Maria Montessori, the founder of the Montessori Method, was born in Italy in 1870, and at age 26 became Italy’s first woman to complete a medical degree, specializing in psychiatry. In her work at the University of Rome’s psychiatric clinic, Dr. Montessori treated children whose mental illness had excluded them from the educational system. In her attempts to educate them, she invented her first special apparatus to help them learn through movement, achieving breakthrough results.

Just two years later, at age 28, she became the director of a school for abandoned and mentally disabled children. She spent long hours at the school observing and developing her approach to teaching, focusing on hands and movement as the bridge to instruction. After two years, she arranged for her pupils to sit for the Italian national school placement tests, and her group, which had been labeled “incapable of learning,” passed successfully. Her immediate question was that if her method achieved such rapid results in children with mental illness or trauma, what might it do for children without those challenges?

In 1907, Dr. Montessori was presented with the perfect opportunity to answer that question. The owner of a tenement in Rome’s impoverished San Lorenzo district asked Dr. Montessori to work with resident children to keep them occupied and out of trouble. Dr. Montessori introduced the children to the apparati that she had developed and created her first child-centered environment to meet their individual needs. She earned great attention for the accomplishments of these disadvantaged children, particularly their ability to write at an early age.

Over time, Dr. Montessori’s method of education spread around the world. In 1915, she was invited to the United States by Alexander Graham Bell to speak at Carnegie Hall. Later she established a Montessori classroom, built with glass walls for viewing, at the Panama-Pacifica International Exposition in San Francisco. Attracting hundreds of observers daily, her exhibit was awarded two gold medals and established her educational method in the United States.

As more and more countries requested her to speak and explain her method and results, Dr. Montessori began to write about her discoveries and train others to apply her method. In 1929, together with her son, she founded Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) to establish and coordinate training centers around the world that would authentically prepare teachers to implement her method. Her influence grew, as she expanded her philosophy of education as a method for achieving peace.

In a speech to the International Montessori Conference in 1937, she said:
“Do we believe and constantly insist that cooperation among the peoples of the world is necessary in order to bring about peace? If so, what is needed first of all is collaboration with children. … All our efforts will come to nothing until we remedy the great injustice done the child, and remedy it by cooperating with him.”

For the rest of her life, Dr. Montessori traveled the world, training, teaching, and lecturing on her conviction that child-centered education was the promise of peace and greater humanity. Having been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for Peace, she passed away in 1952, leaving an international legacy of schools and training centers that transcend culture, faith, language, and political systems.

To learn more about the exquisite mind and philosophy of Dr. Maria Montessori, we recommend going to the source. Here is a list of her most famous books:

• The Absorbent Mind
• The Secret of Childhood
• The Discovery of the Child
• The Formation of Man
• To Educate the Human Potential
• Advanced Montessori Method – Book 1
• Education For Human Development