Maria Montessori

She was born in 1870 and in her life she worked as an educator, pedagogist, doctor, child neuropsychiatrist, philosopher and Italian scientist. In Italy, she was one of the first women to graduate from the faculty of medicine. She had a lot of interest in fighting for women’s emancipation.

She became very famous in the world thanks to the famous educational method for children that took its name, or the “Montessori Method”. This method was initially used in Italy, but was soon adopted all over the world, and even today Montessori schools are preferred to others. The Montessori method refers to the education of the child from birth to adulthood. The teacher must be “only” the mediator who fosters the desire to do, innate in the child; he must know how to observe, choose the right material and know how to be silent at the right moment. Her motto was: “HELP ME TO DO IT ALONE!”, To understand the need to guide the child in search of autonomy. Furthermore, he argued that «Manual work with a practical purpose helps to acquire an inner discipline. When the hand is perfected in a work chosen spontaneously, and the will to succeed, to overcome an obstacle is born, the conscience is enriched with something very different from a simple cognition: it is the conscience of one’s own value. “