Montessori education and its scientific basis

Italians have always revered the arts and promoted the infusion of beauty and fi ne design into the quality of everyday life. Perhaps it is this distinctive cultural fl air, revealed in fi elds such as architecture, painting, interior design, graphics, fashion, and cuisine, that has infl uenced Italy also to become a giant in the fi eld of early childhood education. In the 20th century, Italy has produced two of the world's most innovative and infl uential Reggio Emilia, in the northern part of the country. Montessori education is the subject of Angeline Lillard's book. Montessori, a brilliant fi gure who was Ita-ly's fi rst woman physician, created an approach that refl ected a late 19th century vision of mental development and theoretical kinship with the great European progressive educational philosophers, Jean-Jacque Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi and Fredrich Froebel (Edwards, 2002 and Edwards, 2003). Th e many parallels between her ideas and those of the American progressive, John Dewey, her contemporary, are due to the fact that their ideas grew out of shared theoretical roots and were responsive to the social and cultural transformations engendered by the industrial revolution. Montessori is the only woman regularly listed as one of the very great fi gures in the history and philosophy of education, and up until 2002 when the European Union issued the Euro as common currency, her country's deep regard was indicated by her face on the Italian 1000 Lira bill. As Lillard's book explains, Montessori's vision anticipated many of the twentieth century's developments in child psychology and education. Montessori was convinced that children's natural intelligence involved, from the start, rational, empirical, and spiritual aspects. After drawing on Edouard Seguin's and Jean Itard's work to innovate a methodology for working with children with disabilities, she started her Casa dei Bambini (Chil-dren's House) in 1907 for children aged 4–7 in a housing project in the poor slums of Rome. Her educational movement (including her highly original concepts for curriculum materials, child-sized furniture, classroom layout, mixed age grouping of children, and teaching strategies) spread to other countries, especially once Mus-solini's Fascist regime denounced her methods and Montessori left Italy to live the rest of her life abroad. In the United States, there was strong but brief interest in the Montessori method from 1910 to 1920, but then it fell out of favor (Torrence & Chattin-McNichols, 2000), though during that time the movement began …