'The Child Is the Teacher' Review: Montessori's Unpinned Butterflies
By: Barbara Spindel (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Montessori method of education is known for promoting the autonomy of children and de-emphasizing the influence of teachers, so it's striking that its creator was such an authoritarian. Maria Montessori wanted her revolutionary pedagogical approach to spread from her native Italy across the globe, yet she tried to maintain an iron grip on its interpretation and use as it did so. The American educator who wrote the preface to the 1912 English translation of "The Montessori Method" must have gotten wind of the author's difficult reputation. He stated, as if wishing could make it true, that "Dr. Montessori is too large-minded to claim infallibility, and too thoroughly scientific in her attitude to object to careful scrutiny of her scheme and the thorough testing of its results."
He was mistaken on all counts. As Cristina De Stefano demonstrates in her compelling biography "The Child Is the Teacher," Montessori, while trained as a scientist, over time began to conceive of herself as a prophet. Prophets typically don't care to be scrutinized and tested.
Born in 1870, Montessori was an adored only child whose imperious personality was evident early on. She would later falsely claim to have been Italy’s first woman doctor, but her achievement of a medical degree was still rare for its time. From the start, Montessori was determined to remain unmarried: When she became pregnant in 1897, she yielded to her mother’s insistence that she avoid a scandal by delivering her son, Mario, in secrecy and sending him from Rome to be raised in the countryside.
By then Montessori had embarked on her life’s mission. She was working with “feeble-minded” children at a psychiatric hospital; considered hopeless cases, they were locked away for life in deplorable conditions. When she tried the methods of French education pioneer Édouard Séguin—who had created customized hands-on materials to stimulate sensory and motor learning in developmentally disabled children—her success convinced her that the entire education system was in need of reform. She described schoolchildren as “butterflies stuck with pins, fixed in their places.” In 1907 she was hired to direct a group of new kindergartens in Rome’s blighted San Lorenzo neighborhood. It was the perfect opportunity to test her radical theory.
Montessori created her own versions of Séguin’s blocks, movable letters and other materials. All of the furniture and supplies were child-sized so that the pupils could easily move about and rearrange the room. Montessori quietly observed them at work, convinced that children placed in the proper environment had the capacity for deep concentration. The San Lorenzo kindergartners didn’t require traditional methods of discipline, unlike children forced to be silent and still throughout the school day. Those children, Montessori fumed, had been “annihilated, not disciplined.”
When the kindergartners began writing precociously early, word spread, with newspapers hailing “the miracle of San Lorenzo.” Montessori, a devout Catholic as well as a scientist, began to shift her language. Where she’d once spoken of her scientific observation of children, she now sounded a mystical note, saying “It is the soul of the child that has revealed itself to me.”
In a pattern that would repeat itself, her prickly personality and demand for control led to a break with the San Lorenzo schools. She then dedicated herself to spreading her method throughout Europe and abroad. Soon after publication of her book in 1909, she became a celebrity. Visitors made pilgrimages to her Rome apartment, waiting for hours to speak with her. While she could be irascible, Montessori was also extremely charismatic. Some of her “awestruck” callers, Ms. De Stefano writes, would drop everything to devote themselves to her “divine mission.”
When her mother died, Montessori was finally free to reunite with Mario, by then 15. She presented him as her nephew, and from that point on he rarely left her side. To compensate for her abandonment, she became fixated on building a Montessori empire to secure his future, writing revealingly in her diary that it must be “I alone that gives him everything.” The lengths to which she’d go included a decade-long collaboration with the Mussolini regime.
Ms. De Stefano, author of a biography of another formidable and controversial Italian woman, journalist Oriana Fallaci, charts Montessori’s remarkable life in short chapters and in a somewhat breathless present tense. (The book was translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti.) The author is supportive of her subject’s cause—Ms. De Stefano refers to Italian primary schools during Maria’s childhood as “prison for children”—and indulgent of her flaws. “Maria Montessori was a genius, and rarely are geniuses easy to deal with,” she shrugs in a concluding note.
Geniuses and prophets probably aren’t the easiest mothers-in-law, either. At 19, Mario married one of his mother’s acolytes, and it’s hardly surprising when the author describes Montessori’s relationship with her son’s wife as “particularly stormy.” Before they divorced, the couple had four children, who would, in Ms. De Stefano’s words, “grow up according to the purest Montessori method.” One later recalled her grandmother as no less than “the center of the universe: the being that observed, decided, demanded, explained, commanded.”
“The Child Is the Teacher,” subtitled “A Life of Maria Montessori,” concludes squarely with its fascinating subject’s 1952 death. One wishes Ms. De Stefano had gone a bit further, offering perspective on Montessori’s enduring influence on early-childhood education and on the state of Montessori education today. (The method born in the slums is now generally the province of the elite, although Montessori alumnus Jeff Bezos is launching a network of free Montessori-inspired preschools for low-income children through his philanthropic Day One Fund.) Finally, it’s impossible not to wonder how those four perfect test subjects, the Montessori grandchildren, turned out.
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