Dayspring Montessori School
950 Northbrook Ave. : Northbrook, IL 60062
info@dayspringmontessori.org
phone: 847-714-9002
Montessori
From its beginnings very early last century, the Montessori Method of teaching children gained a global following at a lightening pace. Maria Montessori opened her first school, Casa de Bambini, Children’s House in Rome in 1907. Attention was immediately attracted and people were enthralled in ever increasing numbers.
Maria Montessori’s biography by Rita Kramer (Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Radcliffe Biography Series, 1976) documents that by 1913 there were already 100 Montessori schools started in America alone. By about this same time, the governments of Australia and Switzerland had adopted Montessori as their official education approach. The same was true of the city governments of London, Rome, Stockholm and Johannesburg.
And Montessori soon had many adherents in the best university departments and among the famous and powerful to say nothing of the poor that had directly benefited. Alexander Graham Bell and his deaf wife fell in love with the method and had a Montessori school started in their Washington D. C. home for their two grandchildren. On the other side of the ocean in St. Petersburg, a Montessori school was started in the Czar Nicholas’s palace gardens for his children and children of his courtiers.
The unparalleled speed of its worldwide spread had to do with two things, first Maria Montessori even as a young woman became very popular and influential. She first caught the attention and stirred the imagination of not only her fellow Italians but much of Europe when fresh out of medical school as the first woman doctor in Italy she took center stage at a women’s congress in Berlin.
What riveted their attention at the congress was her fair-minded reason combined with strong personal presence and charm. From then on, she seemed to be in the headlines over and over again. Her personal magnetism had certainly paved the way but she consistently wielded influence with her progressive ideas to the point that they became the reason for the attention.
The power of her ideas, which now regularly were in the public eye, never slacked, but her focus on education was only one step away. Her medical work led her ultimately to working with mentally deficient children. She could not believe they were without hope and in her studies found help from several earlier thinkers. Then on her own, she took what she learned and went further. At the heart of what she did was design her own materials to develop the sensory and conceptual perceptions of the deficient children. And the children learned. Some of them even learned to read and write passing the same tests as normal children in primary grades.
So impressed was Montessori by what the deficient children could do when the right environment was provided, that she realized that normal children would equally benefit from her approach. This was the launching point of her methodology. As she expected the results were even better. An opportunity came her way to provide day care for children in a tenement. She took it a step further, though, and provided them the beginnings of their education.