Maria Montessori was a truly remarkable woman. Born in 1870, she was the
first woman to be granted a medical degree from an
Italian university.
On January 6th, 1902, the first Casa dei Bambini opened in Rome. Prior to
this, Dr Montessori had been developing her educational
theories while working with abandoned children from the Asylum for the
Insane in conjunction with the Orthophrenic Institute,
attached to Rome University. Most of these children were considered to be
retarded, yet Dr. Montessori had great success with them;
expanding on principles and materials used by Jean
Itard and Eduard Seguin during the 19th Century.
Dr Montessori was very interested in the potential
of these methods for working with children of normal
intelligence, so she quickly accepted the proposal of a group of bankers,
who wanted to create a centre
to serve the needs of children living in a new apartment tenement they had
financed in a poor area of
Rome. Their motivation was material, rather than altruistic; as the
unsupervised children of parents who
worked 12 – 15 hour days in the factories were seen as a physical threat
to the apartment building.
“The children were collected there so that the walls should remain intact
and the tenement have less
frequent need of renovation.” [1]
The first Casa dei Bambini was therefore a very
different place to the beautifully maintained and presented Children’s
Houses of
today. Dr Montessori was provided with a large room, and invited to equip
it as best she could. She did this by approaching friends and
charitable institutions, and managed to collect some specially made
furniture, mainly small tables and chairs as well as a teacher’s desk,
and some of the scientific materials she had used with the children from
the asylum. The teacher was a young, untrained woman given
free reign by Dr. Montessori, after being shown how to present the
sensorial materials and with the addition of about 50 young
children,
the first Casa dei Bambini was born. Through her observations and work
with these children she discovered their astonishing,
almost effortless
ability to learn. Children taught themselves! This simple but profound truth
formed the cornerstone of her life-long
pursuit of educational reform.
[1] Secret of Childhood, p122.
