Montessori Schools

History

Montessori education began in 1907 when Maria Montessori, one of Italy's first female physicians, opened the first Casa dei Bambini as part of an urban renewal project in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. In her early years as a physician, Montessori held an appointment at the university hospital while also operating a private practice. As she practiced medicine among the poor in Rome, she was drawn to the condition of those children and youth who were called “feebleminded” or “deficient.” The work of the French physicians and psychologists Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard and Edouard Séguin was particularly influential. Both devoted their careers to working with people with disabilities, and it was from this orientation that Montessori launched her own work with children.

From Itard, Montessori adopted the practice of studying children's activity in their environment and then adjusting the environment based on those observations. Séguin, a student of Itard's, had begun [Page 679]developing instructional apparatuses specifically for mentally impaired children. In addition to a focus on didactic materials, Montessori also adopted Séguin's developmental orientation toward learning environments. That is, Séguin observed that the environment itself should be customized to the needs of children at various stages of development. In Montessori's hands, the notion of developmentally responsive environment, filled with carefully constructed didactic materials, became the “prepared environment,” one of the cornerstones of the Montessori Method.

Soon after the opening of the first Casa dei Bam-bini, Dr. Montessori began to receive acclaim for the method. In 1909, following the opening of subsequent Casas and confident that the approach would hold universal appeal, Montessori published Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all'educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini, whose English translation is simplified to The Montessori Method.

Montessori made two heavily promoted trips to the United States. During both of these visits, she lectured to sold-out auditoriums and in the process developed an ardent American following, which led to a rapid proliferation of American Montessori schools and societies. American interest in Montessori, however, was not all positive. From the beginning, critics on both sides of the Atlantic attacked Montessori education. One of the most vocal detractors was famed Teachers College professor and self-proclaimed follower of John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick. In 1914, Kilpatrick produced a scathing critique that railed against the “fallacies” of self-correcting materials, “outworn and castoff” psychological theory, and a sharp focus on concentration at the supposed expense of social development. In a similar vein, Charlotte Mason, a leader of the British infant school movement, lamented what she viewed as Montessori's overemphasis on academic learning at the expense of the play spirit necessary for a happy early childhood.

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