Maria Montessori's Background

Dr. Maria Montessori was born in Chiavalle, Italy August 31st, 1870. Her father was an accountant of the civil service and her mom was well educated and loved reading. When Maria was five, they moved to Rome where she enrolled in school. When she was sixteen she went to school to be an engineer breaking several women constraining career barriers. After graduating, Montessori insisted in being a doctor, even if it was an only male career at the time. This turned her into the first woman to enter medical school in Italy. Maria Montessori graduated from medical school at the age of twenty-six and became known throughout the country. In 1897 Montessori started working at a psychiatric clinic where she developed an interest in children with special needs, then turned into the co-director of an institution that took in children with all kinds of disorders, and worked with them on her theories. There was where she met Guisseppe Montesano whom she had a love affair with and gave birth to a boy she named Mario. An opportunity presented itself giving Montessori the chance of working with "normal" children and then opened her first Children’s House in January of 1907. In 1909 Montessori gave her first training of her methods to 100 students, turned the method into a book and became a bestseller in the United States by 1912 and was translated to twenty different languages. Soon after schools practicing the Montessori Method were open all over the world. This caused Montessori to give lectures, public speakings and trainings all over the world as well. In 1933 a lot of her schools were banned due to fascism. Six years later Mario and Maria went to India to train teachers for three months. They found themselves unable to leave for seven years due to wars. They were finally released when Maria turned seventy; they trained thousands of Indian teachers before they left for the Netherlands where Montessori died in May of 1952.