Maria Montessori was born on August 31st 1870 in Chiaravalle near Ancona in Italy, but soon moved to Rome with her parents. She was always a strong-willed girl, unusual for the times, who knew what she wanted. She managed to get a place to study medicine, although it was prohibited for women at this time. With a lot of hard work and against a lot of opposition (for example, they could not accept a woman in the same room as the men studying anatomy so she had to go in after hours on her own) she graduated as the first female doctor in Italy in 1896.
She began to work in the psychiatric clinic and to teach at Rome university and became more and more interested in the education of children with special needs. She developed special materials and was amazed at how much the children learned. This success encouraged her to further her studies in psychology and education and to work on similar teaching materials and methods for “normal” children.
In 1907 the Italian government asked her to set up a Casa dei Bambini in San Lorenzo in Rome where the children of working parents had been uncared for and running wild on the streets. The success of this first Children’s House, run according to her ideas, was amazing and Maria Montessori continued to develop her educational method and materials based on her observation of the children and their work. It was clear that these children, with the help of this new method of education – encouraging independence of thought and action in a prepared environment with the specially developed materials and trained teachers, were learning more than anybody had expected. She was also a strong advocate of providing care for children so that their mothers could go out to work.