Happy 150th Birthday, Maria Montessori
By Laurie Ewert-Krocker,
Director of Training
I am in total admiration of Maria Montessori, but I have always been careful not to project the image that Montessori educators are members of a personality cult that celebrates Montessori the person. Our devotion to her work can look—from the outside—narrow and occasionally fanatical.
Yet, year after year, observation after observation, research study after research study—my respect and admiration for her work only grows. I continue to be in awe of how on target she was in her understanding of human development, of how convincing her view is that “education” can respond to our humanness by providing informed support for children in different stages of development; by preparing environments that allow for choice, independence, and self-construction. She seldom gets it wrong.
Some notions in her writing occasionally seem outdated (her assertion of the need for adolescents to consume sugar, for instance—a point which adolescents love to champion when they read her work), but Montessori’s fundamental understanding of what drives us as human beings and what children and adolescents need to maximize their human potential is astoundingly, impressively clear—and increasingly backed up by current scientific studies.
Just three days ago I was reading E.O Wilson’s recent book, On the Origins of Creativity (2017), and found this passage:
The Neolithic Revolution began only long enough ago, about ten thousand years, to produce a few changes in small ensembles of genes among the newly settled populations. That amount of time is way too little to explain the hereditary and environmental origin of human nature itself. As populations spread around the world, they carried intact the basic genome prescribing human intelligence and the fundamentals of human social behavior.
This assertion is precisely what Montessori pedagogy rests on—the recognition of fundamental human processes of development that are universal—that set us up for the unfolding of human capacities throughout childhood and adolescence which, together with the cultural context of our time and place in history, can be studied and understood in order to support maximum human potential. The intended outcome of which is for us to thrive on this planet—now and in the future. Montessori’s gift to education was to begin observing and documenting the details of these fundamental capacities and processes. The work continues 113 years later.
For this gift, Montessori is worthy of some adulation, for how accurate her work was, how comprehensive, and how hopeful. A number of years ago in the summer AMI/NAMTA Orientation to Adolescent Studies Course, designed to introduce teachers of adolescents to Montessori principles and possible implementation strategies, one of the people in the course commented after my first lecture introducing Maria Montessori and some of her fundamental ideas by commenting: “This isn’t education; this is religion.”
By the end of the 5-week course, the gentleman (a 25-year department head and professor of alternative education in Taiwan) shared with me that he was finding Montessori pedagogy to be the most intelligent, comprehensive, and inspirational pedagogy he had ever learned about—and that he would devote the rest of his career to bringing it to Taiwan.
If we sometimes look like cult fanatics, it’s for good reason. The brilliance of her work is enduring, and children all over the world are benefiting from it.
So Happy Birthday, Maria. And thank you. We will get back to work now.