by Ron Miller

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) brought to education her experiences as a medical doctor, scientist, peace activist and spiritual visionary. The first female physician in Italy, she began working with "mentally defective" children and experimented with methods to awaken their latent intelligences. Her success led to her appointment as director of a therapeutic school, and in 1907 as the organizer of a childcare center in a housing project in Rome. It was here, at the "children's home," that she devised the "prepared environment" that became the foundation of the Montessori education movement.

Closely studying children's biological and psychological development, Montessori concluded that young humans go through specific cycles of growth. Their intellectual and social capacities unfold in a rhythmic order, and at certain "sensitive periods," they are especially attuned to aspects of the environment that will call out their abilities to speak, count, read, perform fine motor activities, and so on. She designed her educational environment to meet the child at each stage of development, to stimulate and nurture latent capacities as they are ready to emerge.

A Montessori classroom is like a studio or laboratory where children can independently engage with the ingenious learning materials she designed. Once the teacher demonstrates (at just the right time in the child's development) how to use the materials, his or her main task is to observe each child as the environment supports self-motivated constructive activity. Montessori emphasized the importance of concentration—allowing children time and space to give focused and sustained attention to their activities.

Children in these classrooms do meet for group activities, but the 3-year age range and individualized self-paced learning in Montessori education are aspects that differentiate it from the Waldorf approach. Another is Montessori's emphasis on sensory perception (helping children become attuned to fine differences in sound, color, texture, etc.) rather than deliberately promoting imagination; Montessori believed that a primary goal of childhood is to connect purposefully with the objective physical and cultural environment.

Another element distinguishes Montessori from Waldorf education: Montessori found that 3- and 4-year old children are intellectually and emotionally ready to begin expressing their thoughts through writing and discovering the thoughts of others through reading, so she introduced sensory-based activities (such as sandpaper textured letter boards and cardboard or wooden alphabet sets) that enable young children to achieve literacy in concrete form. While Rudolf Steiner believed that literacy prior to the change of teeth (around age 7) was developmentally premature and actually harmful to soul development, Montessori was convinced that the young child's urge to communicate in this way is powerful and essential.

Montessori education is most often understood as an early childhood model, and indeed, most Montessori schools are designed for young children and many of her innovations and ideas have influenced the larger field of preschool teaching. She went further, however, and developed an elementary school model using similar principles of self-paced, interest-driven learning, adapted to the different developmental needs of older children. She proposed a "cosmic curriculum" that invites young people to experience and explore the wholeness and the wonder of the evolving universe. Beyond this, she envisioned a retreat-like farming community for young adolescents, a challenging experiential alternative to the modern middle school curriculum, that she called the erdkinder (earth children).

Because the Montessori learning environment cultivates a sense of order and calmness and promotes serious intellectual inquiry, it has been widely adopted in many parts of the world and appeals to mainstream families. It is not generally considered a culturally radical educational innovation. But Maria Montessori viewed her work as a nonviolent revolution that could transform human history. She argued that every child possesses hidden spiritual powers capable of fashioning a peaceful and compassionate adult personality and a harmonious society. (This is "the secret of childhood"—the title of one of her books.)

Montessori was an early proponent of the holistic worldview that became more prevalent later in the twentieth century: She looked carefully and deeply into the world of nature and found, not isolated material entities interacting mechanically, but a living and purposeful Cosmos. As she put it in To Educate the Human Potential, "All things are part of the universe, and are connected with each other to form one whole unity." She was deeply impressed by the harmony she discerned in the natural world, the ecology of existence that gives every living thing a meaningful function in the larger system. Every species, indeed every individual organism, contributes to the good of the whole by performing its inherent "cosmic" function. This harmony has not emerged randomly, but expresses "a pre-established plan" that is "of divine origin"; she was convinced that "the purpose of life is to obey the occult command which harmonizes all and creates an ever better world" (Education for a New World).

Montessori's distinctive notion of the child as a "spiritual embryo" emphasized her key principle that the growing human being is not simply a biological or psychological entity, but a spiritual energy seeking expression in the form of a human body within the physical and cultural world. She compared the process of psychological and spiritual development to the physical unfolding of the human organism. Just as the material body first takes shape as a self-forming embryo, requiring during its formation the protection and nurturance of the womb that envelopes it, the human soul first appears in the newborn child in an embryonic form that requires nourishment from a psychic womb—the protective environment of loving, caring parents and a spiritually responsive education—but that essentially unfolds organically from within.

Philosopher Robert G. Buckenmeyer asserts that Montessori's mystical religious faith was "the basis for her educational philosophy, namely, that the child is created by God and merely loaned to parents and teachers whose job it is to respect the mysterious possibilities of each child..." (The California Lectures of Maria Montessori. Oxford, UK: ABC-Clio., 1997). Montessori's spirituality has touched a responsive chord in many traditions. Catholic as well as Sikh and Bahai educators, and followers of nearly every world religion have adopted Montessori's principles if not her entire method. Yet the Montessori approach is not explicitly religious and does not aim to inculcate specific beliefs; remarkably, the rationalist atheist Ayn Rand also endorsed Montessori education! Apparently the approach taps into universal archetypes of child development.

Consequently, Montessori education has spread around the world, and there are now thousands of schools that bear her name. In 1929, the Association Montessori Internationale was founded to promote the faithful implementation of her method and to oversee the training of teachers. However, as with most educational and philosophical movements, there are followers and allies who interpret or adapt the founding principles in original ways. In 1960, a group of parents wanting to implement these principles in more flexible ways to respond to the conditions of American culture broke off from AMI to establish the American Montessori Society, and by the 1990s there were several other independent organizations training their own Montessori teachers and accrediting their own networks of schools. After some rather difficult competition, they have in recent years sought ways to collaborate to promote the movement as a whole.

The situation today is quite complex. For some Montessorians and parents, there is one true Montessori Method that reflects the brilliance of its founder. For others, there are variations on that method—adaptations that Montessori herself might have made had she lived and worked in the rapidly changing culture of the later twentieth century. And for still others, the brand name "Montessori" is less important than the principles established by one educational innovator among others who offer different, but complementary, perspectives. To hold the Montessori approach as a specific method requiring authorized training is one way to interpret and apply her principles, and it works for many children in many diverse communities (just as Steiner's specific Waldorf method works). But this attitude is quite different from "progressive," "democratic," or "holistic" educational alternatives that seek to engage teachers, students, and society in a critical and open-ended discussion about the goals and techniques of education.

Parents today have the benefit of many educational options, and to make informed decisions, they need to understand such philosophical nuances. The "Montessori school" in one family's neighborhood may have a very different flavor from a "Montessori school" elsewhere in town. One might strive for orthodoxy, and will tend to attract teachers and families comfortable with well established methods, procedures and expectations, while another might encourage more active experimentation and inquiry. Parents need to visit, observe, ask questions, and reach their own judgments about what sort of environment meets their own family values and children's learning styles.