Maria Montessori, Between Salvation and Discrediting

How should I refer to Maria Montessori? What title should I give her? The question assails me as a central dilemma at the beginning of this essay. Should I say “the great Italian pedagogue,” “the doctor,” “the anthropologist,” “the feminist,” or simply “Ms. Montessori,” as many of her contemporaries called her? Or better, “the philosopher,” “the theologian,” “the mystic,” “the devout Catholic” or some other term that alludes to her spirituality? Writers, always on the hunt for words, could enjoy this variety of terms referring to her character without having to repeat themselves. The dilemma I face is that in giving Maria Montessori the title of “pedagogue” or any other of the sort, I feel quite profoundly that I do not pay due homage to someone who spent her whole life striving to honor the unbreakable unity that constitutes every human being, the unlimited union with our spirit. Not reducing it to conventional fragments (titles, positions, professions) is the least I can do for this woman who did not even like the reference to being Italian: one day, she asked to be buried in the country where death overtook her because all countries were her country. Yes, it is the least I can do, especially in a text like this, written to remember her on August 31, another anniversary of her birth.

The unity of each person is, I believe, one of the lenses that can bring the whole life of “lady” Montessori into focus: mystical unity, yes, which is not posed as something to be achieved (through pedagogy, for example) but as something that is given to us as a condition at birth and from which we encounter the world. It is a condition that needs specific means to unfold freely in this life; if found, it guides us towards fullness; if not, if deprived of it, we wither away, left at the mercy of enormous deficiencies.

The reader will understand that, for the same reason, it is also challenging to refer to a single stage or a single aspect of her life. That is why, in her remarkable biography The Child is the Teacher: The Life of Maria Montessori (published in 2020 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of her birth), Cristina de Stefano tries to limit herself to refer to facts and testimonies without highlighting any profile or theme, leaving us alone to realize the universality to which her life aspired. (“Facts and testimonies” do not mean that it is an arid text: the singular events of Maria Montessori’s life, her comments, and those of her friends, students, acquaintances, and descendants provide the sufficient plot for a charming narration; let’s say, movie quality).

I do not hide that my perspective is present in all this. I admit this because I am convinced that it is easier to understand others’ visions when one looks from one’s perspective (how strange it is to have to clarify this!). In the end, that human unity, that depth – which is as personal as it is common to the group – does seem to exist and to be always present in our mutual understanding.

However, it is still relevant to ask ourselves what happens with the inevitable misunderstanding. We will see in the following paragraphs how – with Maria Montessori as an example – this faith in human unity can lead to maladjustment in the face of humanity’s diversity. Capable of wrapping the whole world in spontaneity, she had to face with singular harshness the fact that, besides the unified and shapeless multitude, there are also individual persons who demand particular things from us; our responses to them do not always arise spontaneously. Maria, with a kind of childishness, always had a hard time seeing individuals with her totalizing gaze as each wanted to be seen, at least in certain aspects. However, her unique ability to see humanity as a single whole, although making it difficult for her to adapt to the demands of individuals, allowed her to connect with one of the faces, the one she considered the most profound: the human soul.

For Montessori, the human being is born into the world with an infinite power, a unifying supernaturality, and must face the fractional reality of adults, which will restrict his spirit unless someone creates the conditions around him allowing that potential to burst forth.

One day, at the beginning of her career, María observed a little girl who, having no other object with which to interact, focused her attention on some bread crumbs lying on the floor and formed them into a row. At the beginning of the twentieth century, anyone who was not Montessori would see this action as an idle distraction. Still, Maria discerned the little girl’s natural, imperious (let’s say innate) need to bring order. But more than that, Maria seemed to see (literally, saw) that the order the child arranged not only pleased her intellect but also enveloped her in a total harmony of body, emotion, and mind. For an instant, the little girl’s whole being seemed to enter into the order that she created with the little brown pieces. Seeing the girl, Maria sensed that if the experience were repeated, not with the few crumbs that the girl had at her disposal, but with pedagogical materials created delicately (artistically, informatively), the little girl’s potential would unfold more vastly and freely. Determined to prove what she considered a revelation, Maria repeatedly experimented, creating those environments necessary for children to flourish, always linking the process with the scientific attitude she had developed in her disciplined academic studies of medicine, chemistry, psychiatry, and anthropology.

The result of this combination of intuition (revelation?) and science was a style of thinking and a pedagogical method that would soon prove to be surprisingly effective. In the special classrooms that Montessori inaugurated, several groups of marginalized children, who were considered almost savages, not only entered into order and harmony but, as if miraculously, learned to write on their own and then to read and solve mathematical operations by themselves.

At first, Maria baptized her discovery as the ” Scientific Pedagogical Method,” but people soon called it the Montessori Method, intuiting (and consolidating) the indissoluble bond that would always unite it – for better or worse – with its creator. The popular name was by no means a projection of Maria’s narcissism but also the reflection of another of her formidable intuitions: that her discovery implied not only her work with children but also with herself. When people began to join the project, she did not stop insisting that each teacher would also make the effort for themselves. It was starting to become clear to many that by declaring her method to be scientific, she was referring to a kind of science of the soul. Dozens of disciples fell at Mary’s feet (some literally) when they began to intuit this perspective. But not everyone in the world understood it: “How many misunderstandings I have found in many countries because people thought I was talking about a pedagogical method, when in fact I was talking about a revelation from the soul.”

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Maria’s perfectionist, domineering, and often explosive temperament and her strange and unorthodox way of understanding science could have ruined the project. It is clear to me that the counterweight of her genius, her charm and charisma, were not enough to avoid this. Indeed, the conjunction of all this with numerous factors of the time was also necessary. We have to think that a woman of her enormity – who, among other things, thoughtfully combined science and spirituality and consumed her time supporting the most marginalized and discriminated populations (children, women, workers, hospital patients, neurodivergent people) – had to attract the support of many at such a tumultuous time as the new millennium (remember that this was the twentieth century for the people of the world that time). These were crucial times of transition: the old idols fell, and before others arose, everything was mixed: superstition tried to look objectively, science sought the unattainable, people killed each other in search of well-being, and those who had always been invisible made an appearance (among them, in a powerful way, children). On that confusing boundary, one woman (a member of the marginalized) who, with sustained authority, erected herself as an axis mundi (an axis of the world, a universal reference) to attract the attention of the multitudes: first of all, the thousands (millions?) of women who saw her exercising (at last!) all the freedoms that they had been demanding for themselves.

The resounding success of the Montessori proposal, which was even profitable, allowed María to impose many conditions on any association that wanted to follow her method. For her, the primary purpose of these multiple restrictions was to safeguard it “from false interpretations and guarantee the integrity of its application.” However, almost all of her attempts to consolidate an international regulatory institution were unsuccessful. For many people, the functions that María dreamed of for such an institution were unacceptable: “Hiring lawyers for the legal defense of the Montessori method and name, journalists to manage the image and public relations, and businessmen to take care of the financing. The schools must be directed by a (person) qualified in a training course (coordinated by Montessori herself), and the method must be used without contamination of other pedagogies and modifications.”

This anguished control that Maria wanted to exercise over her pedagogical model and enterprise seemed to many (then and still today) a contradiction to her postulated method (both the humanitarian and spiritual vertices and the scientific: regarding the latter, it would be as if the contemporary Albert Einstein said that only he could apply the laws of relativity). However, it seems to me that it was the only resort to which she, as a woman, always on the verge of being discredited and ridiculed by men, could rely on to preserve the purity that she considered irremovable in her brilliant proposal, one that sustained her integrally and materially. Success as a pedagogue did not prevent her from the innumerable threats against her as a woman. In this context, she found that the only weapon to defend her from abuses would be controlling her income through legal means. That is why, with the same almost alchemical meticulousness with which she made and perfected her method, she wanted to create a company that would maintain and protect her. The tragic contradiction then arose between sharing a work she felt could save humanity worldwide and maintaining its very personal control to preserve it from contamination.

There is no doubt that there was something of sacred madness in this, which at times illuminated her and, at others, blinded her, leading her to get rid of people who had shown themselves to be exemplary support, even her spiritual peers. There are cases where Montessori becomes sadly ridiculous in the eyes of history. De Stefano gives us a tragic example: in the twenties, Clara Grunwald, a German, Jewish, and socialist woman, was dazzled by what the method could do for the children of the working class and created an institution to apply it, which enjoyed Maria’s authorization. Sometime later, Ms. Montessori tried to withdraw that authorization to disapprove of the declared atheism of teachers and students, and the conflict led to a lengthy litigation process against Clara’s association. Now, Clara could declare herself an atheist, but did she lack the spiritual stature to understand the fundamental vertex of this method? Years later, when Nazism began Jewish persecution, Clara’s friends found a way to help her leave the country; she decided to stay and assured that she would not leave Germany until she had the last Jewish child safe. She dedicated her body and soul to achieving this. When finally, in 1943, the deportation order reached her, and, due to her age, she was assigned to a concentration camp whose conditions were known to be moderately tolerable, Clara asked (her biographer tells us) “that her destiny be changed to go with her students, to be sent to Auschwitz. So that the children would not be frightened, she tells them that they will go on a train excursion.”

I hope with this ending (because I am about to finish), I have not described Montessori as outstanding but, for many reasons, historically defeated; if so, I am sorry. Maria intrigues us in several ways, but for me and many, in the devastating panorama of the first half of the twentieth century, few areas of light stand out like those moments of love and ineffable flowering when thousands of children lived in her company; instants whose secret memory are added today to all the concepts of education that circulate the world. There remains, therefore, to honor Maria Montessori and render her our loving gratitude.

Translated by Daniel Wetta

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

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