SYMHC Classics: Maria Montessori

This 2017 episode covers Maria Montessori, who worked in several fields, though is mostly associated with education. Her theories on early education still shape the way kids learn today around the globe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. Recently, we got an email from listener
Kathleen who asked if we had done an episode on
Maria Montessori. We have on January and that is Today's
Saturday Classic. Also, we're getting towards the end of what's
been another incredibly challenging school year for a lot of
our listeners. The last couple of months of the school

(00:24):
year can be particularly hectic, so we thought we would
take a moment for an episode that celebrates educators enjoy
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

(00:48):
I'm Tracy Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have gotten
a lot of requests to talk about Maria Montessori, a
few hundreds that 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

(01:09):
Facebook live by myself right before the holidays and and
gave listeners kind of a rundown of what was coming up.
And then I said, and then will be here. We
have 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,

(01:32):
she's really close to my heart because I have several
very dear friends who work in Montessori schools. But before
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 Holly's and my age are older,
probably you probably associate her with free spirited parents from

(01:57):
the sixties and seventies. That's from when Montessori became really
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

(02:18):
are not terms we would use today, and in some
cases they would be insensitive or even offensive. And this
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 disadvantaged, or both. So this
affects everything from titles of her predecessors books, two quotes

(02:39):
from her own work, and if you're inspired by this
episode to go learn more about her. It also applies
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
A m Standing, which was came up for the first
time I think in the nineteen fifties and speaks about uh,

(03:01):
developmental disabilities in a way we don't talk that way today, right,
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 Vello, Italy,
and that's on the upper calf part of the boot
overlooking the coast, and her father, Alessandro, was in civil

(03:24):
service and her mother reneald was charming, pious 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

(03:46):
other work. Maria and renealed were very close and 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

(04:10):
interested in excelling at school, but that started to change
if 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.

(04:31):
Her parents encouraged her to become a teacher, that 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

(04:54):
women did not offer the kinds of classes she would
need to actually do this. She enrolled in a technic
school for boys in three From there, Maria found a
love of science, especially biology, and she decided what she
really wanted to do with study medicine. This was even
more unheard of for a woman at the time than
being an engineer, and enrolling in medical school was an

(05:17):
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 excelled at it, and earning
multiple scholarships and paying most of her own way by

(05:38):
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 faced derision

(06:02):
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 she almost gave up,

(06:24):
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 park,
and the woman's child, caught Montessoria's attention, was playing with
a piece of colored paper with this just completely wrapped attention.
Something about this scene really struck Montessori, and it gave

(06:47):
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 eight she was the first woman in Italy
to earn a doctor of medicine. At this point in
her life, Montasari was also an advocate for feminists and

(07:08):
social causes. This would 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,

(07:31):
able to work outside of the home, and not defined
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

(07:52):
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

(08:13):
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 in the psychiatric clinic at the University of Rome.

(08:36):
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

(08:56):
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

(09:17):
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 Montessori, seeing that the room had absolutely nothing in
it that could stimulate a child's hands and mind, instead

(09:40):
interpreted it as a desperate search for something tactile to
hold and manipulate. Through observing these children, Montessori began to
see developmental disabilities, particularly 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

(10:01):
from there she started to piece 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

(10:23):
special education theories of two doctors, Jean Marc gaspar Atar
and Eduard Sagan, And although Atar's work had included some
truly questionable attempts to cure deafness, his methods 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

(10:45):
also a proponent of the idea that 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,
how had written a book called quote Idiocy and its
Treatment by the Physiological Method, which theorized that developmental disabilities

(11:07):
stemmed from issues with the central nervous system and consequently
could be treated with exercises and sensory activities. Montessori found
that her theories were compatible with a tars and sigins.
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

(11:30):
were critical to learning. In she delivered an address at
a pedagogical congress in which she stressed that children with
developmental disabilities quote were 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

(11:53):
education classrooms where children with disabilities could receive an individualized
education that was appropriate to their individual need. 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.

(12:15):
So 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 Vicelli, the

(12:36):
Minister of Education, invited Montessori to come to Rome and
deliver a series of lectures on special education, and she did.
In eight 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 other

(12:58):
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 other

(13:19):
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

(13:41):
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'd

(14:01):
had a son, Mario, with the school's other co director,
Dr Gippe of Monte Sano. The date of Mario's birth
is kind of unclear, It's often reported as March thirty one.
Monte Santo's family was against the idea of his marrying Montessori,
and although Montaso did legally recognize Mario as his child,

(14:22):
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

(14:46):
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

(15:07):
in secret, 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

(15:28):
of Rome in nineteen four and eventually became its chair
of Anthropology. During those same years, the world of education
was also changing during Montessori's childhood and early career. Many
schools in Europe and the United States were just dominated
with memorization. Recitation and repetition might have had something to
do with why Montessori was not particularly into doing well

(15:51):
at it 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

(16:11):
just drilling them in recitals and repetition and learning things
by rote 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. But from Montessori's point of view, Probole and

(16:35):
other reformers 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. In nineteen o four, she had

(16:58):
returned to lecturing on pettig g 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. This was an approach that

(17:20):
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 and how it relates to anthropology. UH,

(17:43):
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 focus to
some of what she did, there where people in the
eugenics movement who like then picked up her theories and

(18:06):
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 had approached her about starting a daycare in the neighborhood.

(18:29):
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, 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 Children's House,
which opened in San Lorenzo Quarter on January six of

(18:49):
nineteen o 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 opera tunity 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
of poverty through educating their children and making it easier

(19:11):
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 dei
Bambini a model for daycare and early childhood education among
working families across the economic spectrum. In terms of the

(19:33):
school itself, it was sized for children's needs, with tables, chairs, cabinets,
wash basins, 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 a lot of freedom to learn and explore,

(19:53):
but there was also a lot of structure. Montessori reframed
the role of teacher as directress. Today often call to
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 Montessoria's educational methods

(20:13):
was the materials that she implemented for helping children learn
to build 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

(20:33):
all of these and to recognize patterns. Rather than systematically
teaching children to read and write, she supplied them with
things like color coded cardboard letters and numbers, and counting
rods of different lengths 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,

(20:56):
for examples, sounding out each letter as children held and
felt the 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 Montessoria's method, children
were self educating. The directress was simply guiding them in

(21:18):
self directing, self correcting activities that made it possible for
them to learn 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 things like helping to prepare prepare meals

(21:38):
and planting and tending a school garden. Kasa dave Ambini
was 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
pause for a break from one of our sponsors. As

(22:02):
we said before the break, Maria Montessori's first school, Casa
de 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

(22:24):
created a curriculum that was starting to be shared around
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 could
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

(22:48):
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, 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,

(23:10):
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.

(23:32):
She published Doctor Montessori's Own Handbook in nineteen fourteen, and
a two volume work called Advanced Montessori Method in nineteen
eighteen and nineteen nineteen. Montessorio 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

(23:53):
had 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, to explain all the sitting and standing
and like, you know. She also traveled extensively in order

(24:16):
to lecture on her methods and trained teachers directly. She
visited the US in nineteen thirteen. Jane Adams, who was
subject of a Past to 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, d C. President Woodrow Wilson's daughter Margaret,

(24:39):
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 nineteen nine teen. Basically Montessori was becoming

(25:02):
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 reunited with her son, Mario, when

(25:23):
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 source who said that Mario at

(25:45):
first was like, oh, this is my nephew. But I
also 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,

(26:07):
So in nineteen two, 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 name and reputation to help

(26:32):
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 nineteen
twenty six, 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 was still

(26:57):
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 she and her son Mario established
the Association Montsori Internacional, meant to unite the world's various

(27:21):
Montessori programs and organizations. Montessori was named its lifetime president,
with Mario working with her extensively in This organization was
headquartered in Berlin. The fact that it was in Berlin
did not sit 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 outside the state,

(27:44):
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 opposition to the government's fascist and totalitarian ideals. When

(28:04):
the government tried to name Montessori Italy's 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

(28:25):
to the a m i's headquarters to Amsterdam, 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 themselves using the same
methods and her words quote, there is no sense in
talking about differences of procedure for Indian babies, Chinese babies,

(28:45):
or European babies, nor for those belonging to 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

(29:08):
in support of her work, and sometimes that 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,

(29:31):
she was allowed freedom of movement, and while in India
she worked with Gandhi to develop a curriculum for peace.
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 Montes, the
Montessori schools and training programs that had previously closed. Maria

(29:53):
continued to work and teach until the very end of
her life. In ninety 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 friend's garden

(30:16):
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 name Montessori

(30:37):
is not actually trademarked, so the number of schools calling
themselves Montessori is actually a lot larger than those approximately
seven thousand 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 with the turn

(30:58):
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 its apparent success

(31:20):
in classrooms and because people were drawn to 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, Yes, I
don't feel like that has quite the same uh connotation today.

(31:47):
A lot of this attention, though, was from the general public,
parents who had heard about Montessori successes with disadvantaged children
in Italy who had learned to read by age four
and seemed exceptionally happy in the class room. Some of
this attention came from articles in magazines. Notably, McClure's publisher
and editor, Samuel S. McClure, was a huge proponent of

(32:08):
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 were vocally critical of Montessori's methods when they were
first introduced. Her theories were often described as being commonplace

(32:31):
in the United States twenty five or thirty years before.
By the time of the English language publication of the
Montessori Method, Friedrich Crobo's concept of kindergarten was widely implemented
in the United States and had been for decades. That
meant that the child sized classrooms and child centered learning
that were common to both kindergarten and Montessori were not

(32:52):
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 Montessori belongs in the history of American educational
theory essentially along with the writer's anti anti dating eighteen eighty.

(33:16):
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,
prompting any George, one of the biggest proponents in the
United States and the translator of the Montessori Method for

(33:36):
English and its first US publication, to count or 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 children
see the world as it really is. To her. A
block is a block, not a castle. The hands and

(33:58):
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
a bit of a flash in the pan fad, but

(34:19):
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 its from Italy. Yeah. However, in the nineteen sixties,
there was a resurgence and interest in the Montessori method

(34:40):
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 a still a lot of focus on American

(35:01):
children need to be achieving academically earlier than they are.
And then, as we 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

(35:23):
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

(35:44):
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 Montsory classroom, but we like we
could not write the copy to be like, you'll be
a monest story teacher with these great blocks. Like for

(36:06):
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. Fay so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive, if you
heard an email address or Facebook U r L or

(36:27):
something similar over the course of the show, that could
be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast
at I heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff
works email address no longer works, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History. And
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,

(36:48):
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
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