Montessori's method began with children written off as uneducable
Maria Montessori trained as a doctor when Italian medicine barely admitted women, dissecting cadavers alone after hours. Working with children labelled uneducable, she built materials that let some of them pass exams set for ordinary pupils. Then she tried the same ideas on slum children in Rome, and a global method was born.
Montessori was born on 31 August 1870 in Chiaravalle, near Ancona. Her father, a finance ministry official, disapproved of her ambitions and wanted her to teach; her mother, a niece of the geologist Antonio Stoppani, encouraged her. At 13 she entered a boys' technical school intending to become an engineer, then switched her sights to medicine. Discouraged by the professor Guido Baccelli, she first took a natural sciences diploma, which let her join the medical programme in 1893.
Male students and staff harassed her, and because mixed dissection with a naked body was thought improper, she worked on corpses by herself in the evenings, smoking to mask the formaldehyde. She qualified as a doctor in 1896, studied paediatrics and psychiatry, and visited Roman asylums, where the plight of disabled children set her direction. The work of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Édouard Séguin gave her a starting point that she turned into a far more systematic practice.
In 1900 she became co-director of the Orthophrenic School, which trained teachers of children with learning difficulties and ran a laboratory classroom. Pupils drawn from asylums and schools as hopeless cases progressed well enough that some passed the public examinations. Her co-director Giuseppe Montesano was the father of her only son, Mario, born in 1898 and registered as of unknown parents; Montessori refused to marry because she would have been expected to stop working, and the child grew up with a wet nurse.
The turning point came in the San Lorenzo district of Rome, where a new block for low-income families needed someone to care for the tenants' young children. The first Casa dei Bambini opened on 6 January 1907 with about 50 or 60 children aged roughly two to seven. They dressed themselves, swept, dusted, gardened and worked with her materials, while the porter's daughter did the daily teaching under her eye. She died on 6 May 1952; her method is now used in schools around the world.
Source: Maria Montessori
