María Montessori, a Woman Who Revolutionized Education In the Twentieth Century

The Italian educator asserted that the greatest sign of a teacher’s success is to be able to say: “Now the children advance as if I didn’t exist.”

“The child is the father of the man”. With this premise, the Italian Maria Montessori (1870-1952) developed one of the most innovative pedagogical methods – still in force – of modernity, centered on the fact that the child builds himself. Both the teacher and the school must be placed at the service of this learning, stimulating in the child autonomy, independence, initiative, ability to choose, as well as their will and discipline.

These ideas, which to this day are obvious to us, were an extraordinary revulsion for spaces accustomed to the draconian authority of the teacher, the punishment-reward pedagogical procedure and the gloomy classification of students as smart and foolish.