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This page is a guide to other sites that provide greater detail on Montessori and other topics in education. The search box below is tied to some good sources of Montessori-specific information.

Get Montessori Stuff

The search box below is tied to providers of Montessori materials and other products for the Montessori classroom. Some of them have free downloads. For a list of all the sites behind this search box, see "Links to Montessori Stuff" below.

Books of Interest

There are a number of free, searchable books on the internet by and about Montessori. For books you can hold in your hand, see my Book Recommendations.

Online Books by Montessori

  • The Montessori Method, 1912. This book is required reading for students preparing teach Montessori at any age.
  • Pedagogical Anthropology, 1913. This was actually written before The Montessori Method. It was translated into English and published in the United States after Montessori's method became popular here. In Italy, early pedagogical studies were based on anthropology rather than psychology. This work reflects the anthropometry and scientific racism that were rampant in anthropology at the time. As anthropology matured and Montessori gained experience with children all over the world, her views changed. Montessori was an Italian delegate to UNESCO in 1950 when UNESCO issued their well known statement on The Race Question and had made statements of her own reflecting her revised views on the subject. In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould presents a thorough discussion of the history of misconceptions regarding human measurement, including brief discussions of Montessori's early ideas on pages 139 and 152. Unfortunately, he only sites the views Montessori expressed in Pedagogical Anthropology and not those she expressed later in life. Pedagogical Anthropology is not a part of standard Montessori training or recommended reading. As a result, most Montessorians are not familiar with this part of Montessori's early thinking. Present day Montessorians support Gould's take on human measurement. Montessorians familiar with this early work would probably argue that Montessori's views later in life were much closer to Gould's than the ones expressed in Pedagogical Anthropology.
  • Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook, 1914.
  • Spontaneous Activity in Education, 1917. Most recently published as the first volume of The Advanced Montessori Method.
  • The Advanced Montessori Method: The Elementary Material, 1917. Most recently published as the second volume of The Advanced Montessori method.

Annette Haine's Glossary of Montessori Terms may be helpful to readers who are new to Montessori. It is worth taking some time to consider Montessori's terms in-depth in order to understand clearly what she said. Montessori's writings contain a number of terms and references to events that were particular to her era. She also borrowed terminology from other theorists and gave them new meaning by using them in the context of her own work (Montessori, Mario M., 1976, page 4). Most of her works were based on notes taken by a students of hers and later translated by followers who were not professional translators.

With regard to translation issues, Susan Feez provides a fascinating analysis of Montessorian's use of the word directress, which is now commonly used instead of the word teacher in Montessori classrooms and why the word guide is increasingly used instead:

The translator, Anne George, used the word directress to translate the Italian word direttoressa. By the 1930s, when Montessori had extended her curriculum to include older children, she seems to have used the more general term maestra in her lectures (See, for example, Montessori 1989 [1979/1930">, p. 7). Nevertheless, a teacher in a Montessori preschool class is still today often called the directress (or director) and the continued use of this term in English-speaking Montessori schools worldwide is an illustration of the problems of translation that bedevil the Montessori movement. The meaning of the Italian word direttore is less about telling people what to do, and more about steering people in the right direction. The word is used for conductors and editors, as well as for managers. When English-speaking Montessori teachers use the term, it still has the valeur of its original Italian use, but to English-speakers outside the movement, the word can seem harsh when referring to someone who works with small children. To overcome this problem, and at the same time to avoid the outdated feminine suffix, some American Montessori schools call their teachers guides. (Feez, 2007, pp. 42-43).

Here is an example of the importance of context in understanding Montessori's terms. Montessori's use of the normalization sounds strange to the ear of modern educators. Isn't every child unique? Isn't it wrong to hold up some idea of "the normal" to which all children must conform? The first thing to consider here is that the ideas of normal development and normal behavior were invented at the end of the nineteenth century (Johanningmeier, E. V., & Richardson, T. R., 2007, page 109), around the time Montessori was working on her doctorate in medicine. These were terms that arose from the recent application of statistics to child study (another such term is deviation).

The next thing to consider is that Montessori was not talking about somehow making children statistically normal. As mentioned earlier, Montessori sometimes appropriated words used by others and gave them her own meaning. To Montessori, normalization was a process by which a child reached a state that "normal" or natural for that child. She observed that over time, children in her classroom developed an ability to concentrate, to care for one another, to cooperate and to work for extended periods of time. She considered children "normalized" when they reached this state.

Montessori also used terms from other human sciences to lend credence to her ideas. For example, she used the terms élan vital from Bergson, engram and Mneme from Semon and horme from Jung. Montessori was introduced to the concepts of mneme and horme by Thomas Percy Nunn (Nunn, 1920). It would be interesting to compare Montessori's use of these terms with that of their originators.

It might also be useful to look further into the term(s) psychic/psychical/spiritual hygiene. These terms could be compared, for example, with Clifford Beer's idea of "mental hygiene" and Viktor Frankl's use of the terms "psychic hygiene" and "psychological hygiene." It seems that the idea of associating hygiene with the mind was already around in Italy before Montessori wrote her books judging by her writings and that fact that she was Professor of Anthropology and Hygienics for a time at the University of Rome (Montessori, Mario M., 1976, page 4).

Finally, it would be helpful to relate Montessori's terms to those currently in use. For example, Montessori's idea of polarization of attention is similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's idea of flow (Rathunde, 2001).

Online Books About Montessori

Here are some of the Progressive Era books about Montessori that are available for free online.

Related Online Books

Here are free online books that give background on the intellectual scene in Italy during the early years of Montessori's career.

Links to Montessori Stuff

Below is a list of all the sites included in the search engine behind the "Get Montessori Stuff" search box

Montessori Research

It's exciting to see the high quality of some of the Montessori research that's come out in recent years. Below are my favorites. Most of them are available for free online from anywhere. If any links lead you a site that tries to charge you for an article, you can probably still get the article for free by going online at a local university and accessing the article through the university library's system.