This is the story of the introduction of Montessori education into the United States as told through the lives and careers of four young American women. Anne George, Margaret Naumburg, Helen Parkhurst, and Adelia Pyle were caught up in the Montessori craze sweeping the United States in the Progressive era. Each of them played a significant role in the original transference of Montessori education to America, its implementation, its success and, ultimately, its demise.
When originally introduced in the United States, Montessori education lasted little more than a decade, beginning in 1911. Montessori education “had virtually vanished from the United States from the mid-1920’s until the mid-1950’s.”1 Yet now, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, of the 132,853 K-12 schools in the United States,2 between 4500 and 5000 of these are Montessori schools.3 Most are private schools but five hundred public school systems now offer programs.
Prior to 1911, Maria Montessori, an Italian physician who was the creator of the educational theory, had never been in the United States and had only recently emerged as a notable personage on the world stage. There were no Montessori schools in the United States. Montessori opened her first schools, called Casa dei Bambini , Children’s Houses, in Rome in 1907. Montessori found traditional schools to be wholly inadequate, even miseducative. She created her own unique alternative to the existing school with her “prepared environment.” Montessori initially concentrated on educating children from two to six years old, at a time, from 1900 to 1920, when early childhood institutions were underdeveloped in Europe and the United States. The major institutional alternative to her method was the kindergarten.
Word of Montessori’s phenomenal success with preschool children reached Italians and then other Europeans. Curiosity led to visits to Montessori’s Casa dei Bambini , and newspaper accounts of those visits. Articles by and about Montessori along with word of mouth about the remarkable educational theory eventually spread to the United States. Between 1910 and 1915, interest in Maria Montessori’s method of education reached fever pitch in the United States. A series of popular articles in McClure’s Magazine featuring Montessori education generated a highly receptive audience for Montessori and her method.4 A tide of books and articles promoting Montessori education attracted American readers. Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879–1958), a best-selling author, who had observed Montessori schools in Rome, published A Montessori Mother (1912) and The Montessori Manual for Teachers and Parents (1913).5 Florence Ward’s The Montessori Method and the American School (1913) contrasted the innovative Montessori Method with traditional schools.6
While Montessori was creating a scientifically-based pedagogy in Italy, Progressive educators in the United States had developed a new, nontraditional pedagogy. At the Cook County Normal School in Chicago, Colonel Francis Parker (1837–1902) stressed learning through experience by means of nature studies, field trips, and activities.7 John Dewey (1859–1952), the Pragmatist Experimentalist philosopher, at his University of Chicago Laboratory School , was testing his experience-based theory of learning in children’s activities and problem-solving.8 William Heard Kilpatrick (1871–1965), a leading Progressive, was operationalizing Dewey’s Pragmatic philosophy into his highly popular Project Method.9 George S. Counts (1889–1974), raising two profoundly challenging questions, asked “Dare Progressive Education be Progressive? ” and “Dare the School Build a New Social Order? ”10 Counts wanted schools to emphasize technological change, to engage in social planning and build a new social democratic society. These Progressive educators, Parker, Dewey, Kilpatrick and Counts, who would become dominant figures in American educational theory, were on a different path than Montessori.
Although differences between Montessori and Progressive education would become more clearly defined in the first half of the twentieth century, these differences were not that apparent between 1910 and 1920 during the introduction of Montessori education to the United States. At that time, the Progressives’ emphasis on basing education on children’s interests and needs seemed congruent with Montessori’s concept of children’s freedom to choose their work, their learning activity. As an umbrella-like movement, Progressivism embraced a wide range of perspectives such as activity-based learning, creative arts and crafts, Neo-Freudian psychology and issue-oriented activism. While Progressivism was an amorphous child-centered movement, its differences with Montessori education were not sharp. Indeed, some Progressives welcomed the Montessori Method as one of the new approaches needed in the post-Victorian social and cultural milieu.
Publicity surrounding the Montessori Method ultimately led to the importation of the Italian educational theory to the United States. By 1917, there were 188 Montessori directresses in the United States.11 Introducing a new educational theory to Americans was a difficult and complicated task. While Progressive theory dominated university education programs, Montessorianism had no position in American academic circles. Adopting the model of Montessori’s original Roman schools, American Montessori schools were small, private venues outside of the public school system.
Since Maria Montessori was the sole creator of the Montessori Method, to become a qualified teacher of her method, Montessori stated, a person needed to study with her. No one other than Montessori herself was qualified to train directresses , the term Montessori used for teachers. Montessori’s designation of “directress” signaled an innovative transformation in the educational process, especially in instructing children. Montessori’s directress, who guided children in their own self-learning, dramatically differed from the conventional teacher who sought to instruct them deliberately. While both the traditional teacher and the Montessori directress had training in a method, Montessori’s approach was a complex scientific and spiritual composite. In the training courses, students would learn about her educational theory and the correct way to teach it. Radically different from traditional schooling, even experienced teachers were required to attend Montessori’s training course in Rome.
Finances were a factor in the introductory phase of Montessorianism beginning with teacher training. The expenses for women who enrolled in a training course in Rome would include a round-trip ship passage, accommodations in Rome for several months and tuition fees. Teachers who had been employed for years, like Anne George and Helen Parkhurst, were in a position to afford these expenses; otherwise, the students’ families would pay the expenses as was the case with Adelia Pyle and Margaret Naumburg. Since Maria Montessori was the only person who could train teachers and her courses were only held in Rome initially, interested students unable to afford the course could not become Montessori directresses.
Anne E. George, the first American trained as a directress by Montessori in 1910, is an indispensable part of the history of the initial phase of Montessori education in the United States. As the premier pioneer, George established the first American Montessori school in Tarrytown , New York in 1911. She also was the English-language translator of Montessori’s book , The Montessori Method , which was instrumental in publicizing Montessori’s educational method in the United States.
Margaret Naumburg, a student in Montessori’s First International Training Course in 1913, was the first American to introduce Montessori education into the public school system of a major city, New York.
Helen Parkhurst, who completed Montessori’s Second International Training Course in 1914, was the only American ever appointed by Maria Montessori as her surrogate in the United States. In 1915, Parkhurst was appointed to supervise all aspects of Montessori education including overseeing all Montessori schools, and establishing college programs for training Montessori teachers for certification in the United States’ Public School System.
Adelia Pyle, a student in Montessori’s First International Training Course in 1913, was the only American who, for a decade, served as a personal assistant to Maria Montessori. Most relevant to the establishment of Montessori education was the Pyle family’s financing of Montessori’s educational activities in the United States including the Montessori college training courses administered by Parkhurst. The withdrawal of Pyle family funds was a major factor in the failure of American Montessori education to flourish after its initial successful introduction.
In addition to their impact on the establishment of Montessori education in America , each of these remarkable women made substantial contributions to education , psychology, and religion. Margaret Naumburg and Adelia Pyle, though attracted by the psychic spiritual dimension in Montessori’s philosophy, took very divergent paths in their lives and careers. Naumburg, living a many dimensional intellectual life, sought spirituality in Carl Jung’s psychoanalytic Cosmic Unconsciousness. She also sought insight into the meaning of life thorough spiritual advisors in the psychic and paranormal realm. Naumburg became known as a Progressive educator, the founder of the Walden School , and an originator of the Art Therapy field.
Pyle’s spiritual search led her to convert to Maria Montessori’s Roman Catholicism . After ten years as Montessori’s aide, Pyle became a devotee of the Italian stigmatic and mystic Padre Pio. Today, she is a candidate for canonization as a saint in the Catholic Church.
Helen Parkhurst, so trusted by Montessori that she made her the director of all Montessori activities in the United States in 1915, developed the Dalton Plan, and became a recognized leader in Progressive education.
Montessori’s tendency to turn her trainees into discip...