January 16, 2017 • 43 mins
While she's mostly associated with education, Maria Montessori worked in several fields. Her theories on early education still shape the way kids learn today around the globe.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have
gotten a lot of requests to talk about Maria Montessori,
(00:23):
a few hundreds. She's on She's on our listener ideas
list multiple times, and the last one just says Robin
and about a million other people. Um. I did a
Facebook live by myself right before the holidays and gave
listeners kind of a rundown of what was coming up.
And then I said, and we'll be here. We have
(00:43):
no idea what's happening. And somebody said, do Maria Montessori?
And I was like, funny, you should say that. That
is actually I do know what's happening, and and Maria
Montessori is it. So she's a subject who's I mean,
she's really close to my heart because I have several
very dear friends who work in Montessori schools. But before
(01:05):
starting this episode, I knew so little about about her
life that I was about fifty years off in terms
of when I thought she lived. If you are a
certain age, meaning you know hollies in my age are older.
Probably you probably associate her with free spirited parents from
the sixties and seventies, as from when Montessori became really
(01:28):
popular in the United States, but her work goes back
way earlier than that, and education also was not her
only field. We do have one super quick note, and
that's that a lot of the terms that are used
to describe children and their development a hundred years ago
are not terms we would use today, and in some
cases they would be insensitive or even offensive. And this
(01:49):
is particularly true because a lot of Maria Montessori's theories
as an educator started out with work with children who
were developmentally disabled or financially disapey manager both. So this
affects everything from titles of her predecessors books, two quotes
from her own work, and if you're inspired by this
episode to go learn more about her. It also applies
(02:11):
two works that were written by people who actually worked
with her, um like. One of the most cited biographies
of her is Maria Montessori Her Life and Work by
im Standing, which was came up for the first time
I think in the nineteen fifties and speaks about uh
developmental disabilities in a way we don't talk that way today, right,
(02:32):
That is cruel. Those are not words that we use,
so uh, just a heads up. Maria Montessori was born
on August thirty one, eighteen seventy, in chatta Velle, Italy,
and that's on the upper calf part of the boot
overlooking the coast, and her father A less Ampo, was
in civil service and her mother, Reneald was charming, pious
(02:54):
and educated and well read. That last part was something
that wasn't entirely common among women in Italy at the time.
The nation was newly unified and very conservative, with fairly
rigid gender roles that kept women mostly in the world
of domesticity and motherhood, with few opportunities for advanced education
or other work. Maria and Rayneled were very close and
(03:16):
from a very early age, Maria was focused on helping
people who were less fortunate than she was. As an example,
part of her daily chores included doing some knitting of
clothing that would be donated to the poor, and this
was something she didn't mind doing because she genuinely wanted
to help. In her very early childhood, Maria wasn't particularly
interested in excelling at school, but that started to change
(03:40):
as she got a little bit older. Her parents wanted
to find a better education for her than was available
in their province. Eventually, Alessandro got a new post that
allowed them to move to Rome. In spite of this move,
Maria eventually had trouble getting the education that she wanted.
Her parents encouraged her to become a teach her that
(04:00):
was one of the very few careers that were really
open to women, but she insisted that was not what
she wanted to do. I mean going so far as
to basically say literally any other thing besides teaching. After
discovering that she had a knack for math, she set
her sights on becoming an engineer, but since schools for
young women did not offer the kinds of classes she
(04:22):
would need to actually do this, she enrolled in a
technical school for boys in three. From there, Maria found
a love of science, especially biology, and she decided what
she really wanted to do was study medicine. This was
even more unheard of for a woman at the time
than being an engineer, and enrolling in medical school was
(04:43):
an uphill battle, including a personal interview with the head
of the board of education, who told her it would
be impossible for any woman to study medicine. She persevered though,
and ultimately Maria Montessori became the first woman to study
medicine in Italy. She also ex held at it and
earning multiple scholarships and paying most of her own way
(05:04):
by becoming a private tutor. But the challenges to her
studying medicine did not end with the struggle just to
become enrolled in medical school. There are lots of this
part of her story that parallel our prior show on
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn an empty
The story kind of becomes very similar when it is
a woman trying to go through medical school. Uh Montessori
(05:27):
faced derision and harassment from her male classmates, and because
it was considered improper for her to participate in dissections
in a co ed setting, she had to do all
of her dissecting work alone in the evenings, surrounded by
the other students. Cadavers in a dissection hall illuminated by
lamps and candles. Started to wear on her, and eventually
(05:49):
she almost gave up, walking out in the middle of
her work one night and making up her mind to
find a pursuit that would not seem so set against her.
But on the way home, she saw a woman begging
in a ark, and the woman's child caught Montsouria's attention
was playing with a piece of colored paper with this
just completely wrapt attention. Something about this scene really struck Montessori,
(06:12):
and it gave her renewed determination. But it wasn't as
you might assume, to become a teacher. It was to
complete her medical education, no matter what obstacles were in
her way. When she graduated in eighteen ninety six, she
was the first woman in Italy to earn a doctor
of medicine. At this point in her life, Montasoria was
also an advocate for feminists and social causes. This would
(06:35):
continue to be true throughout her life. She was appointed
to represent Italy at a feminist congress in Berlin the
same year that she graduated for medical school. She also
advocated for the rights of working women and against the
use of child labor. In eight she went on a
lecture tour on the quote new woman. This is a
woman who was liberated from Italy's strict gender roles, able
(06:57):
to work outside of the home and not find by
stereotypes of feminine frailty and inferiority. Although Montessori's conceptualization of
new womanhood offered far more freedom for women, it was
still strongly connected to motherhood. In her own words quote, Eventually,
the woman of the future will have equal rights as
(07:19):
well as equal duties. She will have a new self
awareness and will find her true strength in an emancipated maternity.
Family life as we know it may change, but it
is absurd to think that feminism will destroy maternal feelings.
The new woman will marry and have children out of choice,
not because matrimony and maternity are imposed on her, And
(07:40):
she will exercise control over the health and well being
of the next generation and inaugurate a reign of peace.
Because when she can speak knowledgeably in the name of
her children and in behalf of her own rights, man
will have to listen to her and her medical practice.
At this point, Montessori was focused on psychiatry, becoming an
assistant doctor and the psychiatric clinic at the University of Rome.
(08:02):
Part of her rounds included visiting Italy's asylums in part
to identify patients who could be helped at the clinic.
A lot of the people that she identified were children. Specifically,
they were children with a range of physical and intellectual
disabilities who, at this point in history were often sent
to asylums for mentally ill adults, where they got little
(08:22):
to nothing in the way of education or treatment. I
mean it was basically a dumping ground for any child
who was deemed to be not quote normal in the
time words of the time. And it was in working
with these children that Montessori started to form a theory
of education connected to sensory stimulation and manipulating things with
(08:43):
your fingers. It started one day when she found a
room full of children supervised by a matron who reported
that after their meals, they would get on the floor
to search for crumbs. The matron was disgusted by this
behavior and thought it was tied to being greedy for food,
but to sorry, seeing that the room had absolutely nothing
in it that could stimulate a child's hands and mind,
(09:06):
instead interpreted it as a desperate search for something tactile
to hold and manipulate. Through observing these children, Montessori began
to see developmental disabilities, particularly with the ones that related
to learning and intelligence, as a need for different methods
of teaching, not as a medical problem or an untreatable
lack of intellect, and from there she started to piece
(09:29):
together a system of education, and we're going to talk
about that more after a brief sponsor break. As she
started to consider an approach to educating children with disabilities,
Maria Montessori began studying the special education theories of two doctors,
(09:50):
Jean Marc gaspar Atar and Edward Sagan, And although a
Tar's work had included some truly questionable attempts to cure deafness,
his method for educating deaf children had been groundbreaking in France.
He was also the person who wrote about the feral
child who became known as the wild Boy of Avon,
and Attard was also a proponent of the idea that
(10:11):
children moved through specific developmental stages and that their education
is most effective when it's appropriate to each of those stages. Saga,
who was born in France and later moved to the
United States, had written a book called quote Idiocy and
Its Treatment by the Physiological Method, which theorized that developmental
disabilities stemmed from issues with the central nervous system and
(10:33):
consequently could be treated with exercises and sensory activities. Montessori
found that her theories were compatible with guitars and sigas.
For example, she thought that children passed through quote sensitive
periods in which they were particularly receptive to learning certain
new skills and concepts, and she thought that sensory experiences
(10:54):
were critical to learning. In she delivered an address at
a pedagogical congress in which she stressed that children with
developmental disabilities quote We're not extra social beings, but were
entitled to the benefits of education as much as, if
not more than normal ones. She started to promote something
that was at the time completely revolutionary in Italy, special
(11:16):
education classrooms where children with disabilities could receive an individualized
education that was appropriate to their individual needs. So, as
we've talked about in previous shows on special education and
its history, today, the goal is typically to educate children
with disabilities in the same classroom with their non disabled peers,
in the least restrictive environment that can still meet their needs. So,
(11:39):
even though she was advocating for basically segregated schooling for
children with disabilities at this time, the idea of educating
them at all was a huge step forward in Italy. Yeah,
the difference between that and sending them to a mental asylum.
We're grown ups. Yeah uh soon. Guido Bocelli, the Minister
(12:00):
of Education, invited Montessori to come to Rome and deliver
a series of lectures on special education, and she did.
In eight nine, she was appointed co director of a
state school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Over
the next two years, she worked tirelessly, both at the
school and by traveling to London and Paris to study
(12:21):
other theories of special education. She rigorously observed her students,
evaluated what worked and what didn't, and then would refine
her approach accordingly. And as she built on her knowledge
and her methods, her students performed exceptionally well. Several learned
to read and write well enough that they were able
to sit for the same exams that were required of
(12:42):
other school children. And as she was doing all of this,
she was also doing a lot of other work, including
having a medical private practice and being the chair of
hygiene at one of Italy's two women's colleges, which she
held from eight to nineteen o six. This earned her
a lot of praise, but Montessori found that it raised
a lot of questions within her own mind. If her
(13:04):
methods allowed her special education students to perform as well
as their peers in regular classrooms, what did that say
about the methods that were being used in those classrooms.
Should non disabled students have been performing even better than
they were so? In nineteen o one, Montessori left the
special education school in Rome, and at this point she
(13:25):
had had a son, Mario, with the school's other co director, Dr.
Giseppa monte Sano. The date of Mario's birth is kind
of unclear. It's often reported as March thirty one. Monte
Sano's family was against the idea of his marrying Montessori,
and although monte Sano did legally recognize Mario as his child,
(13:46):
he also insisted that the baby we kept secret. Mario
was sent to live with a wet nurse and then
to a boarding school. There's not a lot written um
about Maria Montessori's role in this decision, but based on
her really sticking to what she wanted and thought was
best um and other parts of her life that we'll
(14:09):
talk about later, it seems as though she would not
have been like bullied into sending her child away like this.
This seems like it was a decision that like she
also probably didn't want to marry him and thought that
it would be best for another family to look after Mario. So,
with her son being cared for in the country in secret,
(14:32):
Montessori returned to school herself. She enrolled again at the
University of Rome with the goal of furthering her education
so she could create an education program suitable for all children.
She studied pedagogy, psychiatry, anthropology, and educational history and philosophy.
She became a professor at the University of Rome in
(14:52):
nineteen four and eventually became its chair of Anthropology. During
those same years, the world of education was also change
jing during Montessori's childhood and early career. Many schools in
Europe and the United States were just dominated with memorization,
recitation and repetitions might have had something to do with
why Montessori was not particularly into doing well at it
(15:15):
in her early childhood years, but educators like Friedrich Froebel,
the German reformer who coined the term kindergarten, had started
to shift that model. More and more educators were starting
to talk about making schools into more homelike, inviting places
that engage children through their senses, rather than just drilling
(15:35):
them and recitals and repetition and learning things by route
to spit them back out again. And of course this
is a very simplified overview of education. At the time,
there were a lot of schools of thought that we're
going on about how children should be educated, particularly in
early childhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(15:56):
But from Montessori's point of view, Frobel and other farmers
had taken and we're taking an approach that was too
intuitive and romanticized. She favored an approach that she saw
as more scientific, incorporating exact measurements of children's bodies that
would be kept as part of their record making clinical observations,
collecting and interpreting data about what was working and what wasn't.
(16:20):
In nineteen o four, she had returned to lecturing on pedagogy,
and she advocated approaching pedagogy through science to gather data
and pinpoint successful strategies for education. Eventually, Montessori wound up
with a theory of education that drew from all kinds
of disciplines, including medicine, psychology, and physiological and cultural anthropology.
(16:43):
This was an approach that was holistic and multidisciplinary, aimed
at creating an educational setting that would nurture and inspire
the creativity and desire to learn that she believed to
be present in all children. UH. The idea of physiological
anthropology comes up from time to time in the context
of the eugenics movement because it's about like human physiology
(17:04):
and how it relates to anthropology. UH. It does not
appear that Maria Montessori ever had anything to do with
that movement, and in fact, a lot of the things
that she advocated were directly contradictory to eugenics. But unfortunately,
because she had that physiological anthropology focused to some of
what she did, there were people in the eugenics movement
(17:25):
who like then picked up her theories and tried to
advocate them as a like a eugenics UH tool. She
actually put all of this theory into practice for the
first time. In nineteen o seven, a charitable society that
was purchasing and refurbishing tenement properties impoverished areas of Rome
(17:48):
had approached her about starting a daycare in the neighborhood.
Most of the parents who were living there worked and
children not yet old enough to be in school during
the day. We're being left alone own, sometimes with basically
no supervision, because their parents just did not have the
means to care for them while they were at work.
The result was the Casa day Bambini a k. The
(18:09):
Children's House, which opened in San Lorenzo Quarter on January
six of nine seven, in one of the tenement buildings
where the children actually lived. About sixty children were enrolled,
and they were all under the age of seven. Montessori
saw this as an opportunity not only to implement her
teaching methods, but also to make a charitable effort to
try to lift the residence of San Lorenzo Quarter out
(18:31):
of poverty through educating their children and making it easier
for their parents to comfortably go to work every day.
Although her students were all from low income families, she
also foresaw a time when women of all social strata
would want to enter the workforce, making the Casa da
Bambini a model for daycare and early childhood education among
(18:52):
working families across the economic spectrum. In terms of the
school itself, it was sized for children's needs, with tables, chairs, cabinets,
washbasins and the like all being sized down to their scale.
She encouraged parents involvement in their children's education with periodic
conversations akin to today's parent teacher conferences. The children had
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a lot of freedom to learn and explore, but there
was also a lot of structure. Montessori reframed the role
of teacher as directress today, often called a guide who
helped children educate themselves in life skills, motor and sensory skills,
and the typical reading, writing, and arithmetic. One of the
most recognizable hallmarks of Montessori's educational methods was the materials
(19:38):
that she implemented for helping children learn to build the
build these skills, for example, a set of cylinders of
different sizes that fit into similarly sized holes in a
wooden block. Her materials used colors, textures, sizes, smells, and
sounds so that children could learn to distinguish between all
of these and to recognize patterns. Rather than systematically teaching
(20:02):
children to read and write, she supplied them with things
like color coded cardboard letters and numbers, and counting rods
of different links, which could be palpated and manipulated. As
children became cognitively ready to read and count. The directress
did work with children as they use these materials, for examples,
sounding out each letter as children held and felt the
(20:24):
cardboard version, but it was more about readying a child's
mind for reading, writing, and arithmetic, and allowing children to
teach themselves to do it rather than sitting them down
and instructing them. Basically, in Montessori's method, children were self educating.
The directress was simply guiding them and self directing, self
correcting activities that made it possible for them to learn
(20:46):
on their own. The directress was to tailor her guidance
according to the to the developmental needs and the readiness
of each child and to their sensitive periods. And the
students also learned about life skills and the natural world
through the is like helping to prepare prepare meals and
planting and tending a school garden. Kaza da Bambini was
(21:06):
hailed as a huge success, and soon Montessori was working
to put her educational theories into wider practice. We're going
to talk about that more after we once again paused
for a break from one of our sponsors. As we
said before the break, Maria Montessori's first school, Casa de
(21:29):
Bambini opened in nineteen o seven. Soon she had established
several other schools in Rome, both in the San Lorenzo
quarter and in other more affluent parts of the city.
By her reputation was really growing in Italy, and she
had started a school to train other directresses. She had
created a curriculum that was starting to be shared around
(21:50):
the world. She left her position at the original Casa
de Bambini in nineteen eleven with the goal of bringing
her methods to more classrooms. Worried that her methods would
be distorted or implemented in an ineffectual or damaging way,
she did as much as she could to disseminate information
herself and educate people on her methods. Personally, she wanted
(22:11):
Montessori's directresses to follow her methods absolutely. Yes. She really
did not want teachers to be like, you know, I'm
just going to take the Montessori method, but I'm only
going to take these blocks and numbers and and those
sorts of things, and I'm going to do my own thing.
She she wanted people to follow exactly what she uh,
(22:33):
what she was advocating, and what she was writing down.
She did not think it was gonna be effective otherwise.
Maria Montessori used her medical and academic background to publish
papers on the method in journals. She wrote what would
become known as the Montessori Method in nineteen ten, and
it began to be translated and published in other nations.
It's first publication in the United States was in nineteen twelve.
(22:55):
She published Doctor Montessori's own Handbook in nineteen fourteen, and
a twovolume work called Advanced Montessori Method in nineteen eighteen
and nineteen nine. Montessori was also Catholic, and over the
course of her life wrote several books that were more
religious in nature for children, such as quote the Mass
Explained to Children. When I was a kid, I had
(23:16):
a copy of that. Really, yeah, that was like an old,
clunky like I don't know where it came from. I
think it probably came from my grandmother's house at some
point in time. But yeah, I had a copy of it.
I don't know where it ended up. And I remember
being like, oh, like it was actually quite helpful to
explain all the sitting and standing and like what you know.
(23:37):
She also traveled extensively in order to lecture on her
methods and trained teachers directly. She visited the US in
nineteen thirteen. Jane Adams, who was subject of a past
two part He Here on the podcast, introduced her at
one of her appearances in Chicago. That same year, Mabel
and Alexander Graham Bell founded the Montessori Educational Association in Washington,
(23:59):
d C. President Woodrow Wilson's daughter Margaret, was on the
board of directors. In nineteen fifteen, the Panama Pacific International
Exhibition in San Francisco featured a glasshouse demonstration school room
for Montessori's methods. Her work and advocacy for her methods
continued on from there. She did research in Spain in
nineteen seventeen and started training directress as in London in
(24:22):
nineteen nineteen. Basically, Montessori was becoming an international movement, with
she herself training people and traveling extensively to promote it
and try to try to directly teach the people who
were going to work as directresses in Montessori classrooms. It
was also within these nineteen teens years that she was
(24:43):
reunited with her son, Mario, when he was about fifteen
years old. Mario was reportedly presented first as Montessori's nephew
and then later as her adopted son, and although he
did not really know his mother until his teens, he
became incredibly devoted to her, and he eventually became her successor.
It cracks me up, like there was more than one
(25:05):
source who said that Mario at first was like, oh,
this is my nephew. But I also I couldn't find
confirmation that she had any siblings. So that tickles me
a little bit unless it's one of those, uh, you
know things where like close friends kind of become like
family and people were referred to their children as their
nephews and nieces. But even so, yeah, so. In ninety two,
(25:33):
Benito Mussolini, who had established the Fascist Party in nineteen nineteen,
became Italy's Prime minister. Mussolini's secretary of education, Giovanni Gentile,
approved of Montessori's methods. The first meeting among Mussolini and
Montessori took place in nineteen twenty four. Mussolini wanted Montessori's
(25:53):
name and reputation to help spread his fascist ideology and
for her educational work to lift Italy's reputation. For her part,
Montessori wanted the Italian government's backing to help spread her
educational philosophies. By nine she had been made an honorary
member of the Fascist Party, and soon the Italian government
was supporting multiple Montessori schools and training programs. However, Montessori
(26:19):
was still dedicated to the idea of keeping control of
her educational philosophies and of educating all children, not just
Italian children. She accepted the government's support in spreading her
work as an educator, but she refused to have it
aligned with Italy's fascist politics. In nine she and her
son Mario established the Association Montsori Internacional, meant to unite
(26:43):
the world's various Montessori programs and organizations. Montessori was named
its lifetime president, with Mario working with her extensively, and
this organization was headquartered in Berlin. The fact that it
was in Berlin did not fit well with Mussolini, whose
regime had become progressively more and more totalitarian at this point,
and whose motto was quote everything in the state, nothing
(27:06):
outside the state, nothing against the state. Montessori, on the
other hand, wanted to be an educator, as we said before,
for all children. This was regardless of the children's race, ethnicity,
or nationality. She refused to give this up and was
increasingly vocal in her opposition to the government's fascist and
totalitarian ideals. When the government tried to name Montessori Italy's
(27:30):
children's Ambassador in nineteen thirty four, she refused unless the
Italian government recognized her total control over the a m I.
The government shut down several state sponsored Montessori programs, and
Montessori left Italy in exile. In ninety six, Maria and
Mario moved to the a m i's headquarters to Amsterdam,
(27:50):
where she continued to try to build a truly international
system of education in which children from Europe, Asia and
North America could all be guided to teach them elves
using the same methods and her words quote, there is
no sense in talking about differences of procedure for Indian babies,
Chinese babies, or European babies, nor for those belonging to
(28:11):
different social classes. We can speak of one method, that
which follows the natural unfolding of man. All babies have
the same psychological needs and follow the same sequence of events,
and attaining to human stature, every one of us has
to pass through the same phases of growth. Montessori continued
to travel in support of her work, and sometimes that
(28:33):
travel was actually quite perilous. She was in Spain when
the Spanish Civil War broke out in nineteen thirty six.
She was training Montessori educators in India in nineteen thirty
nine when Italy entered World War Two, and as she
was an Italian national in British territory, she was for
a time confined to her training school along with her son. Eventually, though,
(28:54):
she was allowed freedom of movement, and while in India
she worked with Gandhi to develop a curriculum for Ease.
After the end of World War Two, the Montessori's returned
to Amsterdam. In nineteen forty seven, the Italian government invited
her back into the country to reopen the Montessori the
Montessori schools and training programs that had previously closed. Maria
(29:15):
continued to work and teach until the very end of
her life. In nineteen forty eight, she returned to India
and in nineteen forty nine she made her first trip
to Pakistan. She toured Norway and Sweden in nineteen fifty
and in nineteen fifty one she went to London for
the eighth International Montessori Congress. She was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize six times before her death in a
(29:38):
friend's garden on May six of nineteen fifty two in
the Netherlands. She was eighty one at the time. Montessori's
teaching methods have continued to be really influential. There are
at least seven thousand Montessori schools around the world today,
although since in spite of her efforts to retain control
over training and certifications, in a lot of places the
(29:59):
name Montessori it is not actually trademarked, so the number
of schools calling themselves Montessori is actually a lot larger
than those approximately seven thousands certified schools, As we noted
at the top of the show. For some folks in
the United States, Montessori school has this connection with the
free spirited parents of the nineteen sixties and seventies, not
(30:20):
with the turn of the twentieth century. And this is
because while the Montessori method was growing in popularity in
much of Europe and parts of Asia, in the United
States had actually felt out of fashion for a while
after its initial introduction in the early nineteen teens. Between
nineteen ten and nineteen fourteen, Montessori education gained a lot
of attention really quickly in the United States due to
(30:41):
its apparent success in classrooms and because people were drawn
some Montessori herself as a person and as an educator,
she was very charismatic and energetic and how she talked
to people. Her method had also come from Europe, giving
it a layer of prestige, and many American minds it's European. Yeah,
(31:02):
I don't feel like that has quite the same uh
connotation today in A lot of this attention, though, was
from the general public, parents who had heard about Montessori's
successes with disadvantaged children in Italy who had learned to
read by age four and seemed exceptionally happy in the classroom.
(31:23):
Some of this attention came from articles in magazines, Notably
McClure's publisher and editor, Samuel S. McClure, was a huge
proponent of the method, although his business relationship with her
to that end was kind of fraught and it eventually unraveled. Doctors, scientists,
and other experts from outside the field of education also
wrote about it quite favorably. A portion of American educators, though,
(31:47):
were vocally critical of Montetstori's methods when they were first introduced,
her theories were often described as being commonplace in the
United States twenty five or thirty years before. By the
time of the English language publication and of the Montessori method,
Freeder Crobo's concept of kindergarten was widely implemented in the
United States and had been for decades. That meant that
(32:08):
the child sized classrooms and child centered learning that were
common to both kindergarten and Montessori were not really novel
in the United States the way that they had been
in some other nations. In the words of William H.
Kilpatrick of Teachers College, Columbia University, who published a highly
critical the Montessori System Examined in nineteen fourteen, quote, Madame
(32:31):
Montessori belongs in the history of American educational theory essentially
along with the writer's anti anti dating eighteen eighty. In
several fundamental respects, she is some thirty years behind the
best of our present. Some educators also criticized Montessori's work
in the nineteen teens as failing to engage children's imaginations,
(32:53):
prompting an e. George one of the biggest proponents in
the United States and the translator of the Montessori method
for England ISSH and it's first US publication. To counter
quote the Italian educator, it is said, makes the mistake
of bringing the children too closely to the earth, as
distinguished from other methods which encourage imagination and deal in
fairies and nights and imaginative games. Dr Montessori makes the
(33:16):
children see the world as it really is to her.
A block is a block, not a castle. The hands
and fingers are anatomical structures, not pigeons. The children learn
real geometrical forms by their right names triangles, squares, circles, ovals,
not as symbolic abstractions. So for the first few years
after its introduction in the United States, Montessori education was
(33:39):
a bit of a flash in the pan fad, but
quickly dedicated Montessori schools dwindled, especially after the United States
entered World War One. Yeah, that it's from Europe prestige
meant something quite different when World War One started and
it became it's from Italy. Yeah. However, in the nineteen
sixties there was a resurgence and interest in the Montessori
(34:02):
method in the United States, led by a combination of factors,
including its focus on child centered learning and a renewed
focus on getting children, especially children from low income and
at risk families, uh into academic excellence sooner. It was
the same window that like the Headstart program was first launched,
Like there was just a lot of focus on American
(34:24):
children need to be achieving academically earlier than they are.
And then, as Sweet said at the top of show,
some kind of free spirited parents. Today, about four thousand
of the seven thousand accredited Montessori schools worldwide are in
the United States. That's Maria Montessori. This whole episode makes
me want to go play with blocks. There's some pretty
(34:46):
great blocks and colorful letters. It would be great well.
And one of the first jobs that I had out
of college, I wrote copy for a educational catalog um
and we had this sort of corner, like this one
page of things that were basically the blocks and letter
(35:06):
shapes and cylinders and things like that that are part
of the Montessori method um. And I remember just having
all of these conversations about like we can say these
are appropriate for a mont Story classroom, but we like
we could not write the copy to be like, you'll
be a mones story teacher with these great blocks, Like
(35:28):
for a lot of people, they're the most recognizable hallmark
of Montessori School. But that's there's a whole philosophy going
with those blocks. Do you have a philosophy of listener mail?
I have. We're gonna call this corrections corner. Okay, it's
been almost a month because of the holidays since I recorded,
(35:51):
since that, like since I was the researcher on an episode. UM,
And so that that means we have a couple of
things that need to be corrected, and we're gonna just
put them all today rather than spreading them out along
more than one episode. UM. The first is about our
Unearthed Part one where we talked about the HMS terror
and we got several notes along these same lines, and
(36:13):
I'm going to read just one of them, and this
is from James. James says Hi, Tracy and Holly. First off,
I wanted to thank you for doing the podcast and
in the Unearthed Part one segment on the confirmation of
the HMS terror's location, mentioning the oral histories of the
indigenous peoples of Canada's North that had already marked the
location of the ship. If it's not too rude, I
just wanted to make a mild correction. The indigenous people's
(36:34):
in Canada's Arctic, including the man who told the expedition
where he had seen the ship's massed. Are the Inuit
not First Nations. It might seem like a mild topic,
but the Inuit are often miscategorized or lumped in with
the other indigenous people's and the issue you can be
fraught with emotion. I know I can shape chafe when
the mate of which I am a member are miscategorized.
(36:55):
A quick down and dirty guide to Canada's three constitutionally
recognized and as people's is First Nations, broadly equivalent to
the American term Native Americans, representing the three six hundred
thirty four federally recognized tribal governments or bands. Mate a
distinct Aboriginal slash Indigenous people who arose from the intermingling
(37:17):
of traders, trappers, settlers, and the Indigenous people who would
later be recognized as First Nations. There are distinct Matine
nations by province. I'm a member of Alberta's Matine Nation
because we're a separate culture and people. A mate person
isn't just someone who has both indigenous and non indigenous ancestry.
They have to specifically with someone who is ethnically matie Inuit,
(37:41):
the indigenous people of the North broadly equivalent to the
U S terms Native Alaskans, but representing different peoples, so
someone who was Native Alaskan likely would not consider themselves
to be Inuit or the reverse. Thank you for taking
the time to read this, and I apologize if I
repeated information you know, or if I spoke at all condescendingly.
I really appreciate how your work works to reinsert the
(38:04):
contributions of marginalized people into history where it belongs. And
I hope my email can be taken in the same
spirit as an Indigenous person who writes and consults on
their representation and media. I just thought I would share
my perspective to prevent any accidental miscategorization. Thanks again, and
I hope you have a great date, James. Thank you
so much, James. The apologies are so unnecessary. This is
(38:26):
the exact type of thing that we really want to
get right and try hard to get right. And I
was genuinely not aware of the nuances um like previously,
we had gotten notes. I think it's this couple of
years ago we had used the word Native American when
(38:46):
talking about Canada, and we got some notes that said, uh,
in Canada we use the term first nations. Absolutely not
aware that there were further nuances to that. So like,
this is the exact type of thing that we want
to hear about, want to be um correct on. And
it was absolutely not condescending or rude at all, uh
(39:12):
in any way. So thank you again so much James
for spelling that out so clearly and concisely, because, as
I said, I did not know that, and I apologized
for my ignorance. Uh. We also have some notes about
the conversation that we had with Eric Lars Meyers about beer. Um.
This is another thing. We've gotten a several different tweets,
slash Facebook comments, slash emails, and so rather reading anyone
(39:35):
particular one, I'm just going to clarify a couple of things.
We got several notes about whether references to wine in
the Bible were really about beer, and lots of these
notes basically said, well, we definitely know that it was
wine because they were wine. Okay, we did, we definitely
do know there was wine in Biblical times. We also
definitely know that there was beer in biblical times, and
(39:58):
we know all of these things that would like of
other writing and archaeological evidence and art and like lots
of evidence for all of these things. What we don't
really have is separate words for all of these types
of alcoholic beverages uh in the Bible. So it's not
completely clear whether everything that's translated today as wine was
(40:20):
really made out of grapes. So we were definitely not
trying to say there was no wine in the Bible,
like that's that's not always um And regardless, the ancient
wines and beers and all of the other fermented beverages
that existed probably would have been a lot different from
what we think of today, Like we talked about that
on that show a bit. Uh. Eric had also said
(40:43):
in the beer episode that he had no idea whether
he was making up the date that the Rhine High
school vote was revised to include yeast after Louis Pasteur's
work in the eighteen fifties in Strasbourg, Pasteward was doing
a lot of research into yeast's fermentation of sugar, specifically
in the eighteen fifties, but it was not until the
early twentieth century that the run High school but was
(41:05):
revised to include East. Um. There were also a whole
lot of other scientists working with East at that point,
So Louis Pasteur is not like the be all end
all of yeast discovery for sure. I kind of now
just want to do a whole episode on the history
of yeast, which could be fascinating, uh, but maybe only
(41:29):
to me. Uh. Lastly, we all definitely know that Plymouth
is in Massachusetts. We in fact have pictures of Pilgrim
Monument in Provincetown, Massachusetts taken with my camera on our Instagram.
This is a known thing. Uh. So that's basically correction
corner for today. Some of those are not really corrections,
there are more like clarifications. But um, thank you again
(41:51):
James writing. Thank you again Eric for being on the show.
I had a super fun time talking about beer with Eric.
If you were, if you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast where History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. And then on social media,
we have the word missed in history. That is basically everywhere.
It's on Facebook and Pinterest and Tumbler, and Twitter and Instagram,
(42:15):
all of those things. Our name is missed in History. Uh.
We have also started doing some videos. We have four
of them now. They are all on our website and
we have been sharing them on our social media also,
so you can come have a look at those. Um
and that is our website which is missing history dot com.
You can also come to our parent company's website, which
is how stuff works dot com and learn all kinds
(42:36):
of stuff about education and teaching methods and all kinds
of things. So we can do all of that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or missing history dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com In
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have
gotten a lot of requests to talk about Maria Montessori,
(00:23):
a few hundreds. She's on She's on our listener ideas
list multiple times, and the last one just says Robin
and about a million other people. Um. I did a
Facebook live by myself right before the holidays and gave
listeners kind of a rundown of what was coming up.
And then I said, and we'll be here. We have
(00:43):
no idea what's happening. And somebody said, do Maria Montessori?
And I was like, funny, you should say that. That
is actually I do know what's happening, and and Maria
Montessori is it. So she's a subject who's I mean,
she's really close to my heart because I have several
very dear friends who work in Montessori schools. But before
(01:05):
starting this episode, I knew so little about about her
life that I was about fifty years off in terms
of when I thought she lived. If you are a
certain age, meaning you know hollies in my age are older.
Probably you probably associate her with free spirited parents from
the sixties and seventies, as from when Montessori became really
(01:28):
popular in the United States, but her work goes back
way earlier than that, and education also was not her
only field. We do have one super quick note, and
that's that a lot of the terms that are used
to describe children and their development a hundred years ago
are not terms we would use today, and in some
cases they would be insensitive or even offensive. And this
(01:49):
is particularly true because a lot of Maria Montessori's theories
as an educator started out with work with children who
were developmentally disabled or financially disapey manager both. So this
affects everything from titles of her predecessors books, two quotes
from her own work, and if you're inspired by this
episode to go learn more about her. It also applies
(02:11):
two works that were written by people who actually worked
with her, um like. One of the most cited biographies
of her is Maria Montessori Her Life and Work by
im Standing, which was came up for the first time
I think in the nineteen fifties and speaks about uh
developmental disabilities in a way we don't talk that way today, right,
(02:32):
That is cruel. Those are not words that we use,
so uh, just a heads up. Maria Montessori was born
on August thirty one, eighteen seventy, in chatta Velle, Italy,
and that's on the upper calf part of the boot
overlooking the coast, and her father A less Ampo, was
in civil service and her mother, Reneald was charming, pious
(02:54):
and educated and well read. That last part was something
that wasn't entirely common among women in Italy at the time.
The nation was newly unified and very conservative, with fairly
rigid gender roles that kept women mostly in the world
of domesticity and motherhood, with few opportunities for advanced education
or other work. Maria and Rayneled were very close and
(03:16):
from a very early age, Maria was focused on helping
people who were less fortunate than she was. As an example,
part of her daily chores included doing some knitting of
clothing that would be donated to the poor, and this
was something she didn't mind doing because she genuinely wanted
to help. In her very early childhood, Maria wasn't particularly
interested in excelling at school, but that started to change
(03:40):
as she got a little bit older. Her parents wanted
to find a better education for her than was available
in their province. Eventually, Alessandro got a new post that
allowed them to move to Rome. In spite of this move,
Maria eventually had trouble getting the education that she wanted.
Her parents encouraged her to become a teach her that
(04:00):
was one of the very few careers that were really
open to women, but she insisted that was not what
she wanted to do. I mean going so far as
to basically say literally any other thing besides teaching. After
discovering that she had a knack for math, she set
her sights on becoming an engineer, but since schools for
young women did not offer the kinds of classes she
(04:22):
would need to actually do this, she enrolled in a
technical school for boys in three. From there, Maria found
a love of science, especially biology, and she decided what
she really wanted to do was study medicine. This was
even more unheard of for a woman at the time
than being an engineer, and enrolling in medical school was
(04:43):
an uphill battle, including a personal interview with the head
of the board of education, who told her it would
be impossible for any woman to study medicine. She persevered though,
and ultimately Maria Montessori became the first woman to study
medicine in Italy. She also ex held at it and
earning multiple scholarships and paying most of her own way
(05:04):
by becoming a private tutor. But the challenges to her
studying medicine did not end with the struggle just to
become enrolled in medical school. There are lots of this
part of her story that parallel our prior show on
Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn an empty
The story kind of becomes very similar when it is
a woman trying to go through medical school. Uh Montessori
(05:27):
faced derision and harassment from her male classmates, and because
it was considered improper for her to participate in dissections
in a co ed setting, she had to do all
of her dissecting work alone in the evenings, surrounded by
the other students. Cadavers in a dissection hall illuminated by
lamps and candles. Started to wear on her, and eventually
(05:49):
she almost gave up, walking out in the middle of
her work one night and making up her mind to
find a pursuit that would not seem so set against her.
But on the way home, she saw a woman begging
in a ark, and the woman's child caught Montsouria's attention
was playing with a piece of colored paper with this
just completely wrapt attention. Something about this scene really struck Montessori,
(06:12):
and it gave her renewed determination. But it wasn't as
you might assume, to become a teacher. It was to
complete her medical education, no matter what obstacles were in
her way. When she graduated in eighteen ninety six, she
was the first woman in Italy to earn a doctor
of medicine. At this point in her life, Montasoria was
also an advocate for feminists and social causes. This would
(06:35):
continue to be true throughout her life. She was appointed
to represent Italy at a feminist congress in Berlin the
same year that she graduated for medical school. She also
advocated for the rights of working women and against the
use of child labor. In eight she went on a
lecture tour on the quote new woman. This is a
woman who was liberated from Italy's strict gender roles, able
(06:57):
to work outside of the home and not find by
stereotypes of feminine frailty and inferiority. Although Montessori's conceptualization of
new womanhood offered far more freedom for women, it was
still strongly connected to motherhood. In her own words quote, Eventually,
the woman of the future will have equal rights as
(07:19):
well as equal duties. She will have a new self
awareness and will find her true strength in an emancipated maternity.
Family life as we know it may change, but it
is absurd to think that feminism will destroy maternal feelings.
The new woman will marry and have children out of choice,
not because matrimony and maternity are imposed on her, And
(07:40):
she will exercise control over the health and well being
of the next generation and inaugurate a reign of peace.
Because when she can speak knowledgeably in the name of
her children and in behalf of her own rights, man
will have to listen to her and her medical practice.
At this point, Montessori was focused on psychiatry, becoming an
assistant doctor and the psychiatric clinic at the University of Rome.
(08:02):
Part of her rounds included visiting Italy's asylums in part
to identify patients who could be helped at the clinic.
A lot of the people that she identified were children. Specifically,
they were children with a range of physical and intellectual
disabilities who, at this point in history were often sent
to asylums for mentally ill adults, where they got little
(08:22):
to nothing in the way of education or treatment. I
mean it was basically a dumping ground for any child
who was deemed to be not quote normal in the
time words of the time. And it was in working
with these children that Montessori started to form a theory
of education connected to sensory stimulation and manipulating things with
(08:43):
your fingers. It started one day when she found a
room full of children supervised by a matron who reported
that after their meals, they would get on the floor
to search for crumbs. The matron was disgusted by this
behavior and thought it was tied to being greedy for food,
but to sorry, seeing that the room had absolutely nothing
in it that could stimulate a child's hands and mind,
(09:06):
instead interpreted it as a desperate search for something tactile
to hold and manipulate. Through observing these children, Montessori began
to see developmental disabilities, particularly with the ones that related
to learning and intelligence, as a need for different methods
of teaching, not as a medical problem or an untreatable
lack of intellect, and from there she started to piece
(09:29):
together a system of education, and we're going to talk
about that more after a brief sponsor break. As she
started to consider an approach to educating children with disabilities,
Maria Montessori began studying the special education theories of two doctors,
(09:50):
Jean Marc gaspar Atar and Edward Sagan, And although a
Tar's work had included some truly questionable attempts to cure deafness,
his method for educating deaf children had been groundbreaking in France.
He was also the person who wrote about the feral
child who became known as the wild Boy of Avon,
and Attard was also a proponent of the idea that
(10:11):
children moved through specific developmental stages and that their education
is most effective when it's appropriate to each of those stages. Saga,
who was born in France and later moved to the
United States, had written a book called quote Idiocy and
Its Treatment by the Physiological Method, which theorized that developmental
disabilities stemmed from issues with the central nervous system and
(10:33):
consequently could be treated with exercises and sensory activities. Montessori
found that her theories were compatible with guitars and sigas.
For example, she thought that children passed through quote sensitive
periods in which they were particularly receptive to learning certain
new skills and concepts, and she thought that sensory experiences
(10:54):
were critical to learning. In she delivered an address at
a pedagogical congress in which she stressed that children with
developmental disabilities quote We're not extra social beings, but were
entitled to the benefits of education as much as, if
not more than normal ones. She started to promote something
that was at the time completely revolutionary in Italy, special
(11:16):
education classrooms where children with disabilities could receive an individualized
education that was appropriate to their individual needs. So, as
we've talked about in previous shows on special education and
its history, today, the goal is typically to educate children
with disabilities in the same classroom with their non disabled peers,
in the least restrictive environment that can still meet their needs. So,
(11:39):
even though she was advocating for basically segregated schooling for
children with disabilities at this time, the idea of educating
them at all was a huge step forward in Italy. Yeah,
the difference between that and sending them to a mental asylum.
We're grown ups. Yeah uh soon. Guido Bocelli, the Minister
(12:00):
of Education, invited Montessori to come to Rome and deliver
a series of lectures on special education, and she did.
In eight nine, she was appointed co director of a
state school for children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Over
the next two years, she worked tirelessly, both at the
school and by traveling to London and Paris to study
(12:21):
other theories of special education. She rigorously observed her students,
evaluated what worked and what didn't, and then would refine
her approach accordingly. And as she built on her knowledge
and her methods, her students performed exceptionally well. Several learned
to read and write well enough that they were able
to sit for the same exams that were required of
(12:42):
other school children. And as she was doing all of this,
she was also doing a lot of other work, including
having a medical private practice and being the chair of
hygiene at one of Italy's two women's colleges, which she
held from eight to nineteen o six. This earned her
a lot of praise, but Montessori found that it raised
a lot of questions within her own mind. If her
(13:04):
methods allowed her special education students to perform as well
as their peers in regular classrooms, what did that say
about the methods that were being used in those classrooms.
Should non disabled students have been performing even better than
they were so? In nineteen o one, Montessori left the
special education school in Rome, and at this point she
(13:25):
had had a son, Mario, with the school's other co director, Dr.
Giseppa monte Sano. The date of Mario's birth is kind
of unclear. It's often reported as March thirty one. Monte
Sano's family was against the idea of his marrying Montessori,
and although monte Sano did legally recognize Mario as his child,
(13:46):
he also insisted that the baby we kept secret. Mario
was sent to live with a wet nurse and then
to a boarding school. There's not a lot written um
about Maria Montessori's role in this decision, but based on
her really sticking to what she wanted and thought was
best um and other parts of her life that we'll
(14:09):
talk about later, it seems as though she would not
have been like bullied into sending her child away like this.
This seems like it was a decision that like she
also probably didn't want to marry him and thought that
it would be best for another family to look after Mario. So,
with her son being cared for in the country in secret,
(14:32):
Montessori returned to school herself. She enrolled again at the
University of Rome with the goal of furthering her education
so she could create an education program suitable for all children.
She studied pedagogy, psychiatry, anthropology, and educational history and philosophy.
She became a professor at the University of Rome in
(14:52):
nineteen four and eventually became its chair of Anthropology. During
those same years, the world of education was also change
jing during Montessori's childhood and early career. Many schools in
Europe and the United States were just dominated with memorization,
recitation and repetitions might have had something to do with
why Montessori was not particularly into doing well at it
(15:15):
in her early childhood years, but educators like Friedrich Froebel,
the German reformer who coined the term kindergarten, had started
to shift that model. More and more educators were starting
to talk about making schools into more homelike, inviting places
that engage children through their senses, rather than just drilling
(15:35):
them and recitals and repetition and learning things by route
to spit them back out again. And of course this
is a very simplified overview of education. At the time,
there were a lot of schools of thought that we're
going on about how children should be educated, particularly in
early childhood during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
(15:56):
But from Montessori's point of view, Frobel and other farmers
had taken and we're taking an approach that was too
intuitive and romanticized. She favored an approach that she saw
as more scientific, incorporating exact measurements of children's bodies that
would be kept as part of their record making clinical observations,
collecting and interpreting data about what was working and what wasn't.
(16:20):
In nineteen o four, she had returned to lecturing on pedagogy,
and she advocated approaching pedagogy through science to gather data
and pinpoint successful strategies for education. Eventually, Montessori wound up
with a theory of education that drew from all kinds
of disciplines, including medicine, psychology, and physiological and cultural anthropology.
(16:43):
This was an approach that was holistic and multidisciplinary, aimed
at creating an educational setting that would nurture and inspire
the creativity and desire to learn that she believed to
be present in all children. UH. The idea of physiological
anthropology comes up from time to time in the context
of the eugenics movement because it's about like human physiology
(17:04):
and how it relates to anthropology. UH. It does not
appear that Maria Montessori ever had anything to do with
that movement, and in fact, a lot of the things
that she advocated were directly contradictory to eugenics. But unfortunately,
because she had that physiological anthropology focused to some of
what she did, there were people in the eugenics movement
(17:25):
who like then picked up her theories and tried to
advocate them as a like a eugenics UH tool. She
actually put all of this theory into practice for the
first time. In nineteen o seven, a charitable society that
was purchasing and refurbishing tenement properties impoverished areas of Rome
(17:48):
had approached her about starting a daycare in the neighborhood.
Most of the parents who were living there worked and
children not yet old enough to be in school during
the day. We're being left alone own, sometimes with basically
no supervision, because their parents just did not have the
means to care for them while they were at work.
The result was the Casa day Bambini a k. The
(18:09):
Children's House, which opened in San Lorenzo Quarter on January
six of nine seven, in one of the tenement buildings
where the children actually lived. About sixty children were enrolled,
and they were all under the age of seven. Montessori
saw this as an opportunity not only to implement her
teaching methods, but also to make a charitable effort to
try to lift the residence of San Lorenzo Quarter out
(18:31):
of poverty through educating their children and making it easier
for their parents to comfortably go to work every day.
Although her students were all from low income families, she
also foresaw a time when women of all social strata
would want to enter the workforce, making the Casa da
Bambini a model for daycare and early childhood education among
(18:52):
working families across the economic spectrum. In terms of the
school itself, it was sized for children's needs, with tables, chairs, cabinets,
washbasins and the like all being sized down to their scale.
She encouraged parents involvement in their children's education with periodic
conversations akin to today's parent teacher conferences. The children had
(19:14):
a lot of freedom to learn and explore, but there
was also a lot of structure. Montessori reframed the role
of teacher as directress today, often called a guide who
helped children educate themselves in life skills, motor and sensory skills,
and the typical reading, writing, and arithmetic. One of the
most recognizable hallmarks of Montessori's educational methods was the materials
(19:38):
that she implemented for helping children learn to build the
build these skills, for example, a set of cylinders of
different sizes that fit into similarly sized holes in a
wooden block. Her materials used colors, textures, sizes, smells, and
sounds so that children could learn to distinguish between all
of these and to recognize patterns. Rather than systematically teaching
(20:02):
children to read and write, she supplied them with things
like color coded cardboard letters and numbers, and counting rods
of different links, which could be palpated and manipulated. As
children became cognitively ready to read and count. The directress
did work with children as they use these materials, for examples,
sounding out each letter as children held and felt the
(20:24):
cardboard version, but it was more about readying a child's
mind for reading, writing, and arithmetic, and allowing children to
teach themselves to do it rather than sitting them down
and instructing them. Basically, in Montessori's method, children were self educating.
The directress was simply guiding them and self directing, self
correcting activities that made it possible for them to learn
(20:46):
on their own. The directress was to tailor her guidance
according to the to the developmental needs and the readiness
of each child and to their sensitive periods. And the
students also learned about life skills and the natural world
through the is like helping to prepare prepare meals and
planting and tending a school garden. Kaza da Bambini was
(21:06):
hailed as a huge success, and soon Montessori was working
to put her educational theories into wider practice. We're going
to talk about that more after we once again paused
for a break from one of our sponsors. As we
said before the break, Maria Montessori's first school, Casa de
(21:29):
Bambini opened in nineteen o seven. Soon she had established
several other schools in Rome, both in the San Lorenzo
quarter and in other more affluent parts of the city.
By her reputation was really growing in Italy, and she
had started a school to train other directresses. She had
created a curriculum that was starting to be shared around
(21:50):
the world. She left her position at the original Casa
de Bambini in nineteen eleven with the goal of bringing
her methods to more classrooms. Worried that her methods would
be distorted or implemented in an ineffectual or damaging way,
she did as much as she could to disseminate information
herself and educate people on her methods. Personally, she wanted
(22:11):
Montessori's directresses to follow her methods absolutely. Yes. She really
did not want teachers to be like, you know, I'm
just going to take the Montessori method, but I'm only
going to take these blocks and numbers and and those
sorts of things, and I'm going to do my own thing.
She she wanted people to follow exactly what she uh,
(22:33):
what she was advocating, and what she was writing down.
She did not think it was gonna be effective otherwise.
Maria Montessori used her medical and academic background to publish
papers on the method in journals. She wrote what would
become known as the Montessori Method in nineteen ten, and
it began to be translated and published in other nations.
It's first publication in the United States was in nineteen twelve.
(22:55):
She published Doctor Montessori's own Handbook in nineteen fourteen, and
a twovolume work called Advanced Montessori Method in nineteen eighteen
and nineteen nine. Montessori was also Catholic, and over the
course of her life wrote several books that were more
religious in nature for children, such as quote the Mass
Explained to Children. When I was a kid, I had
(23:16):
a copy of that. Really, yeah, that was like an old,
clunky like I don't know where it came from. I
think it probably came from my grandmother's house at some
point in time. But yeah, I had a copy of it.
I don't know where it ended up. And I remember
being like, oh, like it was actually quite helpful to
explain all the sitting and standing and like what you know.
(23:37):
She also traveled extensively in order to lecture on her
methods and trained teachers directly. She visited the US in
nineteen thirteen. Jane Adams, who was subject of a past
two part He Here on the podcast, introduced her at
one of her appearances in Chicago. That same year, Mabel
and Alexander Graham Bell founded the Montessori Educational Association in Washington,
(23:59):
d C. President Woodrow Wilson's daughter Margaret, was on the
board of directors. In nineteen fifteen, the Panama Pacific International
Exhibition in San Francisco featured a glasshouse demonstration school room
for Montessori's methods. Her work and advocacy for her methods
continued on from there. She did research in Spain in
nineteen seventeen and started training directress as in London in
(24:22):
nineteen nineteen. Basically, Montessori was becoming an international movement, with
she herself training people and traveling extensively to promote it
and try to try to directly teach the people who
were going to work as directresses in Montessori classrooms. It
was also within these nineteen teens years that she was
(24:43):
reunited with her son, Mario, when he was about fifteen
years old. Mario was reportedly presented first as Montessori's nephew
and then later as her adopted son, and although he
did not really know his mother until his teens, he
became incredibly devoted to her, and he eventually became her successor.
It cracks me up, like there was more than one
(25:05):
source who said that Mario at first was like, oh,
this is my nephew. But I also I couldn't find
confirmation that she had any siblings. So that tickles me
a little bit unless it's one of those, uh, you
know things where like close friends kind of become like
family and people were referred to their children as their
nephews and nieces. But even so, yeah, so. In ninety two,
(25:33):
Benito Mussolini, who had established the Fascist Party in nineteen nineteen,
became Italy's Prime minister. Mussolini's secretary of education, Giovanni Gentile,
approved of Montessori's methods. The first meeting among Mussolini and
Montessori took place in nineteen twenty four. Mussolini wanted Montessori's
(25:53):
name and reputation to help spread his fascist ideology and
for her educational work to lift Italy's reputation. For her part,
Montessori wanted the Italian government's backing to help spread her
educational philosophies. By nine she had been made an honorary
member of the Fascist Party, and soon the Italian government
was supporting multiple Montessori schools and training programs. However, Montessori
(26:19):
was still dedicated to the idea of keeping control of
her educational philosophies and of educating all children, not just
Italian children. She accepted the government's support in spreading her
work as an educator, but she refused to have it
aligned with Italy's fascist politics. In nine she and her
son Mario established the Association Montsori Internacional, meant to unite
(26:43):
the world's various Montessori programs and organizations. Montessori was named
its lifetime president, with Mario working with her extensively, and
this organization was headquartered in Berlin. The fact that it
was in Berlin did not fit well with Mussolini, whose
regime had become progressively more and more totalitarian at this point,
and whose motto was quote everything in the state, nothing
(27:06):
outside the state, nothing against the state. Montessori, on the
other hand, wanted to be an educator, as we said before,
for all children. This was regardless of the children's race, ethnicity,
or nationality. She refused to give this up and was
increasingly vocal in her opposition to the government's fascist and
totalitarian ideals. When the government tried to name Montessori Italy's
(27:30):
children's Ambassador in nineteen thirty four, she refused unless the
Italian government recognized her total control over the a m I.
The government shut down several state sponsored Montessori programs, and
Montessori left Italy in exile. In ninety six, Maria and
Mario moved to the a m i's headquarters to Amsterdam,
(27:50):
where she continued to try to build a truly international
system of education in which children from Europe, Asia and
North America could all be guided to teach them elves
using the same methods and her words quote, there is
no sense in talking about differences of procedure for Indian babies,
Chinese babies, or European babies, nor for those belonging to
(28:11):
different social classes. We can speak of one method, that
which follows the natural unfolding of man. All babies have
the same psychological needs and follow the same sequence of events,
and attaining to human stature, every one of us has
to pass through the same phases of growth. Montessori continued
to travel in support of her work, and sometimes that
(28:33):
travel was actually quite perilous. She was in Spain when
the Spanish Civil War broke out in nineteen thirty six.
She was training Montessori educators in India in nineteen thirty
nine when Italy entered World War Two, and as she
was an Italian national in British territory, she was for
a time confined to her training school along with her son. Eventually, though,
(28:54):
she was allowed freedom of movement, and while in India
she worked with Gandhi to develop a curriculum for Ease.
After the end of World War Two, the Montessori's returned
to Amsterdam. In nineteen forty seven, the Italian government invited
her back into the country to reopen the Montessori the
Montessori schools and training programs that had previously closed. Maria
(29:15):
continued to work and teach until the very end of
her life. In nineteen forty eight, she returned to India
and in nineteen forty nine she made her first trip
to Pakistan. She toured Norway and Sweden in nineteen fifty
and in nineteen fifty one she went to London for
the eighth International Montessori Congress. She was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize six times before her death in a
(29:38):
friend's garden on May six of nineteen fifty two in
the Netherlands. She was eighty one at the time. Montessori's
teaching methods have continued to be really influential. There are
at least seven thousand Montessori schools around the world today,
although since in spite of her efforts to retain control
over training and certifications, in a lot of places the
(29:59):
name Montessori it is not actually trademarked, so the number
of schools calling themselves Montessori is actually a lot larger
than those approximately seven thousands certified schools, As we noted
at the top of the show. For some folks in
the United States, Montessori school has this connection with the
free spirited parents of the nineteen sixties and seventies, not
(30:20):
with the turn of the twentieth century. And this is
because while the Montessori method was growing in popularity in
much of Europe and parts of Asia, in the United
States had actually felt out of fashion for a while
after its initial introduction in the early nineteen teens. Between
nineteen ten and nineteen fourteen, Montessori education gained a lot
of attention really quickly in the United States due to
(30:41):
its apparent success in classrooms and because people were drawn
some Montessori herself as a person and as an educator,
she was very charismatic and energetic and how she talked
to people. Her method had also come from Europe, giving
it a layer of prestige, and many American minds it's European. Yeah,
(31:02):
I don't feel like that has quite the same uh
connotation today in A lot of this attention, though, was
from the general public, parents who had heard about Montessori's
successes with disadvantaged children in Italy who had learned to
read by age four and seemed exceptionally happy in the classroom.
(31:23):
Some of this attention came from articles in magazines, Notably
McClure's publisher and editor, Samuel S. McClure, was a huge
proponent of the method, although his business relationship with her
to that end was kind of fraught and it eventually unraveled. Doctors, scientists,
and other experts from outside the field of education also
wrote about it quite favorably. A portion of American educators, though,
(31:47):
were vocally critical of Montetstori's methods when they were first introduced,
her theories were often described as being commonplace in the
United States twenty five or thirty years before. By the
time of the English language publication and of the Montessori method,
Freeder Crobo's concept of kindergarten was widely implemented in the
United States and had been for decades. That meant that
(32:08):
the child sized classrooms and child centered learning that were
common to both kindergarten and Montessori were not really novel
in the United States the way that they had been
in some other nations. In the words of William H.
Kilpatrick of Teachers College, Columbia University, who published a highly
critical the Montessori System Examined in nineteen fourteen, quote, Madame
(32:31):
Montessori belongs in the history of American educational theory essentially
along with the writer's anti anti dating eighteen eighty. In
several fundamental respects, she is some thirty years behind the
best of our present. Some educators also criticized Montessori's work
in the nineteen teens as failing to engage children's imaginations,
(32:53):
prompting an e. George one of the biggest proponents in
the United States and the translator of the Montessori method
for England ISSH and it's first US publication. To counter
quote the Italian educator, it is said, makes the mistake
of bringing the children too closely to the earth, as
distinguished from other methods which encourage imagination and deal in
fairies and nights and imaginative games. Dr Montessori makes the
(33:16):
children see the world as it really is to her.
A block is a block, not a castle. The hands
and fingers are anatomical structures, not pigeons. The children learn
real geometrical forms by their right names triangles, squares, circles, ovals,
not as symbolic abstractions. So for the first few years
after its introduction in the United States, Montessori education was
(33:39):
a bit of a flash in the pan fad, but
quickly dedicated Montessori schools dwindled, especially after the United States
entered World War One. Yeah, that it's from Europe prestige
meant something quite different when World War One started and
it became it's from Italy. Yeah. However, in the nineteen
sixties there was a resurgence and interest in the Montessori
(34:02):
method in the United States, led by a combination of factors,
including its focus on child centered learning and a renewed
focus on getting children, especially children from low income and
at risk families, uh into academic excellence sooner. It was
the same window that like the Headstart program was first launched,
Like there was just a lot of focus on American
(34:24):
children need to be achieving academically earlier than they are.
And then, as Sweet said at the top of show,
some kind of free spirited parents. Today, about four thousand
of the seven thousand accredited Montessori schools worldwide are in
the United States. That's Maria Montessori. This whole episode makes
me want to go play with blocks. There's some pretty
(34:46):
great blocks and colorful letters. It would be great well.
And one of the first jobs that I had out
of college, I wrote copy for a educational catalog um
and we had this sort of corner, like this one
page of things that were basically the blocks and letter
(35:06):
shapes and cylinders and things like that that are part
of the Montessori method um. And I remember just having
all of these conversations about like we can say these
are appropriate for a mont Story classroom, but we like
we could not write the copy to be like, you'll
be a mones story teacher with these great blocks, Like
(35:28):
for a lot of people, they're the most recognizable hallmark
of Montessori School. But that's there's a whole philosophy going
with those blocks. Do you have a philosophy of listener mail?
I have. We're gonna call this corrections corner. Okay, it's
been almost a month because of the holidays since I recorded,
(35:51):
since that, like since I was the researcher on an episode. UM,
And so that that means we have a couple of
things that need to be corrected, and we're gonna just
put them all today rather than spreading them out along
more than one episode. UM. The first is about our
Unearthed Part one where we talked about the HMS terror
and we got several notes along these same lines, and
(36:13):
I'm going to read just one of them, and this
is from James. James says Hi, Tracy and Holly. First off,
I wanted to thank you for doing the podcast and
in the Unearthed Part one segment on the confirmation of
the HMS terror's location, mentioning the oral histories of the
indigenous peoples of Canada's North that had already marked the
location of the ship. If it's not too rude, I
just wanted to make a mild correction. The indigenous people's
(36:34):
in Canada's Arctic, including the man who told the expedition
where he had seen the ship's massed. Are the Inuit
not First Nations. It might seem like a mild topic,
but the Inuit are often miscategorized or lumped in with
the other indigenous people's and the issue you can be
fraught with emotion. I know I can shape chafe when
the mate of which I am a member are miscategorized.
(36:55):
A quick down and dirty guide to Canada's three constitutionally
recognized and as people's is First Nations, broadly equivalent to
the American term Native Americans, representing the three six hundred
thirty four federally recognized tribal governments or bands. Mate a
distinct Aboriginal slash Indigenous people who arose from the intermingling
(37:17):
of traders, trappers, settlers, and the Indigenous people who would
later be recognized as First Nations. There are distinct Matine
nations by province. I'm a member of Alberta's Matine Nation
because we're a separate culture and people. A mate person
isn't just someone who has both indigenous and non indigenous ancestry.
They have to specifically with someone who is ethnically matie Inuit,
(37:41):
the indigenous people of the North broadly equivalent to the
U S terms Native Alaskans, but representing different peoples, so
someone who was Native Alaskan likely would not consider themselves
to be Inuit or the reverse. Thank you for taking
the time to read this, and I apologize if I
repeated information you know, or if I spoke at all condescendingly.
I really appreciate how your work works to reinsert the
(38:04):
contributions of marginalized people into history where it belongs. And
I hope my email can be taken in the same
spirit as an Indigenous person who writes and consults on
their representation and media. I just thought I would share
my perspective to prevent any accidental miscategorization. Thanks again, and
I hope you have a great date, James. Thank you
so much, James. The apologies are so unnecessary. This is
(38:26):
the exact type of thing that we really want to
get right and try hard to get right. And I
was genuinely not aware of the nuances um like previously,
we had gotten notes. I think it's this couple of
years ago we had used the word Native American when
(38:46):
talking about Canada, and we got some notes that said, uh,
in Canada we use the term first nations. Absolutely not
aware that there were further nuances to that. So like,
this is the exact type of thing that we want
to hear about, want to be um correct on. And
it was absolutely not condescending or rude at all, uh
(39:12):
in any way. So thank you again so much James
for spelling that out so clearly and concisely, because, as
I said, I did not know that, and I apologized
for my ignorance. Uh. We also have some notes about
the conversation that we had with Eric Lars Meyers about beer. Um.
This is another thing. We've gotten a several different tweets,
slash Facebook comments, slash emails, and so rather reading anyone
(39:35):
particular one, I'm just going to clarify a couple of things.
We got several notes about whether references to wine in
the Bible were really about beer, and lots of these
notes basically said, well, we definitely know that it was
wine because they were wine. Okay, we did, we definitely
do know there was wine in Biblical times. We also
definitely know that there was beer in biblical times, and
(39:58):
we know all of these things that would like of
other writing and archaeological evidence and art and like lots
of evidence for all of these things. What we don't
really have is separate words for all of these types
of alcoholic beverages uh in the Bible. So it's not
completely clear whether everything that's translated today as wine was
(40:20):
really made out of grapes. So we were definitely not
trying to say there was no wine in the Bible,
like that's that's not always um And regardless, the ancient
wines and beers and all of the other fermented beverages
that existed probably would have been a lot different from
what we think of today, Like we talked about that
on that show a bit. Uh. Eric had also said
(40:43):
in the beer episode that he had no idea whether
he was making up the date that the Rhine High
school vote was revised to include yeast after Louis Pasteur's
work in the eighteen fifties in Strasbourg, Pasteward was doing
a lot of research into yeast's fermentation of sugar, specifically
in the eighteen fifties, but it was not until the
early twentieth century that the run High school but was
(41:05):
revised to include East. Um. There were also a whole
lot of other scientists working with East at that point,
So Louis Pasteur is not like the be all end
all of yeast discovery for sure. I kind of now
just want to do a whole episode on the history
of yeast, which could be fascinating, uh, but maybe only
(41:29):
to me. Uh. Lastly, we all definitely know that Plymouth
is in Massachusetts. We in fact have pictures of Pilgrim
Monument in Provincetown, Massachusetts taken with my camera on our Instagram.
This is a known thing. Uh. So that's basically correction
corner for today. Some of those are not really corrections,
there are more like clarifications. But um, thank you again
(41:51):
James writing. Thank you again Eric for being on the show.
I had a super fun time talking about beer with Eric.
If you were, if you would like to write to
us about this or any other podcast where History podcast
at how stuff Works dot com. And then on social media,
we have the word missed in history. That is basically everywhere.
It's on Facebook and Pinterest and Tumbler, and Twitter and Instagram,
(42:15):
all of those things. Our name is missed in History. Uh.
We have also started doing some videos. We have four
of them now. They are all on our website and
we have been sharing them on our social media also,
so you can come have a look at those. Um
and that is our website which is missing history dot com.
You can also come to our parent company's website, which
is how stuff works dot com and learn all kinds
(42:36):
of stuff about education and teaching methods and all kinds
of things. So we can do all of that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or missing history dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
com In
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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