Maria Montessori

 

(Chiaravalle, 1870 - Noordwjek, 1952) Italian pedagogue who renewed teaching by developing a particular method, known as the Montessori method, which would initially be applied in Italian primary schools and later throughout the world. Aimed especially at children in the preschool stage, it was based on fostering the child's initiative and responsiveness through the use of specially designed didactic material. The method proposed a great diversification of work and the maximum possible freedom, so that the child learned to a large extent by himself and at the rate of her own discoveries.

Graduated in medicine in 1896 from the University of Rome and assistant the following year in the chair of psychiatry at the same university, Maria Montessori was impelled by her instinct to study children with cognitive development disorders, and she immediately realized that her problem , more than medical, it was pedagogical. She expounded her ideas on this matter at the 1898 Turin Pedagogical Congress. Minister Guido Baccelli commissioned him to give a course to the teachers of Rome on the education of this type of student, a course that later became an Orthophrenic Magisterial School, directed by Montessori for two years.

She then went to London and Paris to deepen these studies, later attending philosophy courses at the University of Rome and experimental psychology, convinced that the education of the child had to have its first and essential foundation in scientific, somatic knowledge. and psychic of his being. Reading the works of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Édouard Séguin, the two illustrious teachers of the education of students with intellectual disabilities in France, helped her to delve into the problems of said special education, which soon appeared to her as an application and revelation of the general laws of the child's education.

The work subsequently developed among children with disabilities through a practical and fruitful experience resulted in the appearance of a Montessori theorist and organizer of a general method of early childhood education. In January 1907, commissioned by the Instituto dei Beni Stabili in Rome, Montessori opened the first "Children's House" in one of the new working-class neighborhoods, soon to be followed by another, also in Rome. From there, the entity spread to Italy and even more to the rest of the world, taking on the character of an independent institution, organized in an increasingly clear way as an original method of child education.

This method, matured by experience and reflection, was exposed by Montessori in the volume Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applied to all'autoeducazione infantile nella Casa dei bambini (1909), later published several times (in 1913, in 1935 and in 1950; this fourth and last edition was titled La scoperta del bambino ) and soon translated into the main languages.

The method consisted of developing the autonomy of the child, who found in the "House" the essential material for the exercise of the senses, the appropriate objects to their hobbies and their physical proportions, and the possibilities of applying themselves, with their personal work and according to their free choice, to the solution of interesting practical problems, through the varied material available. The dominant principle was that of letting go; to watch to help in case of need; to have faith in the immense value of a free activity carried out with a view to concrete goals adopted by the child, capable of promoting a secure development and leading, little by little, to spontaneous discoveries and conquests according to a natural rhythm and according to a succession of "sensitive periods", linked to the particular hobbies of the child, which it was necessary to know how to understand and satisfy at the right moment, so as not to let the propitious occasion pass without the essential exercise.

It was a program and an apostolate that were inscribed with its own characteristics in the movement of the "active school" and that linked more or less with Emile de Rousseau and Friedrich Froebel . The next work, L'autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari (Turin, 1910), also republished twice in 1916 and in 1940, applied the method to elementary school teaching.

Meanwhile, since 1909, Maria Montessori taught courses for teachers in Città di Castello, protected by two meritorious figures of popular education, Leopoldo and Alice Franchetti, and wrote articles in Italian and English, to illustrate her method and her thought, which later synthesized in the Manuele di pedagogia scientifica (Naples, 1921). From 1913-14 her stays in North America and in many European countries multiplied: Germany, Great Britain, Spain (Barcelona was the city that was interested in the new methods), Holland and Sweden. She was later in China and India, and at the same time the Montesorian "Houses" spread throughout the world.

His influence was also felt in countries like France, Austria and Switzerland. Meanwhile, his works were translated into almost all languages ​​and Montessori's thought, while preserving the essential lines, developed the spiritual germs, the sometimes mystical vision of nature or religious inspiration, which already emerged in the first plays

The stages of his evolution, to include influences from psychoanalysis , are represented by the volume Il segreto dell'infanzia , published in Bellinzona in 1938, and then in Milan in 1950; for the essays Il bambino in famiglia , from 1936; for the work De l'enfant à l'adolescent (Paris), not translated into Italian; for La mente del bambino (Milan, 1952), a posthumous Italian translation of the work published in English in Madras, in 1949, under the title The absorbent mind , and for the fourth edition of the first fundamental work, under the title La scoperta del bambino , already cited.

In conferences, courses and congresses the formidable activity of the educator was developed. He had also founded in Barcelona, ​​in 1916, a "Church of the little ones", applying the principles of the "House" to the religious education of children, a subject to which he later dedicated some essays (I bambini viventi nella Chiesa, 1924 ; The Holy Messa spiegata ai bambini , 1949).

She increasingly concentrated her apostolate on the idea that the child educated with full respect for his freedom and his infinite resources should be the educator of the adult, the regenerator of humanity, and that the formation of man according to the principles preached by her could and should guarantee the triumph of justice and peace in the world. The small volume Formazione dell'uomo (1949) and the three essays contained in Educazione e pace (1949) represent, it can be said, his spiritual testament. In the last years of his life, he took an important and competent part in the work of UNESCO and founded the Center for Pedagogical Studies at the University for Foreigners of Perugia.