Maria Montessori - A Biography

Maria's initiation into the field of education

photo of a maria when she was a young lady

After obtaining her medical degree, Maria worked as a surgical assistant in Santo Spirito. Apart from this, she also continued with her research in the University of Rome. Maria was a member of the University's Psychiatric Clinic. Here she became intrigued with trying to "educate the mentally challenged" and the "ineducable". This led her to discover the work of two Frenchmen, Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin who specialized in educating mentally handicapped and deaf children in Paris. Seguin and Itard refused to accept that the mentally handicapped could not be educated. They developed activities specially for these children which exercised the senses of sight and touch. These activities in fact helped the mentally challenged children make some progress. Maria studied Itard's and Seguin's works. She also read books of Friedrich Froebel, a German who had founded schools for children up to seven years. Armed with knowledge of her predecessors, Maria argued for the development of training for teachers along Froebelian lines (she also drew on Rousseau and Pestolozzi). She developed the principle that was to be the basis of her general education program: first the education of the senses, then education of the intellect..

photo of Froebel, Jean Itard, Edouard Seguin

The three educationists who deeply influenced Maria Montessori

In 1898, at an educational Congress in Turin, Maria gave a lecture about the training of the mentally challenged. The Italian minister for education was in attendance and was sufficiently impressed by her arguments to appoint her in the same year as the director of the Scuola Ortofrencia, an institution devoted to the care and education of the mentally challenged.

Maria accepted the appointment as it gave her an oppurtunity to test her theories. She developed a teaching program to enable the mentally challenged children to read and write. She sought to teach these skills not by having children repeatedly try it, but by developing exercises that prepare them. These exercises would then be repeated: Looking becomes reading, touching becomes writing.

As a result of her novel approach to teaching, several of her 8-year-old mentally challenged students at the institute applied to the state examination for reading and writing. All these children passed the examinations with above-average scores. This achievement of Maria is often described as "the First Montessorian Miracle".