Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori was born in the town of Chiaravalle, Italy on August 31, 1870. Her father was Alessandro Montessori. Her mother was a woman named Renilde Stoppani.

Maria was considered to be self-confident, optimistic and greatly interested in change. As a child Maria had a daily quota of knitting she was to meet. Maria learned very easily and did exceptionally well on exams.

Maria graduated from technical school in 1886. She managed to get high marks in all of her subjects with a final score of 137 out of 150. After that she attended Regio Instituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci from 1886 to 1890. There she studied modern languages and natural sciences. By the time she was ready to graduate, she had decided she wanted to go into the biological sciences. Her family, mostly her father, was shocked and disapproving. It was considered impossible for a woman to be accepted into a medical school. Her father actually stopped just short of forbidding her to study medicine.

She checked first with the University of Rome. Not surprising, however, they did not admit women into the medical program. She decided instead to enroll at the University of Rome to study physics, mathematics and natural sciences. In 1892, she passed her exams with an eight out of ten and received a Diploma di licenza that made her eligible to study medicine. The problem of course was she was a woman. During the time she was at school, she lived at home and had very little campus life experience, however, gradually other students began to accept her. Her and her father did not talk a lot because he was still upset about her studying medicine. Her mother continued to support her and sometimes helped her study.

In 1896 she had to present her thesis to a board of ten men. They were highly impressed with her work and granted her the degree of doctor of medicine. This made her the first woman to graduate from medical school in Italy.

Shortly after, she was chosen as a representative of Italy at two different women's conferences. The first was in Berlin in 1896 and the second in 1900 in London. In November of 1896, she was asked to replace a surgical assistant at the place she was a medical assistant the previous year, Santo Spirito. While there she cared for patients more than was expected. She continued doing research at the University of Rome. Maria also found time for other interests such as cooking and needlework.

In 1897, she joined the staff at the University of Rome as a voluntary assistant.

One of her responsibilities is what led her to her most loved occupation. She was to visit asylums for the insane. Here she came across feebleminded children, unable to function in schools or families and had no other public provisions. She saw that they were starving for experience and started to think about what she could do to help out. So in 1901 she returned to University with a desire to study the mind instead of the body. So in 1904 she was offered a job teaching as the professor of anthropology at the University of Rome. She accepted but in 1906 gave the job up to work with sixty young children of working families. This is were she developed all of her educational methods which became so successful that even learning disabled children began to pass examinations for normal children. With these sixty children she started a "Children's House" in San Lorenzo Rome. This children's home was an environment that was offered to the child so he may be given an opportunity to develop his activities. Of course it was very dependent on financial resources and opportunities in the environment. She began to notice how the children would absorb knowledge almost effortlessly from their surroundings. She felt the children were teaching themselves, which helped inspire her lifelong pursuit of educational reform.

In 1913, she made her first visit to the United States. It was during this year that Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel, founded the Montessori Educational Association in Washington D.C. Other American supporters were Thomas Edison and Helen Keller. In 1929 she founded the Association Montessori International in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 1938 she opened the Montessori Training Center in Laren, Netherlands. In 1947, she founded the Montessori Center in London. And in 1949, 1950, and 1951 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

When she began her work, large groups of children were supposed to do the same thing at the same time and in the same way. She knew there was a better way to teach children. She based most of her approach to teaching on truths about human nature. "The materials used by the senses are a doorway to the mind."

Through giving children some freedom in a specially prepared environment that was rich in activities, children of 4-6 years learned to read on their own, chose to work rather than play most of the time, loved order and silence, and developed a real social life in which they worked together instead of competing against one another. In the classroom there is usually a central room for intellectual work with some small rooms off to the side, a lot of outside space and the choice to work outside. The furniture

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