Translator: Simona Faggiano Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good morning.
it's a big thrill for me to be in this wonderful theater today.
I would like to tell you
about the courage to dare of an extraordinary woman,
with whom, moreover, I'm in debt, as a mother and as an educator.
A woman who wasn't discouraged by difficulties she faced during her life
and who had the courage to dare in order to achieve her great mission,
that is support the child's cause.
A woman whose work is widespread, rooted, and highly topical all over the world.
But very little in Italy, her birth place.
It all started a few years ago,
or, better, my meeting with Maria Montessori
dates back to a few years ago.
My daughter Alice had just six months,
when my husband and I read a leaflet in which a follow-up meeting
about the Montessori education was proposed,
we decided to go there.
I really couldn't believe my ears, once got there:
for the first time, finally,
I heard of a school as a place where the teacher
must take care of the child, and not of the program;
a place where children organize their day independently,
where they even focus on the work for a long time,
and, especially, they are very happy to do what they do.
A place where the teacher doesn't judge,
so the teacher doesn't give weight to marks, punishments, rewards.
A teacher who, rather lovingly accompanies their scholars throughout their growth.
I had studied Maria Montessori at the university,
but, I must be honest, I never understood
this revolutionary content of her educational proposal.
It was just a different way of seeing the education's task,
in which I always believed.
So, another education was really possible.
That was the school which I wanted for my daughter.
But, who is this extraordinary woman
that the New York Times called "the most interesting woman in Europe"?
Maria Montessori was a scientist;
she was born and lived between 1800 and 1900.
Since she was a child she is very determined,
and especially, she is aware of her great mission to accomplish.
She had such clear ideas that at the age of 12,
she renounced one of her great passion:
she attended drama since she went to primary school,
and she renounced it
to devote herself to those that she called "the strict studies",
which are the same studies that will lead her to enroll in,
when she was barely 20, the Faculty of Medicine in Rome,
an exclusively male environment,
in which she was immediately opposed and disliked.
However, she wasn't absolutely discouraged.
Maria Montessori was a tenacious woman,
who wanted to travel the most difficult paths
to carry her project out.
In fact, she will be
one of the first women in Italy to take a degree in medicine,
and once graduated, she actively participated in the nascent psychiatry.
She began to look after the children and the so-called oligophrenics,
children who are considered irredeemable with serious developmental delays.
At some point she began to make revolutionary observations.
She said,
"Healing for these children doesn't consist in an operation.
Their therapy is pedagogical,
it's in the educational work, in the relationship."
Thus, she began to deepen the studies.
She researched what was deepened,
and carried out by some scientists who preceded her,
who studied this particular phenomenon
and who focused on the sensory recovery.
She made her first trials, working with these disadvantaged children,
and she began to create some materials which are appropriate for them.
The courage to dare is satisfying
because, after just two years of intense work, really intense
- Maria Montessori worked
from morning to night with these children -
one of these children passed the exam at the primary school,
and he did it with better grades of the so-called healthy children.
And then another, and yet another, they hail as a miracle!
Maria Montessori adopted an idea
that is today confirmed by the neurosciences.
Children in order to learn and comprehend need concrete things,
they need to do concrete experiences.
Children think with their hands.
There is a close link between mental processes and sensitivity.
The extraordinary thing is
that Maria Montessori said this more than 100 years ago.
She asserted that the senses way is the main method
to re-educate irredeemable children with serious problems,
with huge learning problems.
The senses way is the main method to enhance the abilities of the mind.
After some years, in a very poor district of Rome,
the San Lorenzo district,
Mr. Talamo, an engineer, restored some crumbling buildings
and built a playgroup,
what we now call "preschool."
A place that housed small children
who didn't go to the elementary school yet,
and it was necessary to find someone that took care of them.
They were abandoned children, some of them had parents that worked,
and so it was necessary someone who took care of them.
The proposal is made to Maria Montessori,
already well known in Rome especially
for her rehabilitation work with difficult children.
Maria Montessori accepted this proposal with deep interest,
she looked after older children,
and now she was very curious
to comprehend, to know the younger children.
Thus, like a scientist expert in biology,
the first thing that she did was to organize an environment
that was suitable to house these children.
She made some materials available to these children,
the materials that she used
with older children with developmental delays,
and she created new ones,
all the sensory materials: the touch and feel numbers and letters.
Then, she started to observe:
she didn't teach, she didn't impose, she merely observed.
She observed children with a great scientific rigor.
She will do this for a lifetime.
She wanted to understand how the mind of these children works, their psyche.
She recognized really extraordinary phenomena.
She noticed
that children touched these materials with great passion,
they touched emery letters and after few months, they began to read,
without anyone has taught it them.
She realized that, in an environment
reach in objects and proposals children-oriented,
which were appropriate for the needs and the interests of children,
and where children could move freely, choose freely,
the atmosphere was completely different:
the arguments were rare, and children even collaborated each other,
they got into what they did, being really concentrated,
they even put what they took in order.
But not only...
An extraordinary interesting thing
was that children didn't seem interested in sweets and toys
which some ladies brought to them.
Why?
Because sensorial materials were even more charming.
Maria Montessori realized that there was a nourishment that was even more powerful
than that which fed the body,
and it was the nourishment that fed mind and soul,
and children should not be deprived of this.
On January 6, 1907,
Maria Montessori opened the first children's house.
From the previous experience,
a new childhood appeared what she called "the new child."
It was no more than a disobedient, naughty, rebellious, unable child,
but it was a new hardworking, reflective,
autonomous child,
who even loved to put things in order.
A serene, and especially, a self-confident child,
a competent child, who was never seen before.
It's the Copernican Revolution in pedagogy!
The first "children's house" was created and launched in 1907 by Maria Montessori,
and it was a great success.
And, pay attention, it was a "house" and not a "school,"
because Maria Montessori refused the concept of school.
The children's house wasn't a place in which education was taught;
but it was a place where the adult followed the children,
helping them in their development, and the latter can't be taught.
People came from all over the world:
educators, ministers, all to acclaim this woman
who had revolutionized the scientific pedagogical knowledge,
subverting commonplaces.
This school became even a model of civil development,
and it was celebrated also by illustrious figures,
such as Gandhi and Freud.
Within a short time, the children's houses
- Montessori elementary schools - spread all over the world,
and, unexpectedly, beyond expectations, they spread also in Italy,
in the Fascist Italy, where are built many schools;
until the revolutionary pedagogy of this woman, which aimed
to form free personalities and consciences,
began to become troublesome.
Therefore, after only 10 years, in Italy, all the Montessori school were closed.
The same happened in Germany and Austria.
The books of Maria Montessori were even sent to the stake,
she was accused of being a profiteer, a clever enchantress.
But she, once again, wasn't discouraged
by these difficulties.
She dropped the charges into the void, and she left Italy.
But she didn't absolutely abandon the project
to which she will devote her life, her great activity of love.
So, she began to travel: she was hosted in The Netherlands, in India,
where she developed some interesting educational experiments
especially for what concerns the elementary school.
She traveled the world, going to England and Denmark.
She began to talk of education as an instrument of peace.
On May 6, 1952, Maria Montessori died in the Netherlands.
Montessori, a very widespread approach in the world, and very little in Italy,
which still receives amazing confirmations
from the educational psychology research and from the neurosciences.
But, most importantly,
Montessori is the story of an original nonconformist woman,
who has still some interesting and very new things to tell us.
New things not only for her time but also for our time.
I think that Maria Montessori, really, still has much to tell us.
And she can help us even to understand the true nature of the child.
Maria Montessori can help us to place our trust in children,
to see the childhood as an educational potential capable of changing the world,
as a gold mine.
And above all, because we must do this,
otherwise, we succumb to perpetuate the waste of childhood and humanity
that befalls, happens
when we don't take into account the real needs of children.
I believe that, even today,
the Maria Montessori education represents a challenge for us;
it encourages us to dare,
to dare to replace children at the center,
not to make them the target of our plans and ambitions,
because they know better than any other what they need.
But we must put them at the center,
to observe, understand, and to give back them
the delight of knowing, learning, and living.
I think what Maria Montessori tells us
is really to invest in children
because they are our real teachers,
the only ones able to guide us towards a new and fairer society.
(Applause)