About Maria Montessori

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Who was Maria Montessori?

Maria Montessori was, born in the town of Chiaravalle, in the province of Ancona, Italy in 1870. In 1896, she became the first female physician in Italy to graduate from medical school.

In her medical practice, her clinical observations led her to analyze how children learn, and she concluded that they build themselves from what they find in their environment. In 1901, she decided to return to university to study psychology and philosophy and was made a professor of anthropology at the University of Rome in 1904.

Her Desire to Help Children

She wanted to help children and, in 1906, she gave up both her university chair and her medical practice to work with a group of sixty young children of working parents in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. It was there that she founded the first Casa dei Bambini, or "Children's House", and what eventually became the Montessori method, based on Maria Montessori's scientific observations of these children's ability to absorb knowledge from their surroundings, as well as their interest in manipulating materials. Every piece of equipment, every exercise, every method Montessori developed was based on what she observed children to do "naturally," without being assisted by adults.

She was determined to prove how children teach themselves and this is what inspired Montessori's lifelong pursuit of educational reform, methodology, psychology, teaching, and teacher training.

In the United States

Maria Montessori first visited to the United States in 1913. That same year, Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel founded the Montessori Educational Association in their Washington, DC, home. Among her other strong American supporters were Thomas Edison and Helen Keller.

Around the World

The Spanish government invited her to open a research institute in 1917. In 1919, she began a series of teacher training courses in London. In 1922, she was appointed a government inspector of schools in her native Italy, but because of her opposition to Mussolini's fascism, she was forced to leave Italy in 1934. She traveled to Barcelona, Spain, and was rescued there by a British cruiser in 1936, during the Spanish Civil War. She opened the Montessori Training Centre in Laren, Netherlands, in 1938, and founded a series of teacher training courses in India in 1939.

Later, she founded the Montessori Center in London (1947). And, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times—in 1949, 1950, and 1951.

Maria Montessori died in Holland in 1952, but her work lives on through the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), an organization she founded to continue on her work.