Fifty years after her death, innovative Italian educator Maria Montessori still gets high marks

Five-year-old Taiwo lays out wooden letters that spell "May is back. I am happy." Nearby, two 4-year-old boys stack pink blocks, watch them topple, then stack them again, this time with the larger ones on the bottom. 
 

A 3-year-old uses a cotton swab to polish a tiny silver pitcher—a task that refines motor skills—while a 5-year-old gets herself a bowl of cereal, eats it at the snack table, then cleans up everything. The 21 other children in the class at the public elementary school in Landover, Maryland, seem equally energetic as they follow their own independent agendas.

Nearly a century ago, a young Italian physician imagined that children would learn better in a classroom like this one—a place where they could choose among lessons carefully designed to encourage their development. Since then, the views of Maria Montessori, who died 50 years ago this year, have met with both worldwide acclaim and sometimes yawning indifference. Her method, which she developed with the children of Rome's worst slum, is now more commonly applied to the oft-pampered offspring of the well-heeled. Montessorians embrace her ideology with a fervor that often borders on the cultlike, while critics say Montessori classes are either too lax and individualized or, paradoxically, too rigidly structured.

Even so, Montessori's educational vision is thriving as never before, with some 5,000 Montessori schools in the United States alone. Many of the educator's once-radical ideas—including the notions that children learn through hands-on activity, that the preschool years are a time of critical brain development and that parents should be partners in their children's education—are now accepted wisdom.

"She made a lasting contribution," says David Elkind, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child. "She recognized that there was an education particularly appropriate to young children, that it wasn't just a smaller-sized second grade."

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Abstract of an article by Nancy Shute, originally published in the September 2002 issue of Smithsonian. All rights reserved.

Photos were added separately.