Maria Montessori

A Biography

Rita Kramer

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781635761092
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

The definitive biography of a physician, feminist, social reformer, educator, and one of the most influential, and controversial women of the 20th century. Maria Montessori effected a worldwide revolution in the classroom. She developed a new method of educating the young and inspired a movement that carried it into every corner of the world. This is the story of the woman behind the public figure—her accomplishments, her ideas, and her passions. Montessori broke the mold imposed on women in the nineteenth century and forged a new one, first for herself and eventually for those who came after her. Against formidable odds she became the first woman to graduate from the medical school of the University of Rome and then devoted herself to the condition of children considered uneducable at the time. She developed a teaching method that enabled them to do as well as normal children, a method which then led her to found a new kind of school—the Casa dei Bambini, or House of Children—which gained her worldwide fame and still pervades classrooms wherever young children learn. This biography is not only the story of a groundbreaking feminist but a vital chapter in the history of education. "Highly recommended for educators, parents, and moderate feminists who seek inspiration from one of the most accomplished women of this or any other age."— Publishers Weekly

PART III

The Method and the Movement

15

The history of the Montessori movement in England—and of Montessori’s role in it—contains both striking parallels to as well as differences from the American experience. It is a story that begins with the same initial enthusiasm of response to the news of the “miracles” at the first Casa dei Bambini. Here too, early accounts in professional educational journals were followed by articles in newspapers and popular magazines and, as had their American counterparts, reform-minded English educators began to make the pilgrimage to Rome, were impressed and inspired by what they saw there, and returned to start schools and societies and bring the message of a new kind of education for a new kind of child to their countrymen.

By the spring of 1912 the name Montessori was becoming familiar to readers of English periodicals and particularly of the influential London Times Educational Supplement, which was followed with close attention by practically all professional educators from the kindergarten or infant school to the university level.

The publication of the English edition of The Montessori Method and the innumerable reviews it engendered aroused both public and professional interest, which was further stimulated by the publication and discussion in the press of the official report “The Montessori System of Education,” prepared by Edmond G. A. Holmes, a chief inspector of schools, for the Board of Education.¹ It seemed as though everyone concerned with schooling had read either Montessori’s book or Holmes’s report, an enthusiastic presentation of the advantages of auto-education, which recommended that the authorities set up classes in the public school system to experiment with English schoolchildren of nursery-kindergarten-primary age by allowing them to learn spontaneously in a prepared environment. The first printing of Holmes’s pamphlet was sold out in a few days and a second was rushed to press for an eagerly waiting public.

Soon the system was being discussed, explained, and attacked at practically every professional meeting of teachers and school officials.

In March 1912 Holmes read a paper on the Montessori method to a large audience of English teachers. Holmes had been an early visitor to the Casa, along with Bertram Hawker, the man who had stopped off on his way to Australia, became engrossed in the method, and returned to England to open the first Montessori school in the drawing room of his house at East Runton, near Cromer. About a dozen village children were chosen, with the cooperation of the Norfolk educational authorities, from the East Runton elementary school, and the directress was a Miss Lydbetter, who had taken Montessori’s training course and was at that moment the only bona fide Montessori-trained teacher in the country. Visitors to East Runton were impressed, and the press reported favorably on the results of this initial experiment: the children were found to be “clean, not tired, considerate, and happy”²—in that order.

Holmes and Hawker were instrumental, in the spring of 1912, in forming a British committee, the Montessori Society of the United Kingdom, with headquarters in Eaton Square. The society soon had two hundred members and included on its executive committee a number of wealthy, influential, and in some cases titled personages.

Journalists reported that “public interest in the movement is getting beyond the stage of curiosity”³ and large audiences turned out for lectures on the method that Hawker gave in London, Liverpool, Sheffield, Lee, and Cambridge.

The intention of the society was to keep in touch with Maria Montessori, arrange for the training of Montessori teachers for the English schools, and educate both the teaching profession and the public about the method.

In the summer of 1912, in a letter thanking the members of the society for their interest and assistance, Montessori wrote, “I approve in substance your conditions regarding the training of teachers but I should like to have more exact information before replying to them. I should like also to know in which way the Society could prohibit the use of the name ‘Montessori.’”⁴

Again, as in America, there begins the concern with the use of her name in connection with her ideas, the emphasis on protecting a system of patentable devices in addition to spreading general intellectual principles, and again one wonders if the history of the movement would have been different if Montessori had not insisted on keeping such a tight rein on all aspects of the use of her method and especially on training all teachers herself.

As a young woman she had insisted on controlling her own life and she had achieved remarkable things. Now she insisted on controlling what she had achieved. It was impossible for her to relinquish the use of her name in connection with her ideas once she became dependent on the use of those ideas for her own livelihood, her entire income, turning away from a life in which she might have done further research, written, and taught her ideas to others in some academic institution to devote herself instead to the spread of a movement she felt had to be carried on in only one “right” way.

During 1912 and 1913 the books on the method that were appearing in America were also being brought out across the Atlantic and an introduction to the Montessori system by Theodate L. Smith of Clark University,⁵ another of the educators who had journeyed to Rome and then put the theory into practice in an open-air kindergarten for American children, was typical of those which, when they appeared in England, were widely reviewed and read, adding to what the press called “a growing chorus of converts.”⁶ Another was Montessori Schools as Seen in the Early Summer of 1913 by Jessie White,⁷ an account of how Montessori schools varied with the personality of the individual teacher directing the class.

At the same time, the publication of The Montessori Principles and Practices by Edward P. Culverwell,⁸ a professor at Dublin University, stimulated a good deal of interest in Montessori’s ideas in Ireland. A fairly balanced appraisal of the method, Culverwell’s book maintained that in the end Montessori’s ideas would prove right because they were consistent with the biological principles of child development and because their emphasis on liberty was consistent with the political direction in which society was moving through history.

Discussing the Culverwell book late in 1913, an English reviewer speculated that “Owing to the indiscriminate worship of blind admirers, the Montessori method may in a few years come to be looked on as a fad which has had its day,” and suggested that Montessori herself was to some extent responsible for the danger: “Like a great many of her disciples, she is too apt to think or to give the impression that she thinks, that she stands alone in her knowledge and appreciation of the principles on which her system is founded.” Extravagant praise of the method “by those who can see no virtue and no likeness to it in any other system must tend to irritate good teachers, and to make them, as Professor Culverwell says, not only unsympathetic, but hostile and suspicious. Those, therefore, who agree with him as to the reality of its excellence will do well to exercise in their written and spoken comments on the work of their teacher, the self-control which it is one of her chief objects to instill into the minds of the young.”⁹

At numerous conferences throughout 1912 English educators discussed the merits and drawbacks of the Montessori system. The criticisms were familiar: the Montessori method catered to the “formal” and ignored “the literary and artistic side of life.” The appreciations were equally familiar: Education would never be the same again. “We now know that education must not begin at twelve years but at two years.”¹⁰

Controversy raged in the columns of the staid London Times. Charlotte M. Mason, a now-forgotten leader in the infant school movement of the time, publicly called the method a “calamity,” insisting it discarded knowledge and replaced it with “appliances and employments.” The Montessori child had pretty manners, was neat and sharp-sensed, but “at the expense of another and higher sense. No fairies play about him, no heroes stir his soul; God and good angels form no part of his thought; the child and the person he will become are a scientific product…but song and picture, hymn and story are for the educational scrapheap.”¹¹

There were plenty of advocates ready to reply to this romantic—and perhaps envious—nonsense. One teacher wrote in answer to the “cheap sneers” of Mason, whose criticisms were appearing in magazine articles as well, that most children never in fact mastered the skills of reading and writing well enough to benefit from the ideas in the books they read. “The methods which prevail in the education of the young do not produce the initiative desired—the alert mind and the ready wit.”¹²

In a magazine article Mason compared her own Froebelian approach with what she considered the Montessori mischief and came closer to some rational objections—if not to the method itself, then to its possible misapplications.

“It is difficult,” she wrote, “to believe that a certain particular set of cubes and bricks and lacing frames and skeins of colored silks and other apparatus are the one perfect and predestined means of proper education for which the world has been waiting all these years. We must not set them up and worship them as fetishes. The danger is that some of [Montessori’s] disciples may be tempted to exalt the method (the apparatus) above the principle (the freedom of the child).”¹³

Other critics said that the method had been around as long as Seguin, that Montessori had merely reedited his physiological method for defective children in the light of modern knowledge and added her own commanding personality and a certain flair for publicity. They pointed out that sense-training methods had been in use for many years in training schools for the feebleminded by devoted teachers who never thought to label these systems with their own names.¹⁴

The criticisms contain both a certain meanness and a certain truth. Montessori never claimed to have originated the materials of her system, but it cannot be denied that she used them for new purposes in new ways. It is also true that she cared about making the results of her discoveries known and that she impressed the world and attracted interest not only because of what she had done but what she was like. The same aggressivity that had thrust her forward, like a self-propelled rocket, from childhood, first into technical studies, then into medical school, then into public life, was applied to her later career, and the press had served throughout to make her and her work known, using her as she had used it in a symbiotic process the result of which had been to make her famous. But while she might have done her work without becoming famous, she could never have gained the fame without having accomplished what she did.

Toward the end of 1912 it was announced that the education committee of the London County Council would send one of its infant-school teachers, Lily Hutchinson, to Rome to attend the international training course Montessori would give beginning in January 1913.

As 1912 drew to a close the Times Educational Supplement reported that “interest in the Montessori system increases every day. The pilgrimage to Rome, where the Montessori Society of the United Kingdom have now an accredited resident representative, is becoming almost as necessary a part of the educationist’s education as in the days when our great-grandfathers used to make the Grand Tour for the development of the intellect. Englishmen are learning Italian so as to be able to speak with the Dottoressa without the cumbersome intervention of an interpreter, English ladies are being sent to Rome to learn the system on the spot.”¹⁵ Culverwell’s lectures in Dublin and Hawker’s in various English cities were attracting audiences of as many as a thousand teachers.

The Montessori movement seemed on the brink of transforming the British educational system.

At the 1913 annual conference of teachers held by the London County Council the Montessori method was the main subject of discussion. The chairman described the method as “a subject upon which the whole educational world is agog” and suggested that council members, by virtue of their position of authority in education, “ought to know all there is to know about the Montessori method.”¹⁶

In discussion of new ideas for classroom activities the results at the Casa dei Bambini became the standard by which teaching practices were judged. Did they train the children in self-reliance? Did they provide “a Montessori feeling”?

A dozen English teachers took the four-month training course in Rome in the spring of 1913 and returned, diplomas in hand, to set up experimental classes in public or private schools from the Hampstead Garden Suburb to the outskirts of Birmingham.

By early 1913 a London school official commented, “The topic is being everywhere discussed—at teachers’ meetings, parents’ meeting, educational officials’ meetings, and meetings of educational amateurs and laymen. Newspapers and magazines are full of it, and there is much crash and conflict of opinion.”¹⁷

Montessori’s supporters—and young teachers in particular—pointed out that she had reversed the old doctrine which held that it doesn’t matter what you teach a child so long as he hates it. But at the annual meeting of the Association of University Women Teachers at the University of London the keynote speaker attacked the Montessori system in a paper entitled “The Theory of the Primrose Path,” in which she stated that “this enervating doctrine” rested on “a too ready and thoughtless identification of games with ease and mere pleasure” and an even more “fatal assumption—that all work was distasteful.” This extraordinary failure to understand the most basic premise of the Montessori method—that under the right circumstances children would find work a pleasure and would pursue it for its own sake—went on to remind teachers that “pain, disagreeable effort” were “an effectual instrument for good” and to express the fear that “left to choose for ourselves, we should accomplish pitifully little.” It was a not uncommon response on the part of teachers unable to tolerate the idea of “letting children sit on the floor and do what they like, as they like, when they like it, for as long as they like, and no longer.”¹⁸

This kind of criticism on the part of the teaching establishment makes Montessori’s fears of distortion of her ideas understandable even if it does not always justify her attempts to prevent it by controlling the use of her method and the spread of her ideas.

After all, there were always other voices ready to answer those of the critics. This particular diatribe was duly reported in the education columns of the Times, with a comment in the paper’s editorial news columns which chided its author for falling into “a pitfall of logic denouncing an educational system of growing popularity on the ground that it turned work into play, that lessons cannot be worth learning if the child enjoys them! We should rather congratulate the child,” said the Times, “on the services of a teacher who makes learning a pleasure.”¹⁹

Now, as in America, the inevitable commercial aspects of the movement began to appear. By spring of 1913 a model Montessori classroom had been set up in the London showrooms of the firm of Philip & Tacey, which advertised “the exclusive right of manufacturing the apparatus and didactic materials for the Montessori System. Eight guineas a set.”²⁰

Without any salaried position, Montessori was “relying upon the support of those who believed in her, and upon fees for courses of lectures,” as a member of the society put it early in 1913, announcing that the society had promise...