History of Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori (1870-1952), the first Italian woman M.D., was one of the great germinal pioneers in studying the intellectual development of the young child. Only through movement and manipulation, through thinking with the senses, does the child proceed to later "abstract thinking."

Dr. Montessori carried her insight that children learned through all their senses to its logical conclusion. On their way to "cleanliness, order, poise, and conversation," children use Montessori materials inherently logical and aesthetically pleasing to develop a sense of order and logical thought, and a firm foundation for success in the three R's.

(This information is drawn from The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori, Schoken Books, New York: 1969.)

The Montessori System

Dr. Holmes was quoted in the Report of the Commissioner of Education for the year ending June 30, 1912, as summing up the characteristic features of the Montessori system as follows:

First and most important, all organization and equipment which make it possible to dispense absolutely with the artificial restraints commonly imposed in the schools and to grant children a freedom they could not have even in their own homes.

Second, a plan of instruction and management which dispenses with formal class teaching and substitutes for it the individual guidance of the child's own efforts to learn.

Third, a series of activities and a set of materials and apparatus especially designed to develop children's bodies and minds systematically, and the didactic objects, originated by Dr. Montessori or taken over from Seguin and others, for sense training and physical development.

Fourth, a daily program which includes a large variety of social enterprises in which the children are trained for the duties of practical life and to which they may turn at almost any time they tire of the didactic materials or the other formal work. Under this last category comes the hygienic care of the children themselves, which includes careful medical inspection and also anthropometric measurements for both scientific and corrective purposes.

Dr. Holmes emphasizes particularly the organization and environment. A Montessori school is, indeed, a "house of childhood." It is a republic, in which the children are free citizens. It is this condition which permits and favors the real Montessori method, the method of free individual auto-education.

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