The Founder Of The Montessori Movement: Maria Montessori

When she was alive, people though that Maria Montessori’s methods of education would wane in popularity after her death because, according to some “experts”, it needed her personality to popularize and promote it. This wasn’t the case, as can be seen by the proliferation of Montessori early childhood centres and the keen interest shown by many parents in sending their children there. However, this “expert opinion” is worth considering: just what sort of woman was Maria Montessori?

From the very beginning, Maria was a pioneer and a groundbreaker. Born and raised in Italy in the late 1800s, she first wanted to become an engineer (a male-dominated area at the time) and attended and all-boys school in order to do so. Later, she decided that medicine was where her heart and talents lay, and she became the first woman to graduate from the medical school associated with the University of Rome. She chose the then-new field of psychiatry and psychology as her specialty area, with a particular focus on educating children who had mental handicaps.

Even this early in her career, Dr Montessori had developed some theories about how children learn and how to help them. She worked with one group of intellectually handicapped children and, using her methods, had them not only passing standard state exams for reading and writing (which others had thought that these children would never be able to do) but achieving above average scores. Next, Dr Montessori was able to try her methods on “normal” children in a school established in a poor area of Rome.

This school was also a success and before long, educators around the world were wanting to find out about how she did it. Maria Montessori travelled the world to tell others about her methods, spending time in India, the Netherlands and Spain. Today, early childhood centres around the world use her methods for one very simple reason: they work.