What did Maria Montessori believe about how people learn?

Maria Montessori's name is now attached to schools, toys and a whole design style of wooden shelves and child-sized furniture. Behind the branding is a set of ideas about learning that are more radical, and more useful to grown-ups, than the toy shop suggests.

Who she was

Maria Montessori was born in Chiaravalle, Italy, in 1870 and died in the Netherlands in 1952, according to Wikipedia. She graduated in medicine from the University of Rome in 1896, one of the first women to study medicine in Italy. On 6 January 1907 she opened the first Casa dei Bambini, the Children's House, in a low-income apartment building in Rome's San Lorenzo district, with around fifty to sixty children aged roughly two to seven.

Her book Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica appeared in 1909; the English version, The Montessori Method, followed in 1912 and sold well in the United States. A later book, The Absorbent Mind, was first published in English in 1949, based on courses she gave in India.

Italians of a certain age will remember her face on the 1,000 lire banknote.

Her core ideas

According to Wikipedia's overview of Montessori education, the approach rests on a handful of principles:

• Child-directed activity. Learners follow their own interests, choosing what to work on.
• The prepared environment. Materials are organised by subject, sized for the people using them, kept on open shelves, and made of natural materials where possible. The space itself does a lot of the teaching.
• Freedom within limits. Children choose from a defined range of options, ideally in long, uninterrupted work periods.
• Learning by discovery. Concepts are learned by handling materials rather than by being told.
• Mixed ages. Older children help younger ones, and younger ones can teach the older.
• The teacher as guide. The adult observes each child and steps in individually, instead of lecturing the whole room.
• Practical life. Pouring, washing up, sweeping: real tasks are part of the curriculum.
• No external rewards. Grades and stickers are discouraged; the work itself is meant to be the reward.

What the research says

Results are mixed, partly because real classrooms are hard to study and because it is difficult to separate the method from families' circumstances. Some studies, including a 2006 review in Science and a 2017 longitudinal study with random assignment, found positive results; others found little or no difference, and some found stronger effects only where schools followed the original method closely. The same Wikipedia overview summarises the evidence. Fair to say: promising, not settled.

Why adults borrow her ideas

Take away the child-sized chairs and the principles translate surprisingly well to grown-up learning:

• Set up your space. Keep the tools of a new hobby visible and ready: the guitar on a stand, the running shoes by the door, the language book on the kitchen table. A prepared environment makes starting easy.
• Learn with your hands. Cook the dish, play the scale, speak the sentence. Reading about something is not the same as doing it.
• Choose within limits. Pick from a small, defined set of options rather than everything at once.
• Protect uninterrupted time. Long, quiet stretches beat many scattered minutes.
• Let the work be the reward. Learning for its own interest, not for points or badges; see intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation.
• Be your own guide. Observe what is working and adjust, rather than following a rigid syllabus.

For practical starting points, see being a beginner as an adult and learning a language as an adult.