Education: The First Progressive

The world has almost forgotten Maria Montessori, the founder of progressive education. But she was still alive last week, though far from her native Italy and her world-famed kindergartens. And she was still quite capable of laying down the law. In the shade of a giant banyan tree in the oceanside colony of Adyar, India, she had just laid it down to members of the Indian Theosophical Society. When someone asked her if she had become a theosophist, the self-confident old (77) Dottoressa snapped: “I am a Montessorian.”

Shocking. Maria Montessori has never been anything else. As a girl, she shocked Roman society by going about the streets unchaperoned. She was a mathematical prodigy and wanted to be an engineer. But on the day she registered at the University of Rome, she came across a tattered beggar carrying a sickly child. Though she could never stand the sight of blood, Maria decided then & there to become a doctor. She was the first woman ever to receive an M.D. from the University of Rome.

As an intern, she began working with cretins and morons. Then she decided to study how normal kids were brought up. She visited schools, was horrified to see rows of children kept immobile behind their desks “like butterflies transfixed with a pin.” This, Maria Montessori declared, did not discipline the children; it “annihilated” them.

Knots & Stoppers. She decided that normal children can learn more quickly than their teachers realize. But they learn first through their hands, she observed, then with their brains. In 1906, she set up a school in a Rome tenement, gave the kids freedom, to learn by themselves. There were knots to untie, stoppers to put into bottles. Soon the pupils were beginning to copy letters cut out of cardboard. One day a four-year-old boy, seeing the fireplace in the room, wrote “camino.” In a few days, the other four-year-olds were learning to write, too.

The Queen Mother Margherita visited Maria Montessori’s Casa del Bambini. Italian schoolmasters began to try out her methods. Montessori schools mushroomed throughout Europe and the U.S. As she grew older, the Dottoressa’s stout figure, in its academic robes, became a familiar sight in lecture halls all over the world. Students crowded to hear her speak at the University of Rome. Mussolini made her an honorary Fascist, but she objected to the way Fascists tried to “warp youth in their own brutal pattern.” In 1933, her schools were closed.

An exile, she wandered to Spain, to England, to Holland. In 1939, she settled in India. There, with her adopted son Mario, she set up a new world headquarters for the Montessori System and started all over again.

Algebra at Five. Today, in a faded yellow-brick-and-plaster house in Adyar, Maria Montessori is hard at work. She lectures in Italian two or three times a week; Mario translates into English for her. She is surer than ever of one thing: “The child is capable of achieving culture at an age hitherto unsuspected.” She now teaches arithmetic at 3½, algebra at five, and finds that eight-year-olds learn algebra quicker than 14-year-olds, for they consider it a game, instead of something to dread. An 18-month-old child, she says, is “perhaps happiest when learning” and every child’s “age of formation” takes place before he is six. From seven to twelve, says Maria Montessori, is the time for “cosmic education”—the interdependence of everything in nature.

Maria Montessori seems happy enough to be away from the rest of the world and its politics (“that harlequin mixture of rags and silk”) and wars (“If men can respect cows during famine, as in India, men can stop killing each other”). She is not even thinking of retiring. Said she: “Work is necessary. It can be nothing less than a passion. A person is happy in accomplishment.”