Maria Montessori
Maria Montessori was an impressive woman in many ways: as an educator, a woman, a scientist, and a philosopher. Born in Italy in 1870, she was the first (or second) woman in Italy to study medicine, which until then was a male domain field. Alongside and later studied education, psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology. Then, she started working with children and founded her "Casa dei Bambini" in San Lorenzo, a poor and slum area of Rome at that time. There she realized that children not only need to be taken care of but also need stimuli to develop. Then she created the very first Montessori materials.
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Throughout her life, Maria Montessori traveled to give lectures, give courses (to train teachers), and exchange ideas with other personalities of her time. Thus, she lectured in Europe and America and founded a model school and children's homes in India during World War II. Later, she founded schools in Spain and the Netherlands. Then returned to Europe and lived in Holland until she died in 1952 before embarking on an already planned trip to Ghana in Africa. Incidentally, she held her last international course in Innsbruck.
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The impressive thing about Montessori's pedagogy is her overall view of the child: the child is at the center. It is not an unfinished human being but a self-developing individual conquering its place in the world. It does not need to be guided or molded and fed with knowledge but stimulated to its natural development. Her works that have come down to us are primarily transcripts of her lectures, many written by her son, Mario Montessori.
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Maria Montessori is also a philosopher. If all people had the chance to develop according to her pedagogy, the planet Earth would be different: full of peace and harmony.
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The child is not an empty vessel, which we have filled with knowledge and owes us everything. No, the child is the master builder of man, and no one has not been formed by the child that he himself once was.
Maria Montessori in: "The creative child".
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Suppose you want to learn more about Maria Montessori's life and work without going into depth scientifically. In that case, you can read the book Teacher of a New Era by Laura Baldini. It is not a historical report; it is a well-readable novel. In fact the plot could have happened in such a way or so similar because of the known vital data. Published 2020 by Piper Verlag, ISBN 978-3-492-06240-4, 366 pages.