Philosopher
Maria Montessori
1870–1952
Italian physician, psychologist and philosopher whose educational method, based on children's freedom in a prepared environment, now guides schools around the world.
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Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, near Ancona, in 1870. After technical secondary school she entered the University of Rome, transferred to medicine and graduated in 1896, the same year she went to Berlin as Italy’s delegate to an international women’s congress. She co-directed a school for children with a wide range of disadvantages and studied the work of Itard and Séguin in Paris.
Her first ‘Children’s House’ in Rome’s San Lorenzo district, described in a 1909 book, won her international fame, and she spent the rest of her life training teachers in many countries. She was also a psychologist, anthropologist and cultural critic, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in Noordwijk aan Zee, the Netherlands, in 1952.
Key ideas
- Learning from free children
- In environments prepared for them, children can flourish in freedom, and in doing so reveal basic truths about human nature, development and culture. Montessori drew her philosophy from these ‘revelations’.
- Peace is the work of education
- Establishing peace, she said, is the work of education: her pedagogy was developed with peace in mind, moving outwards from the child’s harmony with body and surroundings to the family, the nation and the world.
- Educational, not merely medical
- Working with disadvantaged children, she argued against biological theories such as Lombroso’s that their problems were ‘more educational than medical’.
- Tradition
- Western
- Region
- Rome and worldwide
- Period
- Contemporary
- Themes
- Education
Key works
- The Method of Scientific Pedagogy (Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica), 1909
- The Absorbent Mind, 1949
Sources
- Patrick Frierson, Maria Montessori, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy