Dr Maria Montessori:

What was her great gift to children?

She introduced a special method of teaching which is practised in many parts of the world today most of you must have gone to a preschool before you started attending a primary school. Preschools are often called Montessoris. If you ask your parents if their little children are going to school, often the answer will be, “No, he/she is still going to Montessori.”

The name Montessori, corrupted to Montesoriya is used more often to refer to the pera paasala (in Sinhala) and preschool in English.

The name is derived from the surname of the person who introduced the system of education.

So, let’s check Who and what Montessori is... Dr Maria Montessori was an Italian doctor who introduced a new method of teaching children from ages 1 1/2 years to 5 years.

Dr Maria Montessori was born in Italy to middle class parents, on August 31, 1870. From a very young age she was determined to become a doctor. There were no female doctors in Italy at that time. But, she had her way, entered the university of Rome and passed out as a doctor in 1894. She became the first ‘lady doctor’ in Italy.

She joined the university staff as a lecturer and soon became closely associated with the psychiatric clinic. There she met a number of mentally retarded (backward) children. That was the turning point in her career; from a doctor to an educator.

She gave much thought to the problems faced in making these children understand what is told them. What was the child’s difficulty? She tried various methods to break this barrier, following the ideas of the French doctor Eduard Seguin, and she achieved remarkable success.

Gradually she became convinced that these children were capable of learning much more than they were believed to be able to.

Dr Montessori then gave up her post at the University and her private practice and started a school for feeble-minded children and those with various defects in hearing, seeing etc., in one of the worst slums in Rome, the San Lorenzo slum quarters. She taught the children how to recognise numbers and letters, count, read and write.

The results were amazing. Even Dr. Montessori was surprised when these children who were said to be mentally retarded, passed the Government examination in reading and writing.

Encouraged by this success she used these same methods to teach normal children of the same age group. The results were much better than she expected.

The school she opened in three rooms in the courtyard of the slum was named Casa de Bambine, Children’s House. The children themselves had to keep the house neat and tidy. The objects in the house such as cups and vases were breakable ones.

If a child dropped one and broke it, he/she recognised his mistake in handling it and was careful the next time. She wanted to give the child the freedom to do the right thing not the wrong, and learn by one’s own mistakes.

The chief aim of her methods was to develop the child between the ages 1 1/2 to 5 years through the development of the senses.

Various equipment and material were used in this process such as pieces of wood of different shapes, sizes and textures and bead chains ranging in colour - from the palest tint to the deepest. She observed children choose what they liked and play with them for 15 minutes or even more according to their mental capacity.

She also found that some senses were sharper at a certain age than others. Children at one age could differentiate colours while at another age they could tell the difference in taste; sweet, sour and bitter. If a child liked what he or she was doing, he/she could concentrate on it, despite of the surrounding disturbances, for as long as a quarter hour to one hour and not feel tired as after an enforced effort.

Within one year observers were coming from all over Europe to see these children, who before reaching 5 years had learned by themselves to read and write, were orderly in their behaviour, kept their surroundings tidy were neat in their dress and could concentrate for long periods of time without showing signs of fatigue.

Her methods were also extended to a large number of public and private infant schools in Rome. In 1922 she was named Government Inspector of Schools in Italy.

She lectured and had training courses in Rome, Paris, London, Berlin and even San Francisco in America. She came to India in 1939 and conducted training courses in Adayar, Madras.

A few women teachers from Sri Lanka attended her training courses and among them were Leena Wickramaratne and Joyce Gunasekera, the two pioneers of the Montessori Method of Education, in Sri Lanka.

Like all popular movements, the Montessori method too had its critics. Advocates of orthodox methods of education said her methods gave the child too much freedom and no discipline.

When Mussolini, the ruler of Italy became more and more of a dictator, Dr Montessori could not stand it; so she left Italy in 1934 and went to Spain.

There she started a training centre in Barcelona, but soon gave it up when civil war broke out in Spain, and went to the Netherlands. She settled down in a small town near Amsterdam and established a school there and that became her home.

She came to Sri Lanka twice and visited the AMI Montessori School in Colombo. She died in Noordwijk, Netherlands on May 6 1952 at the age of 82.

How many preschools that have the name Montessori follow her methods? How many even know who Montessori was? I doubt whether even one in 100 teachers know that she was an Italian doctor turned educator.

- Sumana SAPARAMADU