Giuseppe montesano e maria montessori biography

Mario Montessori (March 31, 1898 - February 10, 1982) was the co-founder of the Association Montessori Internationale and a Montessori teacher and teacher trainer. He is the only child of Italian physician and educator Dr. Maria Montessori. His father was Italian psychologist Giuseppe Ferruccio Maria Montesano.

When we say "Montessori," we are generally referring to Dr. Maria Montessori. Before she started her first school, she worked to help teach children with severe learning disabilities in a psychiatric hospital, and she was a prominent leader in the fight to allow women the right to vote. To put it simply, she was an extremely busy lady. But before her first school opened, there was another Montessori who would become important to the Montessori movement. Before we get to who he is, it is important to understand Maria Montessori's particular situation.

In the late 1890s, she began to volunteer for a research program at the University of Rome's psychiatric division. This was not a nice place to be with a lot of couches and staff that care for you. This was likely a very deplorable place where people were simply dumped off and left there. As a worker commented how children would grasp at crumbs on the floor, Montessori realized that these children were seeking sensorial stimulation. She began to study works of psychologists and educators and brought many of their ideas to the children. The sensorial materials became an amazing tool to help the children connect with the world and learn and is now one of the key parts of the Montessori classroom. Children stuck in this situation were amazingly passing the exams given out at the local public schools. Montessori was becoming nationally and internationally known as an expert in her field. At one point, Maria Montessori was working with a man named Gius

When my daughter was little, I became fixated on a schoolhouse a few blocks from our apartment—a Tudor-style storybook cottage, with red trim and a brick chimney and a playground all of wood. Its first-floor windows were concealed by tall bushes of a deep impossible green, and everything that a childhood should be was waiting for my daughter behind them, or so I believed. When I went inside, my expectations were met. The children, aged two to six, were serious and serene, occasionally speaking to each other in low, considerate tones. They stacked blocks, strung beads, and arranged letter boards, and of course I had seen these kinds of blocks and beads and boards before, but never these specific, exquisite renderings of them. When it was time for “walking on the line”—a morning custom in which the children followed a line of tape on the floor, around and around, silent and judiciously spaced—I felt overcome by a sense of dazed compliance.

This was our local Montessori school, and I had convinced myself that, with a bit of scrimping and bootstrapping, I could somehow find the money to send my daughter there. I scheduled her required interview; afterward, the director told me, “Oh, she’s a dream,” and in that moment I would have signed a Sea Org contract in exchange for a year of my kid’s enrollment. But when I reviewed the numbers, the following weekend, I concluded that I could pay the tuition only if I went into credit-card debt—and, really, if that qualifies as being able to “afford” something, what can’t you afford? I withdrew her application, and, to self-soothe, I bought a Montessori-ish hundred-piece counting board for her off Amazon. (She barely touched it, and I gave it away after her toddler brother expressed an interest in eating the numbers.)

For the Montessori-curious parent on a budget, there is consolation in the wide and lasting influence of the movement’s founder, Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and educator whose ideas and innovati

Maria Montessori was born on 31 August 1870 in the town of Chiaravalle, Italy. Her father, Alessandro, was an accountant in the civil service, and her mother, Renilde Stoppani, was well educated and had a passion for reading.

The Montessori family moved to Rome in late 1874, and in 1876 the young Maria enrolled in the local state school on Via di San Nicolo da Tolentino. As her education progressed, she began to break through the barriers which constrained women’s careers. From 1886 to 1890 she continued her studies at the Regio Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci, which she entered with the intention of becoming an engineer. This was unusual at the time as most girls who pursued secondary education studied the classics rather than going to technical school.

Upon her graduation, Montessori’s parents encouraged her to take up a career in teaching, one of the few occupations open to women at the time, but she was determined to enter medical school and become a doctor. Her father opposed this course—medical school was then an all-male preserve—and initially Maria was refused entry by the head of school. She was undeterred, apparently ending the unsuccessful interview with the professor by saying, “I know I shall become a doctor”.

In 1890 Montessori enrolled at the University of Rome to study physics, mathematics and natural sciences, receiving her diploma two years later. This enabled her to enter the Faculty of Medicine, as one of the first women in Italy, and the first to study at the University of Rome. Montessori stood out not just because of her gender, but because she was actually intent on mastering the subject matter. She won a series of scholarships at medical school which, together with the money she earned through private tuition, enabled her to pay for most of her medical education.

Her time at medical school was not easy. She faced prejudice from her male colleagues and had to work alone on dissections since these were not allowed to be done in mixed

Upon her graduation in 1896, she was immediately offered a position with the San Giovanni Hospital attached to the University. Later she was to join a research programme within the psychiatric clinic at the University of Rome. Here, she met Giuseppe Montesano the father of her son, Mario (born 1898).

Her position at the clinic involved visiting Rome’s asylums for the insane, seeking patients for treatment at the clinic. A key event occurred when a caretaker at the children’s asylum described how the patients ran to any crumbs on the floor after their meal. Dr Montessori realized that as the children were kept in a bare, unfurnished room with no sensory stimulation, this was contributing to their condition.

She was subsequently appointed co-director with Giuseppe Montesano of a new institution called the Orthophrenic School. The school took children with a variety of disorders. It proved pivotal in Dr Montessori’s professional identity shifting from a physician to an educator.

Initially using the materials developed by the Frenchman Edouard Seguin to improve the child’s sensory perceptions and motor skills, Dr Montessori was to use them in new ways. Over the two-year period she spent at the Orthophrenic School, Dr Montessori experimented and refined the materials, analysing them and her patients from a scientific viewpoint.

Dr Montessori was passionate in her desire to improve the quality of the children’s’ lives, learning all that she could about education by studying pedagogy. She subsequently took up the post of lecturer at the Pedagogic School at the University of Rome.

Rome was developing rapidly by 1907. New developments were being constructed for people to live in. However, while the parents went to work the children were left to ‘run wild’, often vandalizing the buildings. The wealthy developers of one such development invited Dr Montessori to open a school for these children. She accepted this invitation eagerly as it was her fi