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Born in Italy in 1870, Maria Montessori grew up to become Italy's first woman doctor. While working at a psychiatric clinic in Rome she first became interested in the treatment of children and, at age 28 accepted a position as the director of a school for "unhappy little ones". (Dr. Montessori referred to them as 'mentally disabled children.')
During the next two years the young doctor spent long, tireless hours observing and working with these children. Under her guidance her wards that had been considered uneducable before she began her experiment, took a standardized test along with 'normal' children and passed successfully. She was proclaimed a Miracle Worker by the educational establishment.
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Heartened by the results she'd achieved with special needs children, she returned to school to study anthropology and psychology in the hopes that she could find a way to apply the educational techniques she'd discovered to. 'Normal' children as well.
In 1907 at the age of 35, she was given a chance to try out her theories when she was invited to take over the education of fifty filthy, ragged children from the San Lorenzo slums of Rome. The techniques Dr. Montessori's continued to refine as she studied and worked with the slum children were so successful that her Casa de Bambini soon began to receive international attention. In fact, visitors came from all over the world to see these children--and their remarkable progress--for themselves.
In 1913, Maria Montessori's innovative--indeed, revolutionary educational philosophy had been recognized and applauded by such intellectual lights of the time as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and Sigmund Freud and many others.
Her fame would spread further with a demonstration she was asked to set up at the 1918 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. A special classroom was built at the exhibition with one glass wall behind which spectators could sit and watch as Dr. Montessori worked with 20 children, none of whom were familiar with the "Montessori environment" as it was already coming to be called. The 4-month long demonstration project did much to popularize Dr. Montessori's teaching techniques on an international level. And that popularity continued to increase among enlightened educators and parents with each book she released, each speech she delivered.
Since the early 20's, interest in the Montessori Method has grown steadily throughout the world. And in the last 20 years or so it has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence in the United States.
Rather than the outer-directed learning approach where children sit passively for much of the time, receiving mostly verbal information from the teacher--vessels being filled as it were, in a Montessori environment. The child is the leader. It is the teachers job not to lead and lecture, but to observe and follow, sensing when the child is ready to try something new and being ready to present it at as close to the perfect time as possible.
The style of learning encouraged is very physical as well with much emphasis on actively pursuing tasks be it dusting every speck off a plants leaves or discovering that 10 + 10=20.
Dr.Montessori discovered early on that rewards and punishments were not necessary for children to learn--and learn happily. Instead, she found if a child was allowed to pursue her own interests--whether it is washing a table, feeding the cat or learning the alphabet, the work itself--and the child's knowledge that she had the ability to master it--were far and away enough of reinforcement.
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