The schoolrooms of Maria Montessori's youth were built to hold a child still: hygienists designed fixed benches for the purpose, and prizes and punishments held the attention the benches could not. Montessori compared the pupils kept this way to butterflies pinned in a case. Her alternative fits in a sentence: given an environment built to their size and the freedom to choose their own work, small children will teach themselves, and the teacher's task is to prepare that environment and watch. She called it a scientific pedagogy, and she arrived at it as a doctor, not as a teacher.
Medicine had not wanted her. As a medical student at the University of Rome from 1893, she had to dissect cadavers alone in the evenings, because a woman could not stand beside men in front of a naked body. She qualified in 1896, one of the first women in Italy to do so. The next year, working for the university's psychiatric clinic, she toured the city's asylums in search of patients. By her own later account, a caretaker told her with disgust how the children there snatched crumbs off the floor after meals; she concluded that in a bare room they were starved of anything to handle. She turned to Jean Itard, the French physician who had tried to educate the "wild boy of Aveyron", and to his student Édouard Séguin, who had built teaching apparatus for children judged mentally deficient. At the Orthophrenic School, a training institute for teachers of such children that she co-directed from 1900, some of her pupils later passed the public examinations set for ordinary children. If the methods worked for them, she reasoned, they might do more for children with no impairment.
The science she trained in was a science of measurement. Her former teacher Giuseppe Sergi wanted pupils studied by the methods of anthropology; Cesare Lombroso, the founder of criminal anthropology, read crime in the shape of the body. In 1899 Montessori publicly attacked both men for presenting the inferiority of women as a scientific finding. Yet her own university lectures of 1904 to 1908, printed in 1910 as Pedagogical Anthropology, measured children's skulls and limbs and took over much of the anthropologists' sorting of people into superior and inferior types.
The test came on 6 January 1907, in San Lorenzo, a working district of Rome. A building society asked her to occupy its tenants' small children during the day, and the first Casa dei Bambini, or Children's House, opened with the porter's daughter as teacher and Montessori observing. The children preferred her materials to the toys provided, repeated the same exercise many times, cared little for sweets offered as rewards, and kept the room in order on their own. The Montessori Method, her report on these classrooms, appeared in Italian in 1909 and in English in 1912, and became a best seller in the United States.
The American welcome did not last. In 1914 William Heard Kilpatrick, a follower of John Dewey at Columbia's Teachers College, published a dismissive critique, and others charged that the method drilled the senses and starved imagination and play. Montessori answered in Spontaneous Activity in Education (1916) that imagination grows from exact observation of real things, not from telling a child that a wooden brick is a horse. The American movement broke apart after she left in 1915 and did not recover until around 1960.
Politics tested her claim that the method stood above them. In 1924 Mussolini promised state support for her schools, and in 1926 she was made an honorary member of the Fascist party. From 1930 she quarrelled with the government over money and ideology, refusing to let the regime steer her movement. She was placed under political surveillance in 1932 and left Italy in 1934; two years later the government ended Montessori activities in the country.
Those anthropology lectures now stand at the centre of the argument over her. In 2024 Sabine Seichter, a professor of education at Salzburg, argued that her pedagogy drew wholly on the race anthropology the lectures set out, and that she held racial and eugenic views all her life; Heiner Barz, an education researcher at Düsseldorf, called the charges mostly baseless. Scholars still disagree about how much of her method that early book explains.