Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, Ancona, Italy in 1870. Montessori became the first female physician in Italy at the age of 26. Montessori’s medical observations led her to want to discover how children learn. She found that children build themselves from what is in their environment. In 1901, Montessori returned to school, studied psychology and philosophy and became a professor of anthropology at the University of Rome in 1904. In 1906, she gave up her medical practice and her chair at the University of Rome to work to open the Children’s House. At the Children’s House, she worked with sixty children from working class parents. This is where Montessori’s educational theory first began. The children of the Children’s House seemed to absorb knowledge in an almost effortless manner, working by themselves, without the assistance of adults.
Montessori visited the United States for the first time in 1913. That same year Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel fo...