Maria
Montessori’s ideas and concepts on education have travelled the entire
globe. She passionately fought for the rights of children to develop
without interference.
Maria was born as an only child to Alessandro and Renilde Montessori
on the August 31st, 1870 in Chivaravalle (in the Ancona province of
Italy). She moved to Rome with her parents where she spent most of her
childhood and years of study. Due to her obvious aptitude for the
natural sciences, she attended a boy’s technology school. Her hard work
was awarded with an opportunity to study medicine at university. In 1896
she became Italy’s first female physician. When she worked as an
assistant doctor at a mental institution in Rome, she realized that
supervising and caring for the mentally disabled and children with
learning difficulties was not only a medical matter. It occurred to her
that it was also a pedagogical one. She researched possibilities to
assist mentally disabled children through sensory aspects of learning.
Specially designed learning materials would enable and motivate children
to independently learn. The success was phenomenal. During this time
Montessori was in a relationship with the physician Giuseppe Montesano.
She gave birth to a son, Mario, in 1898. As a single mother she would
have had to give up all of her professional commitments to raise her
son. Thus, she decided to have him raised in a foster family. They were
in regular contact and he moved back in with her at the age of fifteen.
Mario became Montessori’s trusted companion and continued her work after
her death.
Inspired
by the successful work with mentally disabled children she took up
further studies in Psychology, Pedagogy and Philosophy. Her goal was to use her findings and experience to aid in educating healthy children.
The opportunity to observe the development of healthy children,
presented itself to her when a building society renovated run-down
buildings in a poor part of the city. Someone was needed to supervise
the pre-school children of the area. In 1907, the first school for
infants was opened in San Lorenzo, a suburb of Rome. About 50 children
were looked after by a woman who had no prior training in education.
Montessori instructed her on applying the sensory materials she had
developed and didn’t interfere otherwise. At the time, Montessori worked
as a pediatrician and taught anthropology at the University of Rome,
but visited the children on a regular basis. In one of her books she
describes the key moment during her observations which let her to fully
devote time to pedagogy. She
was observing a child that was completely immersed in an activity.
After completing it seemed entirely transformed: happy, liberated, more
independent. She
became aware that activities involved in everyday life and “sensory”
exercises changed children’s attitude towards work and social behavior.
With further detailed research on child activities she developed
pedagogical principles. In 1909 she gave up her pediatric practice and
became fully devoted to training teachers and educators for the
Montessori children‘s homes and -schools, which soon after became
established in various other countries. Due to totalitarian regimes in
Germany, Italy and Spain during the Second World War her life’s work was
partly destroyed. Nevertheless, she resumed her work in Europe in 1949.
On May 6th, 1952 Maria Montessori died shortly before her 82nd birthday
in Noordwijk aan Zee, Netherlands.
The
most important principles of Montessori’s pedagogy can also be applied
to music education:
• Respecting the ‘learning windows’ in child
development
• Learning should involve all senses
• Promoting independent activity
• Every child is an individual with a proper personality.
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