Dr. Thomas M. Shepherd, Director
The Shepherd-Montessori Institute
Developed
by Maria Montessori
Italian
Educator
The Montessori Method is
based on giving children (or adults) freedom to create, not destroy, in a
non-competitive environment under the direction of a motivated director. The
director’s task is to guide the student’s physical and mental energies in a
creative direction.
Each student
establishes his/her own objectives, solves his/her own problems, evaluates his
or her own accomplishments and develops at his or her own pace, feeling free to
ask questions or seek advice from others along the way.
Emphasis is on
independent research, self-discovery, preservation of self, repetition for the
purpose of memory retention, and order.
A hands-on approach
to learning is emphasized, in which students learn concepts from working with
materials rather than by direct instruction. thus exercising and developing
so-called ‘right brain’ creative thought processes.
The result is
individuals who learn spontaneously to read, write, and create, who prefer work
to play, who love and preserve order in their appearance and their environment,
who display sustained mental concentration without fatigue, and who combine
initiative with cooperation.
Maria
Montessori, Italian physician and educator, founder of the
Montessori method of teaching children, was born in Chiaraville, Italy, on
August 31, 1870. She was educated at the University of Rome, receiving the
first medical degree given to a woman in Italy. She joined the university staff
a lecturer in anthropology, but soon became closely associated with the
psychiatric clinic.
While at the clinic,
she met retarded children and gradually became convinced that they were much
more capable of learning than was realized. Therefore, she gave up her chair at
the university and her private practice to found the Orthophrenic School for
developmentally handicapped children. She based her work on the ideas of
Edouard Seguin, achieving remarkable results.
Believing that her methods would be even more effective with normal
children, in 1907 she opened the first Montessori school, or “Children’s
House,” in a slum section of Rome. Within a year observers were coming from all
over the world to see these astonishing children who—before the age of
five—learned spontaneously to read and write, who preferred work to play, who
loved and preserved order in their appearance and in their environment, who
displayed sustained mental concentration without fatigue, and who combined
initiative with cooperation.
Other Montessori
schools were established and training courses were held during the ensuring
years in Rome, Paris, London, Berlin, San Francisco, and many other cities.
When her schools were closed in Italy in 1934, Dr. Montessori settled in
Barcelona, working there until the Spanish Civil War forced her to move to The
Netherlands. There she established a training school at Laren, near Amsterdam.
Interned in India during World War II, she founded a training school there,
too.
Dr. Montessori was
convinced that the harmonious development of personality, individually and
socially, made possible by universal adoption of her method, would be of
immense value in bringing about world peace, and she stressed the importance of
education as the “armament of peace.”
Among her works are
The Montessori Method (1912), Pedagogical Anthropology (1913), The Secret of
Childhood (1936), The Discovery of the Child (1948), and The Absorbent Mind
(1949). Dr. Montessori died in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, on May 6, 1952.
Marie Montessori’s
books may be purchased at the Amazon.com bookstore.
Suggested
complementary reading is British philosopher-social critic R. D. Laing’s The
Politics of Experience.
Tom Shepherd, Mortimer Standing and Collier’s Encyclopedia
contributed to this article.
