“Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world” (1)

In Angelina Lillard’s book Montessori: The Science behind the Genius, she looks to Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy as the educational answer. Lillard says that the two fundamental cornerstones in today’s Schooling (2) : the school as a factory and the child as a blank slate are proven by students of child development to be out of date and an explanation of why so many children suffer under these persistent ideas. (3)

So the Montessori educational method is an alternative to the old-perception of how to educate children and the main target in this article will be to look more closely to what really Montessori-schooling is all about and what to look for if you are thinking about enrolling your child into a Montessori Kindergarten and/or primary school.

Maria Montessori- the founder. (4)

As the name reveal, the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori is the founder of the Montessori educational method that all in all rejected the old educational concept. Her educational concept is in many ways an extraction from her post-graduate research on children with learning and mental disabilities. Her task was to see how these children, through new teaching techniques, could obtain learning. The research was built on the work of the French physician Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin.

The research proved to be a success and described as Montessori’s “first miracle” and this gave her the motivation to study the techniques on children who didn’t suffer from intellectual or development disabilities and see how they would respond to the same educational techniques - "if mentally disabled children could be brought to the level of normal children then (she) wanted to study the potential of 'normal' children.” (5)
Then in 1906 she was offered to lead a day-care center in one of Rome’s more run down districts – the San Lorenzo district. This opportunity gave her a chance to see how children interacted through sensorial materials. The aim was to observe while the children themselves are stimulated to specifically selected materials for the conceptual framework. Today this technique stands as the hallmark of Montessori education.

The initial work focused primarily on Kindergarten children, but after recognizing that children have a slightly different way of learning compared with adults, Montessori and her son Mario wanted to expand this educational discovery to also include children in primary-school.

After opening the first Montessori school in 1907 , her educational methods spread to almost all corner of the world. In US, today, you can find over 8000 Montessori schools and there are hundreds of schools in United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Australia and there are also a few in Switzerland.

Montessori in practice- Seldwyla Montessori Kinderhaus & Primarstufe. (6)

None of the Montessori schools are exactly the same. The teaching environment at Seldwyla Montessori Kindergarten and Primary school is placed in an old white brick villa in Forchstrasse in Zurich. The educational method there is built on the Montessori concept, but has also integrated ideas from the Swiss teacher Johann Pestalozzi and modern educators such as Emmi Pikler and Elfriede Hengstenberg. (7)
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