Project:

INFLUENCI
AL WOMEN
AROUND
THE
João Pedro Nascimento Lima WORLD
 MARIA
MONTESS
ORI
A life dedicated to
children
João Pedro Nascimento Lima
Maria Tecla Artemisia
Montessori was born in
1870 in Chiaravalle,
Italy, and was the only
child of a middle-class
couple.
Passionate about
mathematics, she attended
the technical education of
Engineering, but
abandoned her career to
become a doctor, being the
third woman to graduate
in Medicine in Italy, in
1896, despite the
machismo of the time. Dr.
Montessori went to Psych.
On your visits to
orphanages, Dr.
Montessori realized
that the treatment
given to children,
especially those with
special needs, was
inhuman.
During this period,
Montessori also devoted
himself to an institution
that exclusively housed
children with intellectual
disabilities and noted that
they were interested in
anything they might feel. 
Thus, she engaged in his
studies on the sensory
sensitivity of the young
child using the materials
that she and the researcher
Séguin had developed,
which are used in
montessorian rooms
around the world to the
present day.
Through the use of these
materials, the children
interned at the school
learned so much and
developed so well, that
Montessori felt confident
to enroll them in the
national education tests of
Italy.
And in the exams,
Montessori’s students,
who faced the most
varied difficulties to
learn, did better than
most of the Italian child
population, who had
perfect cognition and
were educated in normal
schools.
Impacted, Montessori
wondered what was wrong
with traditional schools, so
that children who would have
everything to get excellent
test results get worse results
than their children, for whom
all activities presented
immense challenges. Thus,
Montessori, who had already
studied Pedagogy in the
meantime, decided to devote
himself entirely to Education.
In 1907, Montessori went to
work with children whose
development had no special
characteristics, in order to
test their intuition about
learning through the
senses. She then became a
supervisor at the Casa dei
Bambini (Children’s
House), located in a
deprived region of Rome. 
There, Montessori applied,
with children between two
and seven years of age, the
techniques he had
developed. With the
enormous success of his
method, other houses were
opened. In 1909, the
techniques created by the
educator replaced the
traditional ones in
orphanages and nurseries of
much of Italy.
The Casa dei
Bambini thus
became the stage
of the world’s
largest
educational
revolution. 
From then on, journeys around the world follow, in which Montessori gives courses
and lectures on his method, spreading everywhere the discoveries he had made,
opening schools and training teachers, writing books and publishing articles and
interviews where he passed.
In my opinion, Maria
Montessori was a woman
way ahead of her time. An
educator, physician,
educator and
anthropologist, she devoted
most of her life to the
school education of
children and developed an
educational method that
has been used for another
century in public and
private schools around the
world: the fantastic
Montessori method.