Maria Montessori faced the resistance of her father and society to be the first Italian female physician, specializing in children with special needs. The accumulated knowledge and experience served as a basis for the renewal of traditional education of children through the Montessori Method, in which the individual is both subject and object of teaching.
Activity, individuality, and freedom make up the triad of principles of the Method with the use of material aimed at the sensory and intellectual stimulus in which the children learn for themselves and following the rhythm of their own discoveries.
Montessori graduated in pedagogy, anthropology and psychology and put her ideas into practice in the “House of Children” schools. Her philosophy of self-education through culture, responsibility and the liberation of the deep potentialities of being was widespread internationally.
