Born in 1870, the year of Italy’s nationhood, Maria Montessori was a social reformer. The general militarisation of life, the first great slaughter, the rise of Mussolini and the second slaughter, are only some of what she reacted and organised against. She believed her method – now universally known as the Montessori Method – would be instrumental in changing attitudes about education and for ways of being.
Maria Montessori’s feminist interpretation of the creation story would have Eve as the holder of knowledge which Adam could never possess. Montessori’s existential attitude and struggle were encapsulated in the notion of a knowledgeable women. She would become the first female medical doctor in Italy in what was then a notoriously patriarchal profession. ‘Learning how to do things for oneself’ was the point of her pedagogical method, built on precepts which she lived by. The bio-pic ‘Maria Montessori’ (‘La Nouvelle Femme’), although not a cinematic masterpiece, is more than saved by its subject. The film makes a reasonable fist of capturing her experiences in the early 1900s and how they informed her educational approach, now universally known as the Montessori Method.
The hypocrisy of the upper-class, and their churches, which guided their society and moral snobbery, profoundly affected Maria Montessori and shaped her philosophy and theorising. Dr Giuseppe Montesano, her lover and the father of their son Mario, along with both their families, feared the harsh judgment of a women with an ‘illegitimate’ child. They hid Mario in the countryside with another family for the first two years of his life. Montesano then abandoned Maria to marry another woman and took possession of the boy. Justifying his actions, he humiliates her: ‘While you might consider yourself a liberated, modern-women, it was time to face the truth of your reality, that of an unwed mother of a small child.’
While fortunate to have been raised in a family which encouraged education and self-fulfilment, her parents, nevertheless, opposed Maria’s pursuing studies in science and medicine. What would women know? What was there to know? She went on to study psychiatry, and became involved in the lives, and then teaching of, children of the slums and as well the intellectually and physically-disabled. At the time regarded as ‘idiots’, these children also occupied the demi-monde of criminals and prostitutes. Women too, of all classes, were subjugated by upper-class men, by their patriarchal laws, which enforced prejudice and self-interest.
Born in 1870, the year of Italy’s nationhood, Montessori was a social reformer. The general militarisation of life, the first great slaughter, the rise of Mussolini and the second slaughter, are only some of what she reacted and organised against. She believed her method would be instrumental in changing attitudes about education and for ways of being.
In her later activities, which included ‘Educating for Peace’, Maria Montessori continued arguing that it was necessary to restructure society. Social reform should prepare people for a civic life but, with no ‘moral organisation’ of the masses, there was no avenue for achieving their collective ends and making social progress. She argued that all that had been achieved so far was ‘the organisation of things’. It was time for humanity to take control of progress and give it direction. Peace is more than the absence of war. A just and peaceful society is the foundation for the possibility of socially cohesive one but only when our fundamental material needs, housing, health, and education are provided.
Mussolini, who still declared himself a socialist in the mid-1920s, saw the value of encouraging rituals which encouraged prosocial behaviour. He encouraged Montessori’s approach. Subsequently, he insisted that Maria swear allegiance to fascism. Refusing to do so, her schools were shut down and she fled into exile in the Netherlands. In catholic, warring Spain her schools too were closed. Progressive pedagogues were persecuted, as described in the recent Spanish film, ‘The Teacher who Promised the Sea’. She then went to India and continued her association with the Theosophists, she had a collaborative friendship with Annie Besant. Mahatma Gandhi knew about her, and the Indian poet and radical social reformer, Rabindranath Tagore, adopted the Montessori method in his schools in the late 1920s.
Childhood was beginning to be understood as a particular realm of human development, and not as unformed adults in training. As Montessori observed, children imitate the actions and activities of other people, young and old. As a society today, we have absorbed this understanding as a fact. She also promoted the idea that the environment in which people existed, be it productive or otherwise, influences behaviour and self-regard. Appreciating the contribution of the physical environment for the healthy development of our psyches is one enduring aspect of Montessori’s contribution.
She opened the first ‘Casa dei Bambini’ in the slums of Rome. After the second world war during a crisis in Rome’s construction industry, many developments were left unfinished and became the playgrounds of destructive play for local kids. Montessori was consulted to find a solution. Children seek sensory delight in whatever is at hand, be it building something or destroying it. Working with these children saw her method evolve. A supportive environment was critical to providing opportunities through constructive engagement with a variety of materials and activities which improved children’s emotional and cognitive needs by providing the possibility to appreciate all that life can offer.
Anton Makarenko, a contemporary of Montessori, a teacher and social worker in the then fledgling Soviet Union, was its most influential and respected pedagogue, who confronted similar problems and came to comparable conclusions. Like Maria, he believed that ‘guided play has great significance in human life, it is preparation for work and must gradually change to work’. To cope with criminal gangs of children and youth, made homeless during the revolutionary civil war, he created the Gorky Colony, a farm which provided education involving the discipline of collective work and responsibility.
My ten years as a preschool and Kitchen-Garden teacher provided me with a taste of what could be possible if the funding and resourcing were available for pedagogical and program innovation. Public schools just survive. Meanwhile, Geelong College a privileged tax-payer funded non-government school serving the rich, was able to ‘value-add’ by organising and supporting an entire year of curriculum around the activity of growing and cooking good food. We cannot fulfil our human needs while ingesting highly-processed food from a global food chain driven by the demands of Wolf St. Much of what we do as educators should provide an antidote to their poisons.
Montessori’s insistence on appreciating the importance of the environment for learning offers an opportunity for reflection. I concur, and equally insist that the space for children’s play must be defended from the demands of commerce and workforce productivity, both destructive encroachments dressed up as caring. Inhabiting an imaginative, exploratory world which encourages experimentation, even if it be temporary, stimulates healthy child-development. These inquiring attitudes should be carried into primary and secondary education rather than trying to measure what students need with the serial child-abuse of compiling NAPLAN data and expelling creative arts.
Montessori understood that educational activity had to evolve and be conducted in a manner which meets fundamental human needs. The digital revolution which is upending so much that we had taken for granted is our current conundrum, loading us with multiplying, and unforeseen challenges. For instance, could it be that gaming, anti-social media, and our overreliance on devices are driving us back into a state of pre-literacy?
Meanwhile, in Indigenous communities, dedicated professionals and volunteers, again underfunded, deploy the Cuban adult literacy program, ‘Yes, I can’, in a necessary attempt to fill the gaps ignored by successive Australian governments. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire made it his life project to overcome adult illiteracy as critical to acheiving political and civil power. Freire insisted on Educating the Educator on the understanding that learning is a reciprocal relationship.
The social world we engage with today discourages reading and writing. Books are increasingly absent. Generative AI threatens the practice of the thinking necessary for acts of creation. Now, we live in an environment that defines us as nothing more than objects and things, consumers whose choices are limited by the profit-seeking of corporations and the dictates of the market.
Maria Montessori’s method stands testament to the power of her practices, many of which have now been absorbed into our pedagogical processes. More than 70 years have past since her death in 1952 but many of her perturbations remain with us despite the exponential advances in our understandings of disability and neurodiversity.
Montessori went beyond the pedagogical struggle with the understanding that it is connected to social inequalities and the maldistribution of our resources. Profound and radical change has to occur if we are to surmount the obstacles to making a world where peaceful actions would overcome our generalised immiseration. While we may have many metaphysical differences with her philosophy and rational for peace-education, we can surely agree that, for the vast majority of us, to continue the way we are is only a road to further deprivations.
Surely, we can use these powerful examples of Maria Montessori and Makarenko to assist us in understanding the ‘crises’ besetting our society and public schools and what should and needs to be done. We pay the price for continuing and growing inequality with all its deleterious effects on community life when the needs of wealthiest are prioritised.
Peter Curtis
Peter Curtis is an educator in the public system in the ACT and has taught the early years through to high school. He has recently published, ‘A Meeting of Minds’, an imagined dialogue between Paulo Freire and Karl Marx.
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