(See front cover)
Last week at Rome, in the Via Monte Zebio, a plump little woman in rusty black clothes stood up to receive the approval of Fascist officialdom, the applause of learned contemporaries, the acclaim of 100 disciples from 21 nations. Dottoressa Maria Montessori had come home, after 16 years, to reinaugurate her Theoretical & Practical Training Course on Child Education, under the auspices of the Italian Government. An honorary member of the Fascist party since 1926, she had been recalled by Il Duce himself, elected by the Ministry of Education to conduct her own new experimental school -the Opera Montessori-after 16 years of lecturing abroad.
Some distance from the Opera Montessori is a place, where, in the last decade of the last Century, a young woman medical student was jeered and hooted by male classmates. Women were not then supposed to have technical careers, or minds of their own, or the liberty of going about the city unchaperoned. Fellow students enjoyed blocking the young woman's path to classrooms and simpering sarcasms in her presence. "A woman of genius might reasonably consider a profession, but surely an ordinary woman shouldn't." "Fool men go in for medicine, why not a fool woman?" But Maria Montessori had the satisfaction of being the first woman to get an M.D. from the University of Rome.
Her degree got her a position on the staff of the city's Psychiatric Clinic, first as an interne, later as assistant physician. Working among cretins and morons, she undertook to sift out and salvage feeble-minded and backward children. Through patient experimentation she discovered that if the child were given something to twist and touch with its hands, its brain might learn to function responsively. At least it was less restive. Four years later (1898), she made known her preliminary findings to colleagues at the Pedagogical Congress in Turin. Her psychiatric studies and feminist activities brought her national recognition. The same year, aged 28, she was sent to Germany as Italy's representative at the International Woman's Congress where she was barred because she professed Socialism. Returning to Rome, she became directrix of the new Scuola Magistrate Ortofrenica (state institution for feeble-minded). Here was formulated the nucleus of what most pedagogs now know as the Montessori Plan. So adept did her backward children become that they outstripped conventionally-trained, normal children in public school examinations.
In 1900 she left the State school and set about thoroughly preparing herself for a life of scientific pedagogy. She enrolled at the University of Rome as a student of philosophy and experimental psychology. She read, talked to educational theoreticians, visited schools where "immobile children were nailed to their seats." From Friedrich Froebel she learned that education should come to the young as a result of self-activity. She found that Johann Pestalozzi held sense-perception to be the source of knowledge. In 1907 she was given the opportunity of putting her theoretical research to practical use.