Maria Montessori

    The experiment was a limited success, for Itard found the "wild boy" uncooperative and unwilling or unable to learn most things. This led Itard to postulate the existence of developmental periods in normal human growth. During these "sensitive periods" a child must experience stimulation or grow up forever lacking adult skills and intellectual concepts that he missed at the stage when they can be readily learned! Although Itard's efforts to teach the wild boy were barely successful, he followed a methodical approach in designing the process, arguing that all education would benefit from the use of careful observation and experimentation. This idea had tremendous appeal to the scientifically trained Montessori, and later became the cornerstone of her method.

    From Edouard Seguin, Montessori drew further confirmation of Itard's work, along with a far more specific and organized system for applying it to the everyday education of the handicapped. Today Seguin is recognized as the father of our modern techniques of special education for the retarded.

    From these two predecessors, Montessori took the idea of a scientific approach to education, based on observation and experimentation. She belongs to the Child Study school of thought, and she pursued her work with the careful training and objectivity of the biologist studying the natural behavior of an animal in the forest.

    She studied her retarded youngsters, listening and carefully noting everything that they did and said. Slowly she began to get a sense of who they really were and what methods worked best. Her success was given widespread notice when, two years after she began, many of Montessori's "deficient" adolescents were able to pass the standard sixth grade tests of the Italian public schools. Acclaimed for this "miracle," Montessori responded by suggesting that her results proved only that public schools should be able to get dramatically better results with normal children.

    Unfortunately, the Italian Ministry of Education did not welcome this idea, and she was denied access to school-aged children. Frustrated in her efforts to carry the experiment on with public school students, in 1907 Montessori jumped at the chance to coordinate a series of day-care centers for working-class children who were too young to attend public school.

    These "Children's Houses" were located in the worst slum district of Rome, and the conditions Montessori faced were appalling. Her first class consisted of fifty children from two through five years of age, taught by one untrained caregiver. The children remained at the center from dawn to dusk while their parents worked. They had to be fed two meals a day, bathed regularly, and given a program of medical care.

    The children themselves were typical of extreme inner-city poverty conditions. They entered school the first day crying and pushing, exhibiting generally aggressive and impatient behavior. Montessori, not knowing whether her experiment would work under such conditions, began by teaching the older children how to help out with the everyday tasks that needed to be done. She also introduced the manipulative perceptual puzzles that she had used with the retarded.

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