Maria MontessoriMaria Montessori was an Italian educator who emphasized on early childhood and the rise of feminism. She devised a very popular method of early childhood called the Montessori Method. She worked with children with learning disabilities and also mentally handicapped children. Her method is used all around the world in Montessori schools where teachers are specially trained to teach in these schools.
Maria Montessori was born in Chiaraville, Italy on August 31, 1870. Like I said before she was a feminist and she had a drive to penetrate all male professions. This was evident when, at the age of sixteen, she enrolled in the previously masculine Michelangelo Buonarroti Technical School, with the intention of becoming an engineer. She redirected her focus from engineering to medicine. This was more evidence of her determination to succeed in a male oriented world. The Board of Education in Rome said that she couldn't enroll in the University of Rome as a student in medicine.
Italian educationist Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
English: White Pine Montessori School in Moscow, I...
English: The Children's House, Stallingborough Thi...Her determination and will were so strong that on July 10, 1896 Maria Montessori was awarded a doctor's diploma in medicine and surgery by the Royal University of Rome.
As an assistant doctor at the University Psychiatric Clinic, she became interested in children with nervous and mental disease and "deficient" children. Back then these children were put in insane asylums. Her curiosity to find appropriate methods for helping these children led her to Bourneville Institute in Paris. There she studied the works of Edouard Seguin and Jean Itard. They were both French physician-educators who worked with handicapped children. "Today these two are considered two of the foremost pioneers in Special Education." "Montessori saw mental deficiency as an educational rather than a medical problem." In 1898, she was appointed director of the Orthophrenic Institute in Rome, which was...