Unit 2 (M1): Casa dei Bambini – The Beginning
Casa dei Bambini
The Beginning
This unit focuses on how the development of Montessori Method began in Casa dei Bambini, the first Montessori house of children, as Dr. Maria Montessori started experimenting with the materials she had developed for the children with special needs.
- – Please watch the video presentation above and then continue to read the lesson below.
- – Refer to Chapter One of Module 1 (Introduction to Montessori) for further reading.
In 1907, Montessori opened her first “Casa dei Bambini” (Children’s House) in a poor district of Rome. Dr. Montessori was intoxicated by the new zest of her life to apply her method to typical children, however, the conditions at the new Casa dei Bambini were horrendous. There was only one untrained teacher to teach her first class which consisted of fifty children, from two through five years of age. It was an extended day school and the children remained at the center from morning till evening while their parents worked. The children were also given two meals per day, bathed regularly, and given a medical care program. The children themselves were the products of extreme inner-city poverty conditions and the ignorance of the parents. Almost all of them came to Children’s House on the first day crying and reluctantly. Most of them were aggressive, impatient, and cranky.
At this stage, Montessori did not know if her experiment would work under such conditions. However, she, not caring about the odds, began by teaching the older children how to help out with the everyday tasks that needed to be done. She also introduced the hands-on materials of perceptual discrimination and puzzles and eye-hand manipulative exercises that she had used with mentally disabled children. Montessori must have had some hope of success but the results surprised her. The materials seemed to be working miraculously. Unlike her mentally challenged children who had to be pushed to use her apparatus, the normal children were naturally attracted to the work she introduced. The aimless street wanderers began to settle down. They began to show longer and longer periods of constructive activity. They were fascinated with the puzzles and perceptual training devices.
Montessori introduced exercises of practical day-to-day living like cleaning, dressing, gardening, etc., and to her amazement, children aged three and four years took the greatest delight in learning practical everyday living skills. She noticed that such activities made them more independent and added to their self-respect. Their interest was developing day by day and they progressed so rapidly that each day they pleaded with Maria to show them more. The older children began to take care of the school. They also assisted their teachers with the preparation and serving of meals and the maintenance of a spotless environment.
The discipline problems vanished dramatically. The children running wild in the street had turned into models of grace and courtesy in just a short period. Montessori, when criticized for her method being too structured and academically demanding of young children, laughed out saying, “I followed these children, studying them, studied them closely, and they taught me how to teach them.” Talking about the role of the teacher, she argued that the educator’s job is to serve the child, determining what each student needs to make the greatest progress.
She believed that children follow their inner strong urges to select their activities and work. These urges are universally similar in all children and are the product of millions of years of evolution. Nature, itself encourages children to select the activities, which are appropriate for development at that stage. To her, a child who fails in school should not be blamed, any more than a doctor should blame a patient who does not get well fast enough. Just as it is the job of the physician to help people find a way to cure themselves, it is the educator’s job to facilitate the natural process of learning.
Montessori’s children showed tremendous progress in academics and each achievement was like a sudden explosion. The children were too young to be sent to public schools, yet they literally begged to be taught how to read and write. They learned to do so quickly and enthusiastically, using special manipulative materials. Montessori just kept on noticing the inclinations of the children and developed manipulatives accordingly.
The other area, that fascinated the children, was numbers. To respond to their interest, the mathematically inclined doctor developed a series of concrete math learning materials. These materials are so comprehensive and yet concrete in nature that they still fascinate many mathematicians and educators to this day. It did not take those three, four, and five-year-olds long to start adding and subtracting four-digit numbers. They further progressed to multiplication, division, skip counting, and increasingly advanced and abstract concepts. Montessori discovered an unlimited potential in children to learn.
They began to show interest in other areas as well. This compelled the already overworked doctor to spend night after night designing new materials to keep pace with the children in geometry, geography, history, and natural science. Montessori discovered that her children showed more interest in academic manipulatives rather than toys.
She made this discovery shortly after her first school opened when a group of well-intentioned women gave the children a collection of lovely and expensive toys. The children took a profound interest in those new gifts for a few days, but they soon returned to their learning materials.
She also found that children generally preferred work over play, at least during the school day. “Children read and do advanced mathematics in Montessori schools not because we push them, but because this is what they do when given the correct setting and opportunity. To deny them the right to learn because we, as adults, think that they should not is illogical and typical of the way schools have been run before.”
Montessori Method wasn’t so perfect since day one. She improved it through trial and error. She continued to observe the children deeply, made educated guesses, and finally experimented. For example, one day the teacher arrived late at the center. The children, meanwhile, had crept in through the window and started their work. They even took the material themselves from the cupboard, which normally used to be locked, but was open just by chance. She, instantly, recognized that the children were capable of selecting their own work, and removed the cabinet and replaced it with low open shelves on which the activities were always available to the children. This seems to be a small change, but it actually was against all the educational theories and practices of that time.