05/07/2019
Maria Montessori, whose method of education sparked a revolution in reconsidering how best to harness a child's love of learning, died on this day in 1952 at the age of 81. As a medical doctor in Rome she formed a school, the Casa dei Bambini, and applied a scientific pedagogy where children could work independently with the teacher acting as a guide.
In the early 1900s her method was popular in Europe. In the United States it took a bit longer to take hold when, in the late 1950s, New York teacher Nancy McCormick Rambusch founded the Whitby School in Greenwich, Connecticut, and spent the rest of her career promoting Montessori teaching and learning. Rambusch founded the American Montessori Society in the early 1960s to support teachers, parents and students, help establish schools and provide support to advance Montessori education.
We hold the records of the American Montessori Society here in Archives & Special Collections. Many of these records can be found in our digital repository beginning here: https://lib.uconn.edu/location/asc/collections/amsrecords/. While the collection does not hold Maria Montessori's personal papers there is a large amount of information about this fascinating woman and her tremendous accomplishments as an educational leader and visionary.
