It is difficult to underestimate the importance of the Montessori method in training the young innovators who have brought about the Internet revolution. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google both trained in a Montessori school. Even Jeff Bezosci passed. All have publicly acknowledged the contribution of creativity and liberation they owe to Montessori thought and action. Today there are 5 Montessori schools in the world, a quarter of which are in the United States alone (500 are public schools).
We are therefore pleased to offer our readers a profile of Maria Montessori as a woman and scientist written by Francesca Marone taken from the beautiful volume published by Guerini e Associati (soon available in digital format) entitled Stories of women. Female autobiographies and identity narration edited by Simonetta Ulivieri and Irene Biemmi.
All my life I have proclaimed the need for freedom of choice, independence of thought and human dignity. However I believe that true freedom, the inner one, cannot be given. It can't even be conquered. It can only be built up within oneself, as part of the personality and, if this happens, it can no longer be lost.
Maria Montessori
1. An atypical path
Why talk about Maria Montessori? For her revolution in school achieved through a thought that is still current; but also and, above all, for the exceptional life in terms of innovation and intellectual rigor of one of the few female doctors of her time, of a feminist and of an Italian whose ideas and whose social and scientific commitment established themselves in the world.
Born in 1870 to liberal parents involved in politics, in 1875 she was enrolled in a popular school in Rome, after which she continued her studies in a technical and scientific school to obtain a diploma. Her courageous and atypical course of study has darted along technological and scientific tracks. But in those last years of the Italian XNUMXth century, in order to give substance to her dreams, Maria, as a woman, had to fight: she wanted to enroll in the faculty of engineering, but in spite of herself, she fell back on medicine and surgery, transferring her knowledge to anatomy and physiology. his passion for technology. So she graduated in medicine and then discovered a third way, the pedagogical one, which in her time would bring her success and fame.
Although she was not the first woman to have graduated in medicine, her presence in the Roman university was an object of great curiosity. Not to mention that bodies, bowels, dissections and palpations created many problems for her: not only because she challenged traditional conventions and roles but also because she had to come to terms with the education she received and her own feelings as a late XNUMXth century girl. She became famous to the point that the magazine The popular illustration in 1896 he dedicated an article with photos to her.
In the same year, the degree arrived, discussing his experimental thesis in psychiatry, a subject towards which he was mainly orienting himself. Shortly thereafter, he exercised his scientific activity in the ambit of the chair of psychiatry, directed by Ezio Sciamanna and under the guidance of Sancte de Sanctis, one of the fathers of Italian psychology. Later, he moved to the medical-pedagogical institute adjacent to the asylum of S. Maria della Pietà directed by Clodomiro Bonfigli, working together with his colleague Giuseppe Montesano, one of the pioneers of child neuropsychiatry in Italy. This terrible experience among the outcasts of mankind was a revelation for the young doctor, impressed by the concomitant presence in that place of children suffering from different pathologies, including those with simple behavioral disorders and, therefore, condemned to stay in that place.
In the meantime, a few months before graduating, the beginning of her feminist commitment can be dated, as she joined the «Per la Donna» Association, promoted by Rosa-Mary Amadori, director of the magazine Female life. Shortly after graduating, she represented Italy at the International Congress on Women's Rights in Berlin to discuss crucial issues with women from different parts of the world: social reforms, equal rights with men in study and work, education and peace; among other things, getting annoyed by the attention given to her by the press of the time, especially with regard to her pleasant and attractive physical appearance, with the fear of seeing her social and professional commitment devalued.
In 1906, she adhered to Anna Maria Mozzoni's proposal to present a petition to Parliament for the female vote, as part of the more general campaign for universal suffrage. The young scientist appealed to Italian women through the pages of La Vita for them to register on the electoral roll, as successfully proposed in the United States of America. But in Italy things went differently; a debate was unleashed in the press between those in favor of women voting and those against it: almost forty years would have had to pass before Italian women were granted the right to vote on a par with men.
The commitment to women's rights and reflections on the women's question led her to move away from positivist determinism and some, even illustrious, statements on the natural inferiority of women to formulate, instead, a "scientific feminism" that emerged from her experience of life.
Indeed this period, while fruitful from the point of view of discoveries and professional successes, was stormy and full of contradictions for her. In the same years, in fact, the twenty-eight-year-old nonconformist, beautiful and elegant Maria found herself living a passionate love story with painful consequences against all social conventions with Giuseppe Montesano, her study and workmate. In 1898 Mario was born from their relationship, kept secret for the sake of appearances as required by current morality. The two decide not to marry but their relationship will crack forever in 1901, when Montesano resolved to marry another woman, not keeping his promise. Meanwhile, the child was entrusted by mutual agreement to a trusted family residing in the countryside: there she, Maria, would systematically visit him, only to take him back with her in 1913; and, precisely, after the death of her mother who was opposed to this motherhood which she considered an obstacle to her daughter's career. Over time Mario will become her main and original collaborator and will only be recognized by her in the 50s.
Therefore, in the traditionally male-dominated academic circles of the late nineteenth century, his unusual educational itinerary, not only as regards studies but also his private choices and, last but not least, his original pedagogical model that broke traditional stereotypes, made him an uncomfortable character because difficult to categorize.
His method and his pedagogical reform, resulting above all from direct observation of the child rather than from consolidated and abstract currents of thought, have radically innovated the relationship between adults and children, rethinking education for the benefit of the latter. Maria inaugurated a liberating pedagogy that allowed children, especially abandoned and deprived ones, to adapt to life without deformation, preserving their individuality.
An independent spirit and a figure of great charm, she escaped any cultural and political cage: neither positivist, nor idealist, neither of the right nor of the left, she was regarded with suspicion by Catholics for her evasion of the rigidly confessional tradition. Not manifestly secular nor exclusively Catholic, she Montessori was first courted by the fascist regime and then opposed and detested by Mussolini.
As for her relations with the Church, which at that time did not spare arrows towards science and feminists, these then deteriorated definitively between 1929 and 1934 when the Doctor (as her collaborators called her) refused to accept the idea of original sin as well as an external authority that rewards and punishes. Although it has been recognized by many of her that she never lacked a certain spirituality and that a profound religiosity, to be understood with "the sense of the sacred of the human being", pervades her work; certainly, the work of a democratic and liberal scientist, open to religious and intercultural comparison, beyond morality and pre-established conventions.
On the other hand, in 1899, she had enrolled in the Theosophical Society and suffered a certain influence throughout her life, perhaps attracted by some of its principles, including that of sexual equality. Furthermore, belonging to this international association, closely linked to the Masonic environment, facilitated the diffusion of her pedagogical method throughout the world.
In reality, theosophy attributed great importance to education, pursuing the project of forming a better humanity: hence the great interest nourished by its exponents for Montessori theories and for its schools. Without the protection of powerful men she was a nomad and not only culturally. In fact, due to the hostilities shown in Italy towards her person and her pedagogical model, she became in her own way an emigrant, albeit an illustrious one. Maria Montessori traveled a lot, from America to Spain, then to Holland and India, a country that she traveled for a long time, meeting favorable conditions for her pedagogical teaching. When she was asked what nationality she was, the scientist replied: "I live in Heaven, my country is a star that revolves around the sun and is called Earth".
Various honors were reserved for her abroad. She was awarded honorary degrees from many universities and was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government; she was awarded the Order of Orange Nassau by the Queen of Holland; she obtained the Pestalozzi world prize and, in New York, an award from the International Women's Exhibition for her international commitment. In addition, she was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
She returned to Italy only after the end of the Second World War, in 1947, acclaimed by Parliament for reorganizing the Opera dedicated to her. Once again, Italy did not understand it. After all, her method has never been officially adopted in Italian public schools, even though it constitutes a fundamental pedagogical and didactic basis for nursery and elementary school teachers.
Returning definitively to Holland, she died there, aged 82, on 6 May 1952. Precisely in Noordwijk, a small village on the North Sea with her son Mario next to her, whom she will officially acknowledge, for the first time, in her will. Mario, having become her protector, the factotum who solved all her practical problems and created the necessary conditions for her "heroic" life as an educator, will be the custodian and witness of the vital traces and of the commitment she felt she had to assume not only for herself but for humanity, through her words and what has been written about her.
When the adventurous life of this scrupulous professional – one of the most innovative scholars of the twentieth century – came to an end, she seemed to belong to another era; she died "far from her land that she had loved so deeply", as the plaque on the tomb of the Montessori family in Rome says, "so she wanted as a testimony to the universality of her work that made her a citizen of the world" .
2. On the children's side: the Montessori method and its diffusion in the world
At the beginning of the XNUMXth century Maria joined a group of young psychiatrists, including Sante De Sanctis, Clodomiro Bonfigli, and the aforementioned Giuseppe Montesano, with whom she faced the tragic situation of disabled children, then mostly defined as "oligophrenics". Together they aroused national interest around the problem, also underlining its social implications and noting the importance of a specific intervention that was more educational than medical.
Left in a state of neglect and often mistreated, these maladjusted and disturbed children struck the professional acumen of the scholar from the Marches, who decided to devote herself to them, shifting her attention from their medicalisation to the relationship between school and juvenile distress.
The problem, therefore, for her was essentially of a pedagogical nature. Having obtained the position of teacher of pedagogical anthropology, she fought for the weakest, reporting her experience in the scientific congresses of the time.
Furthermore, he undertook to give pedagogy a scientific guise, referring to the anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi from whom he was also inspired as regards the development of the teaching methodology, which was affected, among other things, by the influence of the two French doctors Eduard Séguin and Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, who had cared for wild children or children with serious learning difficulties.
Thus, energetic and tireless, she stubbornly began her mission for the recovery of young patients no longer through medical care but with the help of suitable materials. In this way, she obtained unexpected results and soon became famous, thinking of extending her methodology also to normal children through the setting up of a private school.
When, in fact, in Rome at the end of 1906, the engineer Talamo, author of the restoration of the dilapidated apartment buildings, which had arisen without any social and hygienic criteria between 1884 and 88 in the peripheral district of San Lorenzo, had proposed to create for marginalized children of the neighborhood a suitable place, Maria accepted with enthusiasm and a room on the ground floor of one of the houses was made available to her.
Thus a completely new experience was born: on 6 January 1907, in Via dei Marsi 58, surrounded by absolute poverty, the first Casa dei Bambini, for guests from three to six years old.
Inside a dilapidated block of public housing, Montessori worked hard to understand the functioning of the human psyche in learning environments that were no longer oppressive and mortifying but harmoniously structured, so as to allow the unsuspected potential to be revealed. For the little ones, in fact, he designs light and colorful furniture; he prepares furnishings proportionate to the physical size of the children; he brings them the tested materials and prepares new ones in the face of the lively response of the children; he carefully defines the outdoor spaces, which include the indispensable presence of the garden. The teaching is individualized, according to the peculiarities of each one and contemplates that guests are engaged in practical activities such as washing, sweeping, setting the tables for lunch, and at the same time immersed in sensory experiences, through music and movement for example without neglecting the narrative. The novelty is that no one scolds them and they help each other spontaneously, mixed by age, supporting each other and also acquiring the ability to self-control, the acme of which is being silent and learning to appreciate the activities that favor concentration and contact with themselves.
The education not to express judgments, the elimination of desks, the lack of rewards and punishments in the face of carefully organized spaces of freedom, produces positive effects: among other things, freedom of expression promotes discipline and self-control. Evidently, the paradigm of training is changed forever. Also, the Children's homesamong other things, they performed a «socialized maternal function», as Montessori herself said; an eminently social function, of support to working mothers who could leave their children in competent and safe hands, while respecting the rules also on the part of the parents: in the schools there was «the obligation to send their children clean and to assist 'educational work of the director'. Rules that many felt comfortable adhering to since the director was always available to the mothers and she even began to live in the same building as the families of her little pupils, becoming a model of life for those underprivileged.
So, le Children's homes they weren't simply schools but social projects, research laboratories open to progress and in which extracurricular activities were also dealt with. From experience in Casa dei Bambini, Maria felt the need to train adults too since, in order for children to show their authentic abilities, non-aggressive, non-judgmental teachers and parents are needed, able to observe before intervening and able to welcome the little ones in environments full of significant objects, responding to everyone's age and progressive abilities, supporting them serenely. In 1913 the first course for teachers was held in Umbria. Subsequently, in the "Montessori schools" there was a significant presence of educators from overseas with a consequent amplification of the work of the pedagogist from the Marches.
The new educational proposal went beyond the boundaries of the city of Rome, to expand into Milan, with schools in working-class neighborhoods as well as in the bourgeoisie, after all famous people studied there, and then abroad: in Holland, Norway, France, England, Sweden, Spain, Russia, the United States after his 1913 stay, later in South America, Asia.
In the meantime, he had published the volume in 1917 The method, written in 1909 and translated into the main European languages and into Japanese. The text met with international success that pushed her to Spain, France and the United States, where she experimented with her educational model with children of different races, gaining the certainty that it was truly universal. In 1929, the Italian scientist founded the International Montessori Association, AMI, with Sigmund Freud, Piaget and the poet Tagore, another of her admirers, financially supported by illustrious personalities such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, JanMasaryk, Guglielmo Marconi and Mahatma Gandhi, who he had visited his classes during a stay in Rome in the 1930s.
The Montessori method taught to educate the child to self-correction and control, through the autonomization of the same and without prescriptive interventions and impositions by the adult.
Montessori's assumption is that from the point of view of the psychic structure the child behaves differently from the adult: his mind is an "absorbing mind" in that it "takes things from the environment and embodies them in itself". In doing so, the child "creates himself" and his own internal world; he creates his own "mindflesh" which permeates his relationships with the world.
On these bases, the Italian educator came to define the ultimate meaning of education as a transformative horizon of humanity's conscience through childhood, in the sense of a true and proper psychic restructuring of humanity.
This idea of a man's father child, who holds within himself a secret of life which, if repressed, leads to pathology while, if identified, offers the subject the possibility of solving his individual and social problems, was already discussed by psychoanalysis . In fact, it is Freud himself who comments on the mutual interest in the child's psyche and testifies to his esteem for the Doctor. This interest was also shared by Freud's daughter, Anna, a child psychoanalyst, who had trained in a Montessori school in Vienna. Therefore, she willingly offered her personal contribution to the drafting of the most complete biography of the Italian scholar, effectively recounting the originality of Montessori thought and the enthusiasm that she and her pupils poured into the numerous activities aimed at the free development of the child; an enthusiasm the Freuds knew well.
3. The new woman: education, freedom, democracy
Little appreciated in Italy and known throughout the world, Maria Montessori was a curious, determined woman, and a scholar gifted with no small amount of courage: she fought to graduate in medicine, attempting to humanize the medical profession; she understood that orphans, entrusted to asylums, grew up emulating adults with mental disorders and instead they were children who could be recovered; you understood that to build the future you have to start from the children; she has perfected a «new Copernican revolution», placing as the driving force of education no longer the adult, but the child himself, with his needs and her self-training skills. This pedagogical innovation is based on the liberation of the body and the free expression of the personality, which must take place in suitable environments.
In reality, the path of this exceptional pedagogist was not all uphill. At the time Maria elaborated her own system, a very authoritarian mentality from a psycho-pedagogical point of view was rampant, which tended to see in the child and adolescent a subjugated being who had to be as responsive as possible to the commands of the school and the family . This was despite the success of previous thinkers who had insisted on the importance of liberal principles in education, and among these the most illustrious were Rousseau and Pestalozzi. Montessori went further, deepening their intuitions so as to conceive a system and a methodology much more complete than theirs. But he found himself having to overcome numerous resistances. Among the most hostile, not only those by some Catholic forces, but also by the idealist philosophers who dominated the scene in those years, including Giuseppe Lombardo Radice; later, even the forces of the left will prove to be against it: recognizing children's right to autonomy as well as their high capacity to decide, act critically and think for themselves, envisaging the possibility of learning without suffering, training for independence, are evidently consider, today as then, dangerous statements and practices.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that, opposed by all totalitarian regimes, the "Montessori" schools were closed during the dark years of the Second World War, in Germany in 33-34 under Hitler's despotism, in countries such as Franco's Spain and Portugal with Salazar in power; while, in the Soviet Union, as early as 1918 with the Russian revolutionaries. Even at home, relations with power were not positive. Mussolini at first declared himself an admirer of him, deluding himself that he could make him a banner of fascism. So much so that Giovanni Gentile, then Minister of Education, was commissioned by the Duce to preside over the Society of Friends, later transforming it into the Montessori National Opera, immediately giving rise to a series of important initiatives which favored the diffusion of the Method, until International Course, held in Rome in 1930. Maria Montessori's ties with fascism could not, however, last long and Mussolini understood that he would not be able to transform her into a propaganda tool. The deep-rooted pacifism of the scientist, the interference of the regime in
her decisions, also with regard to candidates within the movement itself, the awareness of being exploited contributed to the rupture. In 1933, in fact, he resigned from the Opera and from teaching in the master's school, distrusting the regime from continuing to use his name and the Duce in '34 closed all the Children's homes and the few elementary schools. Without forgetting that, in order to work freely, she was forced by the fascist regime to change her residence, moving first to Barcelona in 34 and, after the Spanish civil war, to Holland which had been the headquarters of AMI since 35.
In 36, invited to India by the Theosophical Society to hold courses, she went there with her son and stayed there long and fruitfully. But by now, war was upon us. In 1940, when Italy sided with Hitler, the British arrested mother and son, not considering that they had broken with the fascist regime. Thanks to political negotiations and the interventions of friends, that same year Mario was released from the Amednagar camp and Maria, quite free in the forced residence in Adyar and yet suffering from being away from her son, was allowed to rejoin him.
In India our educator carried out numerous and fascinating educational experiments, giving life to various multicultural schools which will allow her to develop a "cosmic education" project for elementary school children, also deepening the theme of peace education, a question who had already seen her participate a few years earlier while he was in England and Denmark holding conferences on the subject. Underlining the links between education and peace, Montessori points out that there has been great progress on the external level of humanity and none on the internal level, so as to reiterate that the basic means for building the latter is precisely education, understood as respect of life and childhood starting from birth. The study of the newborn and of the child in the first three years began to be very close to her heart, so much so that after the war she will particularly support education from birth as an aid to life, giving rise to the Montessori Birth Center in Rome.
The Educational Act for the Italian pedagogist is authentically such to the extent that it allows to free and express intelligence, sociability, love. Education is the weapon that guarantees peace and, the latter, as a practical principle of humanity and of social organization which is based on the very nature of the human being, is the necessary condition for a good education; peace understood not only as the absence of war but above all as the absence of disorder, oppression, material and intellectual poverty, hostility and selfishness. Therefore, peace is a necessary condition of "good education".
The extraordinary topicality of Montessori thought lies, precisely, in considering freedom as an essential basis for the formation of every human being; where, often, in the family or in school or in society, violence and intolerance arise from a lack of freedom, from a mortification of identity, from the impossibility of expressing oneself. Indeed, when the conditions for joyful learning are not fulfilled, the child finds himself in a condition of war, sacrifice and defeat which are not congenial to him. The conflict, the competition, the submission, generated by the adult, lead to an impoverishment in the child as regards the capacity of expression, forcing him to repress desires and needs and to live in an inauthentic condition, distorting his own sensibilities in an impersonal adaptation. It goes without saying that the Montessori project centered on the development of superior qualities in humanity, such as freedom, maturity, creativity, universality, is the result of a new education capable of expanding the boundaries of knowledge and overcoming the narrow borders of the nation, of race, religious confessions, family, personal convictions and of the self itself, to give way to becoming a citizen of the world, or rather, a citizen of the universe.
«Cosmic education» is the definition coined by Maria Montessori in a conference held in India in 1946 in order to explain this new vision of man immersed in the totality of the world, ready to appreciate and experience what positive has been done or it is available at any time and in any space.
An attempt has therefore been made to highlight the scope of this pedagogical conception, not only in relation to the society of the time but also with regard to the present day, prodigious in favoring the construction of alternative models which, moving in an interdisciplinary sense, follow the criteria of a another "logic", hostile to the "neutral universal", to conformism; a logic capable of saving different subjects in the sign of their radical otherness.
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