There are many debates about Maria Montessori’s personality that are still whirling around, even today. Some people are delighted with the pedagogical system she created while others don’t understand how it’s possible to trust the studies of the woman who gave up her own son to strangers.
We at Bright Side became interested in the destiny of this unusual woman so we learned the details of her life, which was a constant fight between conventions and stereotypes.
The Italian woman who became a doctor despite being bullied by those around her
Maria, an Italian girl and the daughter of an official, was growing up to be a talented kid. She was fond of exact science and dreamt of becoming a doctor or an engineer. However, her father didn’t think that his daughter would become a doctor. Moreover, the fact that a woman wanted to become a doctor seemed unlikely in Italian society during the late nineteenth century.
Maria was adamant and successfully passed difficult exams and even got accepted to medical school. When Montessori was studying to become a doctor, her fellow students considered her presence inappropriate because she was a woman. Her groupmates and teachers openly displayed hostility toward her. When they were conducting practical lessons on autopsy, all of the bodies were male and naked. How was it possible for a woman to be present in these classes?
But despite the harsh psychological atmosphere, her success in her studies was noticeable and she got an opportunity to do hospital work in the fields she was interested in. In the last 2 years of her university life, Maria was studying pediatrics and psychiatry and worked in emergency services as well as in the pediatric consulting room. She became an expert in kids’ medicine and was one of the first women in Italy to receive the title of Doctor of Medicine.
She started to save kids who were believed to be hopeless.
Working with children as a pediatrician and visiting asylums during her work, Maria noticed that some forms of mental disabilities, which at that time were considered hopeless, could actually be dealt with. This purposeful woman decided that it was possible to work with these kids and help them develop.
Step-by-step, she started to create her own system. When giving speeches, she would say that the issue of mentally disabled kids was more related to pedagogy than it was to medicine and that she wanted to work with children as a mentor, not a doctor.
Her work gained notoriety and the National League opened an Orthophrenic School — a special institute for training teachers who would be educating mentally-ill kids. Maria was appointed to deputy director.
Maria would create her methods and materials and instantly apply them to kids of a model classroom in the same institute. This class consisted of children who were considered “uneducable” due to the specifics of their psyche, and mental disabilities weren’t always the reason for that. The first of her successes was noted by teachers when some kids easily passed the exams that were made for so-called “normal children.”
