Dr Maria Montessori

Discuss life and work of Dr.

Maria Montessori and why is she referred to as a lady much ahead of her time? * Dr. Maria Montessori was born in Italy in 1870. Most of her life was spent in Rome. Her father Ale jandro was an accountant in government services. Her mother, Renilde , had good education for a woman of her time and was more open to the many transformations that affected daily life at the end of the 19th Century.

Maria Montessori, an only child, she was a vivacious, strong-willed girl. Her mother encouraged her curiosity, which the rigid schools of her time did not.Maria Montessori’s quest for knowledge lasted life long. Maria Montessori attended male technical secondary school instead of traditional one and her favorite subject there was mathe matics. Initially she wanted to pursue a degree in engineering but she later pursued a degree in Medicine and became the first lady in Italy to do so.

Maria Montessori graduated at the top of her class in 1896 with a diploma that had to be hand edited to reflect her gender. A month after graduation, she was chosen as part of a small Italian delegation to attend the Berlin Women’s Congress that had delegates from all over the world.Extremely pretty and well spoken, Dr. Montessori made a big splash with her speeches about women’s education and work conditions in Italy. In her second speech , she advocated an issue that still has not entirely been resolved in our own times: equal pay for equal work.

Later , Dr. Montessori developed her medical career. She became involved with the neediest of patients. The neediest, she soon found, were what were then called “idiot children. ” They were the mentally retarded who were kept in horrific conditions in asylums along with adults suffering severe mental illnesses.With her usual energy, she researched methods of helping them and soon gained fame for her remarkable successes.

Maria Montessori later returned to university to study Philosophy and Physical Anthropology and became absorbed with the desire to change educational practice. Reflecting on her extremely successful work with the mentally retarded, she thought how similar activities would benefit normal children. But as a scientist, she needed to test her ideas. She had a chance in 1907. She took on the directorship of a daycare center for preschool children in a ewly built housing project in the slums of Rome.Montessori called this center the “Casa De Bambini” or “Children’s House.

” Offering some of the materials she had used with the older mentally deficient children, she soon discovered the normal children ignored the fancy toys and became independently absorbed in more meaningful tasks. She believed that the child constructs knowledge from experiencing the world. Learning, she said, was not something that needed to be forced or motivated. Instead, learning is something that humans do naturally. The early years especially are ones of great mental growth.

Throughout the early years of life, the child absorbs impressions from the world around him. Not with his mind, but with his life. A unification of mental and physical energies comes about when a child becomes absorbed in work. Montessori called this “normalization.

” And concentration, she said, was the key. The carefully prepared environment at Montessori schools provides the opportunity for children to grow intellectually and emotionally. There are several hallmarks of these environments:-They are aesthetically pleasing using lovely materials.The materials are readily available and children choose from among them during a long block of unscheduled class time. -Activities take place outside as well as inside. Gardening is often a part of the Montessori experience.

-Children with a 3 year age span work together in the same room and learn from each other. In what Montessorians call primary classes, there are children from ages 3 to 6.Dr. Montessori experimented with activities and materials throughout her lifetime in order to find which ones engaged the children easily and repeatedly allowing them to integrate the physical and mental energies. The practical life exercises first developed from Dr.

Montessori’s desire to improve the hygiene and nutrition of her slum children. They proved their value over the years helping children gain self-confidence as they learned to take care of themselves. The child develops logical thought patterns as she follows through an activity, in this case washing from the beginning to middle (rinsing and drying) to the end (cleaning up). A child becomes able to control his impulses and concentrate on the task at hand.Normalization often first takes place with practical life experiences. -The Montessori approach is based on a delicate balance of freedom and discipline.

Children are free to move about in their classroom and yet their movements are limited to the confines of the room. By the structure of the exercises, the scientifically designed materials, and by the requirements of the social group of which they are a part, the children work at their own pace. They can work at their own pace, but they cannot work with the materials they do not know how to use.They are not free to disrupt others or misuse materials. They learn to return the material to its correct place and in its original condition so that it will be there ready for the next child.

-Freedom and discipline go hand in hand. The freedom to work undisturbed results in a kind of discipline that could never be brought about by threats or rewards; which brings us to the roll of the trained adult in Montessori classrooms. The adult in a Montessori classroom has a task that is much different from a traditional teacher.While a teacher in a traditional classroom is active and the child is passive, in the Montessori approach, the child assumes the active role and the adult often appears passive. This is because Montessori saw the aim of education is to free the child from adult domination and allow him to develop along more natural pathways. It is the child who teaches himself when he works with the materials in the prepared environment.

Montessori understood the need for involvement, Mental, Physical, and Emotional, on the part of the child in order to construct knowledge.About 100 years later, the ideas she developed in Rome about the process of learning and how environments and adult side ally supported still remain at the core of Montessori educational practice. Americans became interested in the Montessori vision of education. She made two well publicized lecture tours through the United States. She was greeted as a celebrity by then otables of her time. The Philosopher and educator, John Dewey, introduced the lectures she gave to an audience at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

But an even greater opportunity for Montessori to demonstrate her form of education was the celebrated World’s Fair of 1915 in San Francisco. There she was invited to set up a model classroom in the Palace of Education. Fair goers could watch the children at work from bleachers outside the glass walls. Over the next decades, Montessori schools multiplied and she gave training courses throughout Europe and even lectured in Argentina. In Vienna, the young Erik Ericks on attended the training program and created a Montessori inspired school.

In the remaining years of her life, she received many honors and remained a heavy travel schedule to deliver lectures and training sessions across Europe and even in India. Maria Montessori died at age 81 – just an hour after actively discussing a trip to Africa to train teachers there. Her schools are her greatest legacy. All over the world, her ideas shaped schools whose teachers have been trained in her Philosophy. Her work has also greatly influenced educational practice outside the Montessori world.

The critical importance of the first 6years of life or the formation of intellectual and emotional constructs is Montessori ideas that all accept and is now being demonstrated by Brain Tomography. All early education classrooms now have the child-size furniture with the open shelving she first designed and often some of the same materials.Multi-age grouping and the provision of non-scheduled blocks of time for independent work are legacies of Montessori’s contributions to educational practice – seldom credited to her. Dr.

 Montessori leaves behind not only an outstanding body of research work and observation of children and their abilities to grow and learn, but also a system of education which promotes the freedom of the child to become more concentrated, creative and imaginative as he develops intellectually and emotionally. Her lifetime work studying child development and education remains well known internationally, numerous organizations promote her methods and Montessori schools are prevalent in both the United States and many other countries, the reason why she is referred to as a lady ahead of her time.