Maria Montessori\'s Contributions to Education

Maria Montessori's Contributions To Education

Dr. Maria Montessori changed the way we look at education. Her methods led people, including educators, to take a good look at the processes by which nations all over the world educated their children. In some cases, such as the education of mentally disabled children, Maria Montessori was able to teach children who were considered "ineducable" (Stephenson, 1998, p. 2). Her life-long pursuit to educate children who others had left behind most definitely qualifies her as a pioneer in the fields of special education and early education in children.

Born in 1870 in Italy, Dr. Montessori did things untraditionally from the beginning. She attended a boys' technical school, became and engineer, and then a doctor. While working as a doctor, she became interested primarily in children and based a lot of her later teachings on direct observation of them. It was at this time that she started to recognize that many of the needs of these children were not being met by the current mainstream education system and that their full potentials as individuals were not being met (Stephenson, 1998).

Susan Stephenson (1998) calls Dr. Montessori a "woman who began an educational revolution that changed the way we think about children" (p. 2). It is an easy claim to back up; in her early work with children, she did amazing work as the director of a school for mentally disabled children who many had given up on. At the time these children were considered un-teachable, yet under Montessori's guidance they reached a level of learning where they successfully passed school examinations along-side children who had no mental disabilities (Stephenson, 1998).

Many ideas and values make up the Montessori model of teaching, but the main idea is that "the purpose of education is to fully develop human potentialities" (Dubble, 1998, p. 2). Through this main idea, children are exposed, from an early age, to resources that allow them to learn at their own pace from surroundings that naturally inspire them to learn. Today these seemingly simple ideas are still rather radical, and in the late 1800s and early 1900s when Dr. Montessori first endeavored to use her methods, educators were shocked.

Beyond her work with mentally disabled children, Dr. Montessori took great interest in children who were poor, malnourished, and uneducated. With her primary education as a doctor (the first female doctor in Italy), she recognized the relationship between health and learning. The success of her teaching methods also gave a voice to poor and disabled children. In her work at The Children's House in Rome, Italy, she fostered great learning in children who otherwise would receive the most minor educations. In this process, she emphasized the importance of movement, spontaneity, choice, and responsibility, all things that children from the poor slums of Rome were not getting (DuCharme 1992).

Working with both the poor and the disabled, Dr. Montessori further developed her ideas of a system under which all children can develop at their own pace and, again, to fully develop to their own potential. She instituted a study of Cosmic Education, or the "gradual discovery, throughout the whole of childhood, of the interrelatedness of all things on earth, in the past, present, and in the future" (Stephenson, 1998, p. 2). She contended that through Cosmic Education, the needs of the individual child would be met and would lead, in turn, to the needs of the greater world being met. In attempts to further these ideas, Dr. Montessori incorporated methods now considered key to the overall Montessori Method. These include: grouping children by periods of development, usually in three-year age spans; applying methods based on human tendencies, like tendencies to move, share, explore, and abstract ideas from experience; and preparation of the environment, by both having a knowledgeable teacher and additional resources available to the child for further learning (Stephenson, 1998).