home

Imagine a little kid at school sitting on a little rug playing with wooden building blocks to learn math, reading in a circle with their friends, sharing with their parents all the things they learned that day when they go home. That was the vision that Maria Montessori had when she started teaching young children through her program. But did you know that before she was a teacher, Maria Montessori was a physician? Join us this episode as we follow Maria from the Italian countryside to the asylums of Rome to the cities of Spain, India and beyond. Her surprisingly star-studded and interesting life is completely worth the listen!

Feminist Corner:

• Do we value the clinician-educator in medicine, why or why not?

Listen to the episode, discuss these questions with friends and family, let us know what you think!

Show Notes:

Maria Montessori was born on August 21, 1870 in Chiaravalle, Italy. In 1875, she started at a local state school. When she graduated from secondary school, her parents suggested that she become a teacher, but she really wanted to become a doctor.

In 1890, she enrolled at the University of Rome where she studied physics, math and natural sciences. She graduated two years later and surprisingly, Pope Leo XIII advocated for her to enter a medical program. She became the first woman to enter medical school in Italy. 

On July 10, 1896 Maria graduated from medical school. In November 1896, she was working as a surgical assistant at a hospital in Rome and in 1897, she joined a research program at a psych clinic at the University of Rome where she worked with a man named Giuseppe Montesano, with whom she had a child out of wedlock. She sent the child away to be raised by a wet nurse rather than marrying Giuseppe, ultimately reuniting with her child 14 years later.

In the psychiatry clinic she worked at, she realized that the children were being deprived of sensory stimulation and that they needed to engage their brains in this way. She began reading more about children with developmental delay, particularly the works of Jean-Marc Itard and Edouard Seguin, two French scientists. They had created these different types of equipment to help develop children’s senses and motor skills. 

Maria wanted to build on this baseline knowledge, and went back to university to expand her understanding of education by attending classes in pedagogy, the study of teaching. 

In 1898, she started sharing and speaking on her opinion that children who were developmentally delayed lacked the support they needed which is why they became “delinquent.” Through education, she believed she could help these children succeed. 

Giuseppe Montesano and Maria, before they had their son Mario, opened a school together called the Orthophrenic School where they took children with a broad spectrum of disorders and taught them. In 1901, she left the Orthophrenic school and started her own studies in philosophy and anthropology. In 1904, she became a lecturer at the pedagogic school of the University of Rome where she stayed for 4 years. 

Maria began teaching neurotypical children using her teaching method from the Orthophrenic school in 1907 when opened her first “children’s house”. At this school, she realized that her approach to teaching was just giving kids a place where they could naturally develop the power to educate themselves, calling this auto-education. 

In the summer of 1909, Maria gave her first training course to a group of 100 students, teaching them the Montessori Method. She published a book in 1912 by the same name.

She ended up moving to Spain in 1917 with her son and his first wife, but for the next several decades her work was thwarted by men like Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco who either despised her work or wanted to twist it for their fascist regimes. 

In 1939, Maria and her son Mario went to India for a  training class where she met very famous Indians including Gandhi and Prime Minister Nehru. They remained in India for many years as they could not return due to war. In 1946, they finally returned to the Netherlands where their family had moved. On <ay 6, 1952 in the Netherlands, Maria died from a brain bleed of unknown cause, with her family beside her. 

The Montessori Education Philosophy is based on the idea that in learning, every child should be treated as an individual in their own right.

Sources:

Biography of Dr. Maria Montessori | Montessori Australia. (n.d.). https://montessori.org.au/biography-dr-maria-montessori

Chang, A., Karani, R. & Dhaliwal, G. Mission Critical: Reimagining Promotion for Clinician-Educators. J GEN INTERN MED 38, 789–792 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-022-07969-5

Maria Montessori. (2023, March 7). Biography. https://www.biography.com/scholar/maria-montessori

Mms. (2017, July 6). Montessori fun Facts. MMS. https://www.middleburgmontessori.com/post/2017/07/06/montessori-fun-facts

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (1998, July 20). Progressive education | Benefits, Principles & History. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/progressive-education

Web, A. T. (2022, July 14). 21 Interesting (+Fun!) Facts about Maria Montessori & Montessori Method. Ark Toys Web. https://thearktoys.com/interesting-facts-about-maria-montessori/Winter, J. (2022, March 3). The miseducation of Maria Montessori. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-miseducation-of-maria-montessori

Like the episode? Send us your thoughts and questions!