Maria Montessori: The Doctor Who Reinvented Childhood

Maria Montessori was born near Ancona in 1870 and died in the Netherlands in 1952, and in the years between she became one of the first women to qualify in medicine in Italy and the founder of an approach to early education that is now used across the world. She worked first in the clinics and asylums of Rome, and in January 1907 she was given a room in a new apartment block in the San Lorenzo district and a group of children who had been left to run through the stairwells.The Casa dei Bambini that grew from that room produced observations that changed how a generation of educators thought about young children: the room scaled to the child, the carefully made materials, the adult who observes more than instructs, and the child who teaches himself to write before he learns to read. Around those observations Montessori built a much larger theory of sensitive periods, the absorbent mind and the planes of development, and she made claims for it that the evidence has not sustained. This book follows the life and the work together, sets out where the research confirmed her, where it corrected her and where it refused her, and follows the method through its spread across Europe and the United States, its enlistment by a fascist state, and its rebuilding in exile.It is an evidence-based account of a life and a body of work, and a work of intellectual history. It is not a parenting manual, not a curriculum guide and not a defense of the brand that carries her name.