Maria Montessori: Phenomenal Medicinal Specialist

Maria Montessori: A Pioneer in Education and Medicine

Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was by any measure a phenomenal person. She initially resisted entering the teaching profession, one of the few career paths available to women in the late nineteenth century, and instead became one of the first women to qualify as a medical doctor in Italy. As a physician, she specialized in psychiatry and pediatrics. While working with children with intellectual disabilities, she gained the crucial insight that, in order to learn, they required not medical treatment but rather an appropriate pedagogical approach. In 1900, she was given the opportunity to start developing her pedagogy when she was appointed director of an Orthophrenic School for developmentally disabled children in Rome. When her students performed as well in their exams as regularly developing students and praise was showered upon her for this achievement, she did not bask in that praise; instead, she pondered what it was about the education system in Italy that was failing children without disabilities. What was holding them back and preventing them from reaching their potential?

Montessori's Revolutionary Approach

In 1907, she had the chance to start working with non-disabled children in a housing project located in a slum area of Rome. There, she established her first 'Casa dei Bambini' ('children's house') for 3–7-year-olds. She continued to develop her distinctive pedagogy based on a scientific approach of experimentation and observation. Through this work, she argued that children go through sensitive periods for learning and several stages of development, and that children's self-construction can be nurtured through engaging with self-directed activities in a specially prepared environment. This approach emphasized the child's innate ability to learn and adapt. There was international interest in this new way of teaching, and there are now thousands of Montessori schools (primarily for children aged 3–6 and 6–12) throughout the world. Central to Montessori's method of education is the dynamic triad of child, teacher, and environment.

The Role of the Teacher and Environment

One of the teacher's roles is to guide the child through what Montessori termed the 'prepared environment,' a classroom and a method of learning designed to support the child's intellectual, physical, emotional, and social development through active exploration, choice, and independent learning. One way to understand the Montessori method, for the purposes of this review, is to consider two of its important aspects: the learning materials and the manner in which the teacher and the design of the prepared environment promote children's self-directed engagement with those materials. Regarding the learning materials, Montessori developed a set of manipulable objects designed to support children's learning of sensorial concepts, such as dimension, color, shape, and texture, as well as academic concepts in mathematics, literacy, science, geography, and history. These materials are crafted to encourage exploration and discovery, fostering a deeper understanding of the world.

Encouraging Self-Directed Learning

Regarding engagement, children learn by interacting hands-on with the materials, often individually, but also in pairs or small groups, during a 3-hour work cycle in which they are guided by the teacher to choose their own activities. They are given the freedom to choose what they work on, where they work, with whom they work, and for how long they work on a particular activity, all within the limits of the class rules. No competition is set up among children, and there is no system of extrinsic rewards or punishments. These two aspects—the learning materials themselves and the nature of the learning—make Montessori classrooms appear strikingly different from conventional classrooms. It should be noted that for Montessori, the goal of education is to allow the child's optimal development (intellectual, physical, emotional, and social) to unfold. This holistic approach emphasizes the importance of nurturing all aspects of a child's growth.

Montessori's Legacy and Modern Education

This is a markedly different goal from that of most education systems today, where the focus is on achievement in academic subjects such as literacy and mathematics. Therefore, when we pose the question, as this review paper does, of whether children benefit more from a Montessori education than from a non-Montessori education, we must bear in mind that the outcome measures used to capture effectiveness do not necessarily assess the things that Montessori considered most important in education. Educators and parents who choose the Montessori method may do so for reasons that are not so easily measurable by conventional standards. The enduring popularity of Montessori schools indicates a growing recognition of the value of an education that focuses on holistic development rather than solely academic achievement.

References

• Montessori, M. (1949). The Absorbent Mind. Adyar, Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House.
• Kramer, R. (1976). Maria Montessori: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.