Montessori education and its scientific basis

Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005) ISBN 0-19-516868-2, 224 pp., $35 (cloth).Italians have always revered the arts and promoted the infusion of beauty and ﬁ ne design into the quality of everyday life. Perhaps it is this distinctive cultural ﬂ air, revealed in ﬁ elds such as architecture, painting, inte-rior design, graphics, fashion, and cuisine, that has inﬂ uenced Italy also to become a giant in the ﬁ eld of early childhood education. In the 20th century, Italy has produced two of the world’s most innovative and inﬂ uential leaders: Maria Montessori (1870–1952) from Rome, in southern Italy; and Loris Malagazzi (1920–1994) from Reggio Emilia, in the northern part of the country.Montessori education is the subject of Angeline Lillard’s book. Montessori, a brilliant ﬁ gure who was Ita-ly’s ﬁ rst woman physician, created an approach that reﬂ ected a late 19th century vision of mental development and theoretical kinship with the great European progressive educational philosophers, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi and Fredrich Froebel (Edwards, 2002 and Edwards, 2003). Th e many parallels between her ideas and those of the American progressive, John Dewey, her contemporary, are due to the fact that their ideas grew out of shared theoretical roots and were responsive to the social and cultural transformations engendered by the industrial revolution. Montessori is the only woman regularly listed as one of the very great ﬁ gures in the history and philosophy of education, and up until 2002 when the European Union issued the Euro as common currency, her country’s deep regard was indicated by her face on the Italian 1000 Lira bill.As Lillard’s book explains, Montessori’s vision anticipated many of the twentieth century’s developments in child psychology and education. Montessori was convinced that children’s natural intelligence involved, from the start, rational, empirical, and spiritual aspects. After drawing on Edouard Seguin’s and Jean Itard’s work to innovate a methodology for working with children with disabilities, she started her Casa dei Bambini (Chil-dren’s House) in 1907 for children aged 4–7 in a housing project in the poor slums of Rome. Her education-al movement (including her highly original concepts for curriculum materials, child-sized furniture, classroom layout, mixed age grouping of children, and teaching strategies) spread to other countries, especially once Mus-solini’s Fascist regime denounced her methods and Montessori left Italy to live the rest of her life abroad.In the United States, there was strong but brief interest in the Montessori method from 1910 to 1920, but then it fell out of favor (Torrence & Chattin-McNichols, 2000), though during that time the movement be-gan to ﬂ ourish in Europe and India. In the second half of the 20th century, Montessori education ﬁ nally be-came a world force in education. In the 1950s, American educator Nancy Rambush led a movement of renewal, and Montessori education spread as an independent (private) school movement (Loeﬄ er, 1992). Today, there are probably 5000 or more schools in the US calling themselves “Montessori.” Of these, about 20% are aﬃ li-ated with two major accrediting organizations. Th e larger organization within this country, the American Mon-tessori Society (AMS), supports Montessori education in the context of contemporary American culture, and has been more inﬂ uential in outreach to the American public school system as well as in promoting a network of teacher-based classroom research. Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), founded by Montessori in 1929, promotes the study, application and propagation of (original) Montessori education worldwide, and is the branch of Montessori to which Angeline Lillard holds allegiance. To prepare teachers for North American Montessori schools, there are many training institutes, some adapting more to the cultural contexts of contem-porary times and others staying close to Montessori’s original methods. For example, in the United States, over 70 training programs are aﬃ liated with AMS, and 16 with AMI. In the 1960s, American parents began to ad-vocate for Montessori education in public schools, leading to hundreds of programs (often magnet programs) at the pre-K and elementary levels, and now increasingly the middle and high school levels. Montessori infant–toddler programs are also becoming numerous.