Maria Montessori: From Rome's Asylums to Sawed-Off Chair Legs

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Maria Montessori rejected teaching, one of the few careers open to women in 19th century Italy, and instead became one of Italy's first female medical doctors. In 1897, while studying educational theory at the University of Rome, she observed institutionalized children in the city's asylums, kept in barren rooms and considered unteachable, and concluded they were starved for stimulation. She called her clinical approach scientific pedagogy, refined it in 1901 while living with reformers Alice and Leopoldo Franchetti, and in 1907 opened the Casa dei Bambini in a tenement in Rome's San Lorenzo district. She cut down furniture to child size and set natural materials on low open shelves, including sandpaper letters and the golden bead material for the decimal system.

Children in the room were reading and writing before school age, and the movement spread worldwide after 1909, with the first U.S. school founded by Frank and Narcissa Vanderlip and supporters including Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. In 1914 William Heard Kilpatrick's booklet The Montessori System Examined stalled the American movement until around 1960. She met Gandhi in London in 1931, and during World War II the British interned her in India as an enemy alien, where she trained teachers. She described four planes of development from birth to 24. The episode also reports Sabine Seichter's finding that her early goal was avoiding racial degeneration, and a 1967 U.S. ruling that the Montessori name cannot be trademarked.

• She gave no grades, stickers or punishments and allowed work blocks of up to three hours.
• Her term normalization describes children settling into deep concentration on freely chosen work.
• For ages 12 to 18 she proposed Erdkinder, adolescents living and working on a farm.
• A 2017 study of randomly assigned students found higher academic scores in high-fidelity Montessori schools.
• A 2021 study linked at least two years of Montessori schooling to higher adult well-being and social trust.