of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils. I convinced myself that
similar methods applied to normal children would develop and set their personality free in a
wonderful and surprising way".
In 1898 her only son Mario Montessori was born. During the first years of the 20th century, at
the time Marconi invented the radio, the Wright brothers made the first flight, Albert Einstein
announced the theory of Relativity, Gaudi projected La Pedrera and Picasso painted Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon, Montessori decided to study philosophy at university.

INTERNATIONAL MONTESSORI INSTITUTE © 2

In 1900 she participated in a congress where she attacked the practice of using children as
workers in Sicily, and supported a movement sponsored by Queen Victoria against child
exploitation. In late 1906, she had the opportunity to expand her educational experience to
children with normal development, but in adverse social and economic conditions, who lived in
a very poor neighbourhood known as San Lorenzo, where criminality was common.
The Istituto Romano dei Beni Stabili (Roman Real Estate Investment Institute) built two blocks
of buildings there, where thousands of people moved under the condition to keep certain rules
of decency and cleanliness. When adults went to work and older children to school, the little
children were left alone, they went down and upstairs and started to mistreat everything.
Montessori was invited to lead a group of children, who were not old enough to attend school
(between three and six years old); she was assigned a room and she took care to set up tables
and chairs, instead of the benches that were used at that time in schools and prepared some
materials that she had already used with the children of the clinic. Then she would work with
those she described as sixty tearful and scared children, so shy that it was impossible to get them
to speak; their faces without expression, their eyes so amazed as if they had never seen anything
in their lives. On 6th January 1907 Maria Montessori founded the first House of Children: “They
wept, and seemed to be afraid of everything. They did not take the presents, and they did not
eat the sweets, did not answer when spoken to. They were really like a set of wild children. They
certainly had not lived in a wood with animals like the savage of Aveyron, but they had lived in
a forest of people lost and beyond the bounds of civilized society”.
Maria Montessori, The Discovery of Child

In San Lorenzo, she discovered through observation, the basic tool for scientific education, the
pedagogical principles that guided her educational task and that nowadays they still work with
children from different cultural and economic backgrounds, more than a century later. Some of
these principles are:

 Offer purposeful activities to children.

 The ability to choose freely
 The repetition of the exercise.
 Children's sense of personal dignity.
 Avoidance of rewards and punishments to make children work for their own
satisfaction.
 Children's sense for order.
 Silence as a result of spontaneous concentration.
 The emergence of self-discipline.
 Explosions in learning
 The importance of respecting the rhythm and meeting the needs and interests of each
child.

INTERNATIONAL MONTESSORI INSTITUTE © 3

From her work at the House of Children, Maria Montessori later developed materials for
elementary school and pointed out guidelines for high school and college education.
She was also interested in giving a new approach to teaching the catechism and in the last years
of her life, for the accompaniment of the human being from birth to three years of age.
Currently, the Montessori approach also offers accompaniment to older adults with mental
impairment.
This is one of the reasons why her pedagogical approach, more than to be considered a teaching
method, is an Education for Life. The results of the experiences at the first House of Children
were so favourable that Montessori's fame spread throughout the country and abroad. Two
years later, the first House of Children was opened in Milan, directed by Ana Wacclienni.
During the next decade World War I broke out, the first spacecraft was projected, Kafka wrote
The Metamorphosis. In 1911 the "Opera Montessori" association was founded by order of
Queen Margherita of Savoy. Two years later the first House of Children opened in Barcelona,
the first out of Italy.
Montessori was invited to the United States in 1914 and stayed at Thomas Edison's house. She
was hailed by the crowds at her arrival. The Montessori Association was founded in that country,
with the collaboration of Alexander Graham Bell, and counting on Margaret Wilson, daughter of
the forthcoming president, as honorary secretary.
A year later, at the San Francisco International Fair, California, a House of Children was opened
to the public with a glass wall. In 1916 Montessori established her residence in Barcelona, where
she would remain until 1936. The lectures given in a teacher course in San Diego, California, in
l917 had a common theme that would outline another of the fundamental aspects of their
pedagogical approach: Education for Peace.
She then officially visited London for the first time and participated in conferences on education
in countries like France and Denmark. In Europe, other educational methods, such as Decroly
and Causinet, were spoken about, and in the United States, the Dalton Plan. It was the time
when Fleming discovered penicillin and the blood groups became known, and avant-garde
architecture emerged.
Some Montessori schools were opened in different parts of Europe, like in Vienna. In Amsterdam
this method took root in public, private, secular, and religious schools and at the request of
parents, a few years later, would start at high school (1936).
Maria Montessori received the Honoris Causa PhD from the University of Durham, England. She
gave a conference on Education and Peace in Geneva, in the League of Nations. Erik Eriksson
attended one of her teacher courses. She travelled to Argentina, where she lectured in Buenos
Aires, La Plata and Córdoba.
Then she started a teacher training in Rome. Among the students who received this training
were Jean Piaget and Maria Antonietta Paolini, whom Maria Montessori would later call to work
in Barcelona.

INTERNATIONAL MONTESSORI INSTITUTE © 4

It was the 1930s; the world was experiencing the consequences of the economic crisis and
emerging fascist movements in Germany and Italy. Montessori schools were closed in several
countries, including in Italy, under Mussolini's mandate. The Montessori gave a lecture at the
Sorbonne on the need for a scientific education to achieve peace. She was invited to Madras,
India, to train more than three hundred teachers.
Then World War II broke out and she remained in that country for four years, where he was in
contact with Tagore and Gandhi. At the end of the War, she returned to London to lead another
course for teachers. In 1947 she was invited by the Italian government to her home country,
where she was received as a great personality, fifty years after starting her work. Then she
established the "Opera Montessori".
She returned to India to lead courses for teachers and she also led some in Pakistan. She
attended the 8th Congress in San Remo (Italy, 1949) and the ninth and last in London (1951).
She received the French Legion of Honour Decoration at the University of La Sorbonne.
She was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for three consecutive years: 1949, 1950
and 1951. Montessori travelled to Norway, Sweden, and Germany to lecture. In 1950 the queen
Wilhelmina of Holland awarded her the Order of Orange-Nassau Decoration. She gave a
conference at UNESCO, where she was presented as a symbol of the high hopes for education
and world peace.
At the age of 81, Maria Montessori passed away. Her life ended suddenly on 6th May 1952 in
Noordwijk, the Netherlands, where she was buried. Let her own message, delivered at the 9th
International Congress (London, 1951), be the one that summarises the reason of so many years
of tireless work: "I am pointing out, as I have never ceased to point out in the past forty years,
to someone outside of myself, and you are saying in effect, “What a beautiful finger she has!
And what a beautiful ring is she wearing! The highest honour and deepest gratitude you can pay
me will be that you turn your attention from me in the direction in which I'm pointing: the Child"
This extraordinary, scientist, feminist, educator, mystic, pacifist, ecologist (even though the term
had not been coined) woman embodied humanistic values. She was also a visionary, who
managed to discover, using the only tool of observation, the child's potential, needs, and
characteristics, which still are verified by researchers with contemporary technologies
nowadays.
Unlike other pedagogues before and after her, Montessori managed to develop a methodology
that would make possible the implementation of the principles that she proposed and that have
been successfully implemented in all continents and in the most diverse economic situations (in
addition to San Lorenzo, recently in refugee camps in Africa, in indigenous communities in Latin
America, but also in privileged socioeconomic contexts, in public and private educational
settings).
This educational movement has also exceeded the first hundred years, because it responds to
the essence of the human being and, despite that, some still doubt its relevance.

INTERNATIONAL MONTESSORI INSTITUTE © 5

"Horizontal growth is demonstrated in the spread of schools and training institutes found all
over the world. The books by Montessori have been translated into 22 languages ... But the
ramification is more interested in the applications of her method beyond regular school
education. The method is applied in households, in child care centres, working with hospitalised
children, with the maladjusted, disabled and other disabled children in some way ... In the fight
against adult illiteracy. Vertical growth is demonstrated in its wide application from infant
rearing up to the education at a university age”
Mario Montessori Jr., Education for Human Development.

"Don't follow me, follow the child," said Montessori. The message is so great, that it has
transcended to the messenger, because this proposal goes far beyond a method, it is a lifestyle.

INTERNATIONAL MONTESSORI INSTITUTE © 6