Vol. I, No. 4, September 2002
MARIA MONTESSORI
This year marks the fiftieth year after the death of Italian educator Maria Montessori. Many of her once-radical ideas-including the notions that children learn through hands-on activity, that the preschool years are a time of critical brain development and that parents should be partners in their children's education-are now accepted wisdom. Perhaps none of her ideas sound as revolutionary as they once did. Maria Montessori's own barely form vision combined Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophy of the nobility of the child with the more pragmatic view that work-and through it the mastery of the child's immediate environment-was the key to individual development. Montessori maintained that each child must be free to pursue what interests him most at his own pace in a specially prepared environment. Due to a revival of the Montessori methods here in the United States in the 1950's, there are now some 5,000 Montessori schools in the United States.