THE CHILD IS THE TEACHER

A chronicle of the life and enduring legacy of the innovative Italian educator.

For five years, journalist De Stefano mined published and archival sources in search of “the real person beyond the global trademark” of Maria Montessori (1870-1952). Written in the present tense, this well-researched narrative bears witness to determination, setbacks, sorrow, and overwhelming success. Montessori trained as a physician at a time when few women were admitted to study medicine. Researching her thesis in psychiatry, she was disturbed by what she saw in the children’s section of an asylum. “Considered incurable, and therefore committed for life, dressed in burlap aprons, dirty, unruly, they are perhaps the most horrifying element of that terrible place,” writes the author. Immersing herself in everything she could find about the education of intellectually disabled children, Montessori discovered the pedagogy of 19th-century educator Édouard Séguin and became “a passionate disciple.” In 1899, she founded the National League for the Protection of Mentally Deficient Children and, in 1900, a school for the training of special education teachers. Within the next decade, she expanded her purview to include children who were economically deprived, inaugurating a kindergarten in a poor section of Italy. Montessori’s pedagogy—privileging the needs and desires of children and using specially constructed materials—attracted appreciative notice throughout Europe and America and grew after her books were published and translated. Montessori was so passionate about her method she seemed to some a prophetess; a devout Catholic, she devoted herself to education “in the same way that others join a religious order.” A lifelong feminist, she was an early supporter of “community education, female suffrage, a law for the determination of paternity, equal pay for men and women.” De Stefano reveals Montessori’s complicated personal life: an overbearing mother, recurring ill health and bouts of loneliness, and keeping secret the existence of a son born out of wedlock. A complicated personality, as well, she could be authoritarian, “ornery,” and selfishly opportunistic.

A nuanced portrait of an educational pioneer.