Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was an Italian physician celebrated as an innovator in childhood education theory and practice. She is the author of The Montessori Method (1912) and many other famous books on her philosophy of education.
Born in Chiaravalle, Italy, Montessori was a brilliant student. At age 13, she studied engineering and went to a technical school despite her father’s objections that all her classmates were boys. She decided to pursue medicine a few years later, got the approval of the Pope, and became the first woman in Italy to earn a medical degree.
As a physician, Montessori attended children with special needs and became interested in learning and education methods. She theorized that each child had individual intrinsic talents. A school must allow the child’s activities to develop freely. A teacher’s responsibility was to help that child discover his/her abilities and interests, instead of assuming that the child is a blank state and then prescribing everything the child should know. Montessori stressed independence, self-directed learning, personal decision-making, and learning from fellow-children.
There are now more than 22,000 Montessori schools in 110 countries. Advocates argue that the Montessori System fosters social and academic skills, while critics say that the classroom environment is “too free” and question Montessori’s teaching priorities.
During World War II, Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime wanted to make her a figurehead for the Italian government, and when she dissented, she was sent to exile. She lived and worked in India for many years, where she collaborated with the poet Rabindranath Tagore and continued developing her educational methods. While in India, she developed Education for Peace and was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She died in Holland.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Maria Montessori
Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Discipline
What is a scientist? We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.
—Maria Montessori
The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Education, Goodness, School, Evil
The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Teaching, Teachers
Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Potential
Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Education
If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Society, Education
The greatest sign of success for a teacher … is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist.”
—Maria Montessori
An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Liberty
If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be thus placed in order, that it is a good and pleasing arrangement in the room, this ordered and tranquil adjustment of theirs—then their remaining in their places, quiet and silent, is the result of a species of lesson, not an imposition. To make them understand the idea, without calling their attention too forcibly to the practice, to have them assimilate a principle of collective order—that is the important thing.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Order
If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Education
There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Language
If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
—Maria Montessori
Topics: Children
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