Maria Montessori

Montessori qualified in medicine in Rome in 1896, one of the first Italian women to do so, and was given work at a psychiatric clinic where she saw children classified as ineducable kept in bare rooms with nothing to touch. She concluded that what they lacked was not intelligence but material, prepared a set of objects for them to handle, and some of them passed the state primary examinations. She then asked the obvious question about what was being done to children who were not classified at all.

In 1907 she was given a room in a tenement in San Lorenzo, a poor district of Rome, to keep the small children out of the corridors while their parents worked. She furnished it at child height, gave them real tools and materials, let them choose their own work and observed. What she saw — long concentration, a preference for order, no interest in the toys — became a method now used in tens of thousands of schools. She refused to make her schools serve Mussolini and left Italy in 1934; her books were burned. She died at eighty-one in the Netherlands and asked to be buried where she died.