Thinkers Timeline

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an Italian educator and doctor whose method of teaching young children has spread to thousands of schools around the world. She was born in Chiaravalle, in central Italy, to a middle-class family. Her father worked for the government; her mother was well-read and encouraged Maria's ambitions. At that time, few women in Italy went to university. Maria wanted to study medicine, which was almost impossible for a woman. She faced strong opposition but did not give up. She entered the University of Rome in 1890 and became one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree, graduating in 1896. Her early work as a doctor focused on children with learning difficulties. She worked at a clinic in Rome where she observed these children closely and developed teaching materials that helped them learn. When many of her students then passed the same state exams as children without special needs, she began to wonder whether her methods might work for all children. In 1907 she opened her first school, the Casa dei Bambini (Children's House), in a poor neighbourhood of Rome. The children were aged between three and seven. The results surprised everyone. Children who had been thought wild or undisciplined became focused, calm, and eager to learn. News of the school spread rapidly. Within a few years, schools using her methods opened across Europe, then in the United States and Asia. She wrote many books, including The Montessori Method (1909) and The Absorbent Mind (1949). She was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize because of her work on education for peace. During the Second World War she was trapped in India for seven years, where she continued teaching and developed her ideas about the education of older children. She died in the Netherlands in 1952 at the age of eighty-one. Her schools now educate more than a million children in more than a hundred countries.