Maria Montessori

Marion O'Donnell, Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441100665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Maria Montessori's work and thinking form a unique legacy to current educational thinking and practice. In this text, Marion O'Donnell explores the key themes of her philosophy of education and explores the relevance of Montessori practices today. In a thorough survey and synthesis of Montessori's thinking and work, this text examines the key aspects of Montessori education: child development; the learning environment; the role of the teacher; the role of the learner and parental involvement. Within each key aspect, the author considers the implications for Montessori education and the views of critics and supporters, demonstrating their relevance to the demands of an education system within today's modern society.

Part 1

Intellectual Biography

1 Montessori and the Origins of Montessori Education

Before the appearance of child psychology as an empirical science toward the end of the nineteenth century, perceptions of childhood in Western societies were radically different from those of today. From the sixteenth century, the treatment of children was often cruel and inhumane, both at home and at school. Many children were abandoned at birth and left to die, while many died in infancy from illness and disease. Unwanted children in foundling homes faced near-certain death (Piers, 1978). Those who did survive infancy were expected to behave like adults and were frequently beaten for any infraction. As soon as possible, children were sent to work, some as young as six, and many were, like animals, expected to obey instant orders and, like fractious colts in need of breaking in, have their wills broken. No consideration or provision was made for childhood itself and documentary evidence of children’s lives until the twentieth century reveals a grim picture (Clarke-Stewart et al., 1985). It is arguable that the roots of Montessori education date back to the sixteenth century when the beginnings of modern science began to appear. According to Butts (1955), the beliefs and assumptions of modern scientific pedagogy included three particular elements. First, there was a certainty that the secrets of nature could be revealed. Second, it was increasingly accepted that ‘science’ was what could be learned from nature itself rather than a body of knowledge from the past. Third, new knowledge was from the actual observation of nature, and after objective, clinical verification, the data were formally collated. It was a rationale that appears to mirror Montessori’s own scientific methodology. For Maria Montessori, childhood was a special period of life and the education we associate with her name began with practice rather than theory. A century after her work first attracted the attention of the world, her novel ideas of child development, the learning process, the role of the teacher, and curriculum content, all continue to excite a lively interest.

Maria Montessori was born on 31 August 1870 at Chiaraville, Ancona, Italy, the only child of Renilde Stoppani and Alessandro Montessori. She died at Noordwijk ann Zee, Holland, on 6 May 1952. Valuable insights into her life and work, which spanned the most horrific wars ever waged by mankind, have been documented by Montessori herself but there are also important biographies, notably by E. M. Standing (1957) and Rita Kramer (1976), that have helped to bring attention to her experiments in education. As a child she was educated at home where she showed a keen interest in mathematics and then was enrolled in a boys’ technical school to further her studies in mathematics and science. When her interest turned to medicine, there were many obstacles to overcome before she was allowed to enrol at the University of Rome as the very first Italian female to study medicine. Her first practical ventures in medicine were in nervous disorders and by 1895, while still a student, she was working in the psychiatric department of the pediatric clinic attached to the University of Rome where she came in contact with children of the inmates. Montessori observed them closely, noting particularly how they played with food dropped on the floor during mealtime. That behavior she interpreted as deriving from an inner urge to be active (Schulz-Benesch, 1997: 189). Graduating in 1896 with Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Surgery degrees, both with honours, Montessori went into private practice, at the same time acquiring an appointment as surgical assistant at the hospital run by Rome University, along with a post in the university’s psychiatric clinic. It was in the latter that she met Dr. Giuseppe Montesano who fathered her love-child Mario (born 1898). Montessori’s interests swiftly turned in the direction of children’s mental diseases, becoming more and more convinced that a key to solving the contemporary problems regarding these children was that mental deficiency presented chiefly a ‘pedagogical rather than a medical problem’ (Montessori, 1964: 31). Here she differed from her colleagues who treated mental diseases through gymnastics (motor education). When she sought ways to ease the plight of these hapless children, she became intimately acquainted with the pioneering work of two French doctors, Itard and Séguin, later acknowledging that she ‘followed Séguin’s book and also derived much help from the remarkable experiments of Itard’ (ibid.: 36). Another whose work she paid tribute to was Giuseppe Sergi, the Italian anthropologist who ardently promoted ‘the principles of a new civilization based upon education’ (ibid.: 2).

Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard (1775–1838) ranks as the first to exert a seminal influence on Montessori’s philosophy of education. A French physician and student of philosophy, he was the founder of a branch of medical science known as Otiatria, concerned with diseases of the ear. From 1800, he worked as physician at the Paris Institute for Deaf Mutes where he developed a methodical education for the sense of hearing. In his first year at the Institute, a boy about twelve years of age, described as possessing animal behavior, was discovered by the villagers of Aveyron. Itard was invited to examine and treat the boy who had been abandoned in the forest at birth and left to die. This wild boy of Aveyron, named Victor, stripped of all human social life and culture, had no language, walked on all fours, and acted like the wolves with whom he had lived in the forest – a true child of nature (Montessori, 1964). Although the boy was seen by the most eminent medical authorities as ineducable, Itard accepted the challenge to civilize him and worked with him for the following eight years. In 1801, he chronicled his observations of Victor in his classic book Des Premiers Développements physiques et moraux du Jeune Sauvage de l’Aveyron, which was translated into English as The Wild Boy of Aveyron in 1802. His method was an extension of the successful program he had been following with students with hearing impairment, using the sensorial materials he had designed specifically for them. Itard was ‘the first educator to practice observation of his pupil in the way the sick are observed in hospitals, especially those suffering from diseases of the nervous system’ (ibid.: 34). His minute descriptions of a child’s behavior were formally documented in a diary which Montessori called ‘practically the first attempt at educational psychology.’ For Itard, Victor’s education had a twofold aim: to lead him from a natural life to a social life; and to provide him with an intellectual education. Itard noted that the boy loved and immersed himself in nature – the sun, the moon, the stars, and the weather all providing a source of natural joy. He laughed with delight at flashes of lightning, danced with joy in the rain, and howled in empathy at the full moon. He began very slowly to take pleasure from new social experiences (Cole, 1950). He learned to dress, feed, and attend to personal needs. The work required great patience since Victor had no experience of human relationships. He invariably ran since walking was unknown to him and Itard ran behind him to keep up. It was a telling case of the teacher adapting to the pupil and modifying his own behavior to suit his student. Discarding long-held philosophical theories, Itard began experimental psychology through observation, developing a bond with his pupil while following his pupil’s lead and building up a repertoire of teaching methods for the development of the boy’s senses (Montessori, 1964). In his book, Itard had described ‘the moral work which led the savage to civilisation as he was surrounded with loving care’ (ibid.: 150). The wild boy of Aveyron experiment still evokes keen debate today but Itard’s rationale was simplicity itself: he studiously observed Victor. There are elements of Itard’s scientific methodology found in Montessori education. Like Itard, she did not start with a theory but followed children’s natural tendencies. Each child was closely observed as an individual case study, with detailed notes and records kept of each child’s progress. Children found themselves in a stable, supportive environment which helped to nurture the human spirit. The Montessori teacher was to adapt to each pupil in a deliberate reversal of traditional roles in order to create happy learning experiences.

Edouard Séguin (1812–80), a teacher and then physician of deaf-mutes in Paris, was the second major influence on Montessori. As an adolescent, he had come under the spell of the Comte Claude de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) who advocated a social reconstruction based on ‘love one another’ and whose social theory ‘developed into socialism’ (Cole, 1950: 542). William Boyd has also noted that Séguin applied to education Comte’s belief that ‘the aim of education was not individualistic but a preparation for an ideal society,’ a community in which love would be the dominant motive of life and ‘moral education the crown of education’ (Boyd, 1921: 363–5). Séguin agreed with Rousseau and Itard that individual sensory-motor training was essential in early education. For Séguin, education depended on two things: first, the individual acting on the environment (nature), and second, harmonious social relationships (nurture). He became a doctor specifically to treat diseases of deafness, paralysis, and idiocy. Mentally retarded children at that time were categorized as ‘morons,’ ‘imbeciles,’ and the lowest group as ‘idiots’ who were considered to be unteachable. In 1846, Séguin founded the first school for feebleminded children in Paris where he modified Itard’s experiments over a period of ten years while working with children taken from asylums (Kramer, 1976: 60). Everything he did was recorded in his Traitement moral, Hygiène et Education des Idiots et des autres Enfants arrières (1846). Most of his pupils were inert and helpless, spending much of the day in bed and requiring full-time care (Hans, 1994: 191). The curriculum used by Séguin included practical things to help their development. Muscular education involved lessons to help the children in feeding and clothing themselves, learning to walk unassisted, maintaining equilibrium, and walking upstairs and downstairs. In so doing, they felt muscular sensations and began to grow independent of adults. Muscular sensations fostered through touching and feeling led his students from simple perceptions to a more sophisticated sensory appreciation using the mind and the senses. The students learned to care for themselves, which helped reduce the costs of their care at the school (Cole, 1950: 545–7). Séguin’s lessons, given individually, were designed to be joyful, spiritual, practical hands-on experiences. He made a close individual study of his pupils, recognizing each as an individual and designing and constructing didactic (self-correcting) materials for each one. With his methods, ‘the education of idiots was actually possible’ (Montessori, 1964: 37). Everything Séguin did was described in detail in his book Traitement moral, the English translation of which Treatise on Idiocy (1866) still remains a standard work for teachers of hearing-impaired children. Montessori education incorporates a number of Séguin-related exercises including ‘walking the line’ designed for good posture, and exercises in practical life to help children become completely independent of adults (Montessori, 1964). Other identifiable elements of his philosophy and practice found in Montessori classrooms were democracy and harmony, all children being encouraged to take an active part in their own education as their rightful due and to live and work together amicably. The immediate goal was a school society at peace with itself, the long-term goal being global peace in perpetuity.

The third great influence on Montessori’s emerging philosophy of education was Giuseppe Sergi, founder of the Institute of Experimental Psychology at the University of Rome in 1876, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rome from 1884 to 1916. Sergi’s long-term goal was to see all men living together in harmony and to this end, he sought to establish natural, comprehensible methods by which teachers took ‘numerous, exact and rational observations of man as an individual, principally during infancy, which is the age at which the foundations of education and culture must be laid’ (ibid.: 3). He was convinced that educational methods urgently needed to be reconstructed to bring about a desirable human regeneration, and in his lectures, collated in Educazione ed Instruczione, he encouraged teachers to join the new movement. Sergi also advocated a ‘methodical study of the one to be educated under the guidance of pedagogical anthropology and experimental psychology’ (ibid.: 2, 3). Such a methodology was clearly pivotal in Montessori’s own method.

There were also other notable influences on Montessori’s work. Because of her interest in childhood mental diseases, Montessori enrolled in courses in pedagogy and educational theory during 1897 and 1898, becoming familiar with the theories and writings of Locke, Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, and Owen. These educators visualized education as a means of creating a new, ideal society, particularly Robert Owen who set out in practical ways to help his poor factory workers improve their education, their lifestyles, and their general happiness in life. In his model village infant school and school at his cotton mill in Scotland’s New Lanark, these dramatic changes in the human condition became a reality (Conservation Trust, Scotland, 1997). In 1897, while still on the threshold of a career as an educator, Montessori attended the National Medical Congress in Turin, which discussed the causes of delinquency in retarded and disturbed children. The following year, she returned for the National Pedagogy Congress (1898) on reforming school policy by segregating ‘degenerate’ children from normal pupils. Studies in penology had convinced her that punishment did not provide a deterrent to criminality and that criminals behaved destructively because of the nature of their feelings and their flawed reasoning (Kramer, 1976: 74). She expressed her opinions in a paper on ‘Moral Education’, the result of which was an invitation from the Minister of Education, Guido Baccelli, to present to the teachers of Rome a course of lectures on the education of feeble-minded children. These lectures aroused so much interest that a Medical Pedagogical Institute was established and Montessori was put in charge of classes made up of children from Rome’s elementary schools considered to be seriously or hopelessly deficient. Also enrolled were ‘idiot’ children selected from the asylums (Montessori, 1964: 32). During 1898–99, Montessori taught these abnormal children in Rome from eight in the morning to seven in the evening, making a thorough study of what she called ‘remedial pedagogy.’ Her plan was to help the deficient children’s mental condition by ‘elevating their minds to a higher level through curative pedagogy’ (ibid.: 31). At that time, she designed and constructed a great variety of new didactic materials and through their application obtained the most surprising results. She found the work with deficient (abnormal) children exhausting but pointed out that the more encouragement, comfort, love, and respect she gave ‘the more we renew and reinvigorate the life about us’ (ibid.: 36, 37). At the end of those two years, she presented some of the children for the Italian Open Examination. All passed the rigorous tests in reading and writing, whereas some children from the state schools failed. With the conspicuous success of her children in the open examination, in 1900, Montessori was appointed as director of a Demonstration School in Rome and invited to train teachers for children suffering mental diseases. In attendance were twenty-two pupils, hitherto unsuccessful learners at schools, with whom Montessori used the opportunity to trial the materials of Itard and Séguin. The results were impressive and sixty-four teacher-trainees of abnormal children were inducted into the profession using these methods (Kramer, 1976: 85, 86). The quality of work she was obtaining with subnormal children led Montessori to suspect that serious deficiencies existed in the established and accepted practices in government schools (Montessori, 1964: 31, 32). She became increasingly convinced that the methods she used were more rational and more beneficial than those in current use in state schools and had potential for helping normal children as well. She determined to undertake the teaching of normal children based on her own findings and withdrew from active teaching of deficient children per se in order to re-study the works of Itard and Séguin, and also to find time for what she called ‘meditation’ (ibid.: 41).

In 1899, Montessori traveled to London where she was presented to Queen Victoria, then she went on to Paris to study practical ways ‘of educating deficients’ and visit schools where new methods were being utilized. Some were using Séguin’s didactic materials, most of them faithfully following his rules to the letter, but not one attained the spectacular results he had documented in his writings. For Montessori, the reason was simple: the materials were being used in a cold, mechanical way without the human, spiritual ingredient Séguin had injected, and lacking the warmth of involvement that he had evoked from his young charges. In 1901, Montessori returned to the University of Rome where her studies included philosophy, experimental psychology, and research into pedagogical anthropology in elementary schools. During that research period she carried out her own empirical studies (Müller and Schneider, 2002), taking particular notice of children sitting motionless and silent all day listening to the teacher talking. What they were undergoing, she concluded, was impersonal rote learning in which they were coerced into doing what the teacher chose for them to do. Miscreants were punished severely for any errors (Montessori, 1964: 21, 33, 42). She soon saw that such schools were not happy places and determined to devise better methods for students of all ages. It was during this time that she translated by hand Séguin’s Traitement moral (1846) from the original French, a monumental task which filled her with awareness ‘of the immensity and importance of a work which should be able to reform the school and education’ (ibid.: 42). On complet...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Part 1 Intellectual Biography
• Part 2 Critical Exposition of Montessori’s Work
• Part 3 The Reception and Influence of Montessori’s Work
• Part 4 The Relevance of Montessori Education Today
• Bibliography
• Definitions of Some Montessori Terms
• Index
• Copyright