The American Maria Montessori
Happy Friday, everyone.
“I have been called a pioneer,” responded Montessori when asked to comment on one of the other recipients of the Teacher’s Award at the 1915 World’s Fair, “but there is your pioneer.”[i]
“On the basis of her results, it would not be too much to call her the American Maria Montessori,” commented New York Times literary critic, Anatole Broyard, in 1980.[ii]
They were both referring to Anne Sullivan, the renowned educator of Helen Keller.
Twenty years before Montessori opened her first school, the Casa dei Bambini, Anne Sullivan was hired by the Keller family to teach their deaf, blind, and mute daughter, Helen. Many may recall the famous scene in The Miracle Worker of Helen learning her first word—with Ms. Sullivan spelling the word for ‘water’ while it flowed over Helen’s hands—and then frantically asking to be taught the words for ‘ground’, ‘pump’, ‘tree,’ everything in her environment.
With the dedicated support of Sullivan, Helen eventually attended and graduated from college, the first blind person to ever do so, along with becoming an accomplished writer, speaker, and political advocate. Sullivan’s success with Helen, much like Montessori’s success 20 years later, teaching 3 and 4-year-old children in the San Lorenzo slum to read and write, brought her instant notoriety. But their results and corresponding fame only scratch the surface of the two pedagogues’ similarities.
1. The troubled yet aspirational conclusions they drew
While the world oohed and aahed at Sullivan and Montessori’s accomplishments, describing their success with disadvantaged and disabled children as miraculous, the two women were troubled. Yes, the children they had helped were disadvantaged. Yes, they had made unprecedented progress, their achievements often rivaling or surpassing the children without such disadvantages. But both Sullivan and Montessori looked beyond their immediate success and wondered: what did this imply about the state of education for “normal” children?
Sullivan, commenting on this idea, remarks:
If Helen Keller, lacking the two senses that are usually considered the most important, has become a writer of ability and a leader among women, why should we not expect the average child, possessed of all its faculties, to attain a far higher ability and knowledge than the schools of today develop? Many realize that there is something radically wrong with a system of education that obviously does not educate.[iii]
Similarly, Montessori, after helping institutionalized and disabled children learn to read and pass the same standardized tests as children who attended school, remarked:
While everyone was admiring [their] progress, I was searching for the reasons which could keep the happy healthy children of the common schools on so low a plane that they could be equaled in tests of intelligence by my unfortunate pupils! … [My pupils] had been helped in their [intellectual] development, and the normal children had, instead, been suffocated, held back.[iv]
Spurred by these conclusions, both Sullivan and Montessori endeavored to advocate for, and in Montessori’s case, to design, a revolutionary education for all children—one that respected the universal developmental needs of the child, her agency, and the way in which she learns.
2. Giving the child the power to “see” with her hands
With the same desire to observe and meet the needs of the child, both Sullivan and Montessori’s approach emphasized education through the senses. Most prominently, through the incorporation of the sense of touch into the child’s learning.
Helen, of course, learned her first concepts by feeling the objects in her environment and having the words spelled out on her hands. But she also famously learned to “hear” the words spoken by others by holding her hands to the throat, lips, and nose of the speaker:
Montessori is famous for believing that “the hand is the instrument of the intelligence” and for having developed a sequence of engaging learning materials that bring the full scope of human knowledge—even literacy and advanced math—to the level of 3 to 6-year-olds. These materials, predominantly, give the child the ability to explore the world and gain knowledge through the use of their hands.
Montessori dedicated her 1914 book, Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook, to Sullivan and Keller, saying at one point,
Helen, clasp to your heart these little children, since they, above all others, will understand you. They are your younger brothers: when, with bandaged eyes and in silence, they touch with their little hands, profound impressions rise in their consciousness, and they exclaim with a new form of happiness: “I see with my hands.”[v]
3. All education as self-education
Above all, both Sullivan and Montessori believed that it was the child, not the adult, who fundamentally deserved the credit for all that was learned. Sullivan declares:
There is no education except self-education. There is no effective discipline except self-discipline. All that parents and teachers can do for the child is to surround him with right conditions. He will do the rest; and the things he will do for himself are the only things that really count in his education.[vi]
In harmony, in one of her final works, The Absorbent Mind, Montessori stresses,
The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was. In order to form a man, great powers are necessary, and these powers are possessed only by the child.
These great powers of the child which we have described for long, and which at last have attracted the attention of other scientists, were hitherto hidden under the cloak of motherhood, in the sense that people said that it is the mother who forms the child, the mother who teaches him to talk, walk etc., etc. But I say that it is not the mother at all. It is the child himself who does all these things. What the mother produces is the new-born babe, but it is this babe who produces the man.
Whether we think of Sullivan as the “American Maria Montessori” or Montessori as the “Italian Anne Sullivan”, both of these incredible women are peerless inspirations. In showing us the potential, grandeur, and nobility of the child at work, they have given us all more than could ever be repaid. They are, as Sullivan hoped the education of the future would enable all individuals to be, “an honor to the human race.”
Have a great weekend,
Samantha Blaisdell,
Editor, Higher Ground Education
[i] https://ppie100.org/on-this-day-helen-keller-day-the-ppie/
[ii] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/30/specials/keller-teacher.html
[iii] https://www.afb.org/about-afb/history/online-museums/anne-sullivan-miracle-worker/wrentham-massachusetts/praise-anne
[iv] Montessori, Maria. The Montessori Method (Illustrated) (p. 42). Kindle Edition.
[v] Montessori, Maria. Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook (p. 26). Schocken Books
[vi] https://www.afb.org/about-afb/history/online-museums/anne-sullivan-miracle-worker/wrentham-massachusetts/praise-anne
† Preview image is Sullivan and Keller: “To Dottoressa Maria Montessori with our admiration and gratitude”, from Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller, July 1913. [Link]