Giuseppe montesano e maria montessori biography
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Mario Montessori: Maria's Only Son
by Matt Bronsil, author of English as a Foreign Language in the Montessori Classroom
Mario Montessori (March 31, 1898 - February 10, 1982) was the co-founder of the Association Montessori Internationale and a Montessori teacher and teacher trainer. He is the only child of Italian physician and educator Dr. Maria Montessori. His father was Italian psychologist Giuseppe Ferruccio Maria Montesano.
Mario Montessori's Parents
When we say "Montessori," we are generally referring to Dr. Maria Montessori. Before she started her first school, she worked to help teach children with severe learning disabilities in a psychiatric hospital, and she was a prominent leader in the fight to allow women the right to vote. To put it simply, she was an extremely busy lady. But before her first school opened, there was another Montessori who would become important to the Montessori movement. Before we get to who he is, it is important to understand Mari
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Dr Maria Montessori
Upon her graduation in 1896, she was immediately offered a position with the San Giovanni Hospital attached to the University. Later she was to join a research programme within the psychiatric clinic at the University of Rome. Here, she met Giuseppe Montesano the father of her son, Mario (born 1898).
Her position at the clinic involved visiting Rome’s asylums for the insane, seeking patients for treatment at the clinic. A key event occurred when a caretaker at the children’s asylum described how the patients ran to any crumbs on the floor after their meal. Dr Montessori realized that as the children were kept in a bare, unfurnished room with no sensory stimulation, this was contributing to their condition.
She was subsequently appointed co-director with Giuseppe Montesano of a new institution called the Orthophrenic School. The school took children with a variety of disorders. It proved pivotal in Dr Montessori’s professional identity shifting from a physician
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When my daughter was little, I became fixated on a schoolhouse a few blocks from our apartment—a Tudor-style storybook cottage, with red trim and a brick skorsten and a playground all of wood. Its first-floor windows were concealed bygd tall bushes of a deep impossible green, and everything that a childhood should be was waiting for my daughter behind them, or so inom believed. When I went inside, my expectations were met. The children, aged two to six, were serious and serene, occasionally speaking to each other in low, considerate tones. They stacked blocks, strung beads, and arranged letter boards, and of course I had seen these kinds of blocks and beads and boards before, but never these specific, exquisite renderings of them. When it was time for “walking on the line”—a morning custom in which the children followed a line of tejp on the floor, around and around, silent and judiciously spaced—I felt overcome by a sense of dazed compliance.
This was our local Montessori school, and