66. Maria Montessori

"And so we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process, which develops spontaneously in the human being," begins educator Maria Montessori in her book The Absorbent Mind. "It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child."

Those three sentences contain the essence of an educational revolution that has reverberated throughout the twentieth century, influencing the course of childhood education all over the world. Students of Maria Montessori have included Anna Freud, Jean Piaget, Alfred Adler, and Erik Erikson, a group of educators and child psychologists whose collective insights into how children learn are built on the foundation of Montessori's ideas.

Several aspects of those ideas are worth underscoring: First, Montessori saw learning as a natural process; we do not need to force children to learn-they are naturally curious and soak up new knowledge like sponges. Second, she believed that children learn by doing, not by being told how to do something. Third, she demonstrated how children flourish and learn in a stimulating environment, scaled to their own size and particular needs. These ideas are commonplace in classrooms throughout the country today, but when Montessori wrote her first book, The Montessori Method, in 1912 these ideas were still radical and very far from the prevailing practices in childhood education.

>>