Dr. Maria was one of the first women doctors in Italy in the late 1800s.
When she lived in Rome, she worked at a clinic where she looked after the poor and their children. When she took care of her patients, she also took care of them and gave them clothes.
She watched children who had emotional and mental problems in a Rome asylum who were not allowed to feel the world around them. People were picking up crumbs to stimulate their sense of touch rather than eat them, she found in one case.
She said that education, not medicine, was the best way to help these kids.
Dr. Montessori didn’t have any ideas about how to teach. Instead, she used the same objective and scientific observation techniques she learned in medical school to find out what the kids were interested in, how they learned, and how she could help them learn more, so she could help them.
She learned about educational philosophy, psychology, and ethnography while she tried out and improved teaching tools for these kids. Even so, most kids with disabilities did better on state exams than kids without disabilities did. Doctor Montessori was thought of as a great person.
The First Casa Dei Bambini
This happened quickly. She was asked to open a centre for young children and their parents in Rome’s slums while their parents worked. This is how it worked: In January 1907, the first Casa dei Bambini (house for kids) opened.
It didn’t take long for people to notice her work and spread it around the world. Every continent, except Antarctica, has Montessori schools and training programmes today, except for Antarctica.
There are almost 4,500 Montessori schools in the US alone, and there are 20,000 around the world. Over 20 Montessori schools are in the city where I live. There are about 800,000 kids in the city who range in age from birth to 18. Montessori schools were attended by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Gabriel Garca Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for their work.
Dr. Montessori worked in education and came up with ideas for kids of all ages as she went around the world. She lived in exile in India during World War II and died in the Netherlands in 1952. “Education for life” is what she called her work. This means that she didn’t just teach in the classroom, but also in our every day lives.
