Maria Montessori - A Biography

Maria Montessori in the United States of America

photo of a maria studying at her table

In the year 1913, on the invitation of Margaret Wilson, daughter of the President of USA, Maria Montessori visited the US. In fact, it was in the same year that Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel had set up the Montessori Educational Association at their Washington, DC home. Thomas Alva Edison and Helen Keller were also strong advocates of Maria and her methods of education. Noted novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, was also very appreciative of the Montessori method of teaching. Ayn Rand considered Montessori's methods a more individualistic and reason-based alternative to what she saw as the shortcomings of progressive education.

On her second visit to the US, in 1915, Maria Montessori was invited to set up a classroom at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, where spectators watched twenty-one children, all new to this Montessori method, behind a glass wall for four months. The only two gold medals awarded for education went to this class. This experiment drew world-wide attention and thus education was never the same again.

Maria conducted a teacher training course in the US and also addressed the annual conventions of both the National Education Association and the International Kindergarten Union in the same visit.