Abstract
Maria Montessori’s Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica was published at the end of the 1910s. The text enjoyed great success after its publication, both in Italy and abroad. Over the course of the following decades, this work underwent numerous changes: various editions were published and numerous translations made, while the author herself added many sections and deleted others from the original draft. In this essay, I examine the first three editions of Il Metodo to analyze the changes that were made and their relation to the advent of fascism. This essay, divided into three distinct parts that follow the first three editions of the work, explores how Montessori was conditioned by fascism and how fascist educators both perceived her work and influenced the changes made to the text.
1. The work Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all’Educazione Infantile nelle Case dei bambini, by Maria Montessori, published for the first time in Italy in 1909,[1] underwent numerous changes during the course of the successive editions and foreign translations. The text was published by the publishing house Lapi di Città di Castello as a result of the help and encouragement of the barons Leopoldo Franchetti and Alice Hallgarten Franchetti,[2] to whom the work was dedicated. After the first edition, four more followed: a second in 1913, a third in 1926, a fourth in 1935, and a fifth in 1950. The few changes made to the second edition repeated those introduced in the English version of Il Metodo,[3] released in 1912. The 1926 edition presented many changes, including six new chapters. [4] The goal of my work is to re-examine the first three editions of Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica and to analyze the changes affected in relation to the advent of fascism. Through a comparison of the various editions it will thus be possible to see whether the changes compromised the original version of Montessori’s ideas, or whether the work remained faithful to its own original principles, notwithstanding the numerous readjustments made to accomodate the different historical context of each edition. As Giacomo Cives highlights in the critical edition of Il Metodo, it is possible to analyze the text’s development linking it exclusively to the evolution of the pedagogical methodology of its author. Alternatively, one can adopt an approach that underlines the structural variations of the work in relation to its historical-cultural context.[5] I will use the latter approach, emphasizing the “tactical changes in the new climate of the 1920s [that Montessori adopted] in order to avoid being rejected by the Italian cultural environment.”[6] It was due to her international fame and the flexibility of some of her positions (on the role of the teacher and the concept of liberty in the classroom, for example) that Maria Montessori, in the context of the fascist regime, sought to negotiate her own pedagogical doctrine. My research, divided into three distinct parts that follow the first three editions of the work, explores how Montessori was conditioned by fascism and how fascist educators perceived her work and influenced the changes made to the text. The first part will focus on the concept of social maternity (maternità sociale), present in the 1909 edition, but not in the successive ones. Proposing an analysis of the Discorso Inaugurale (Inaugural Speech) beginning with the book Social Bodies by David Horn, [7] I argue that the pedagogue eliminated this section of the work in order to avoid misunderstandings and manipulations on the part of the fascist regime. The concept of italianità, widely used to judge the work and its author, will be another principal theme of my analysis. I will demonstrate how Il Metodo was criticized during the liberal period for supposedly being unconnected to the national context, whereas in the fascist period it was appreciated as a form of promotion for the Italian spirit abroad.[8] This comparative approach offers a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between Montessori and Mussolini, and suggests Montessori’s motives for leaving Italy at the height of the fascist regime’s power.
2.
The section Discorso
inaugurale pronunziato in occasione dell’apertura di una
“Casa dei Bambini,” left out in 1926
edition but re-introduced in the appendix of the 1950 edition,
constitutes one of the most fascinating deletions from the first
edition of Il
Metodo (1909).[9] Such an omission
becomes even more significant by virtue of its reintroduction in the
appendix of La
scoperta del bambino[10] with a brief
introductory note, probably written by the editor. This note explains
its re-insertion into the larger text by describing it as the
“pages of our country’s history: a terrible history
of misery and exertions that are barely behind us.”[11] The exclusion of this
section from the edition published under fascism (1926), and its
subsequent re-introduction in 1950, provide a fundamental key to
understanding Montessori’s revisions to Il
Metodo.
The elimination of the Discourse should be included in
the series of changes made by Montessori to accommodate her method to
the pedagogy and to the social politics of fascism in its approach to
women, family, and childhood.
Before undertaking an examination of the concept of social
maternity, which is central to the Discorso
Inaugurale,
it is necessary to focus on the analysis that Montessori offers of the
tenement building on Via dei Marsi[12] as well as her
thoughts on the necessity of state intervention to restore such
buildings and to improve the social conditions of the entire community.
The activity of the state in favor of the mothers of the dilapidated
neighborhood of San Lorenzo included the renovation of the tenement
buildings, under the initiative of the Istituto Romano per i beni
stabili (Roman Real Estate Association). Edoardo Talamo, engineer and
president of the Istituto, charged Maria Montessori with the
responsibility of creating kindergartens inside the building. He hoped
that the children, unsupervised by their working mothers during the
day, would not damage the barely renovated structures if placed in
kindergartens.[13]
As the
pedagogue emphasized, in the original architectural plans of the
tenement, “no social or hygienic motive had guided the new
constructions” that had become “such extreme
spectacles of ugliness, more profound than barbarisms.”[14] In this context, the
family lost its centrality and suffered the negative influences of the
environment. Because of this predicament, the family needed a direct
intervention by the state that could open “l’intérieur” of the
social worker’s eye.[15] In the Discorso
Inaugurale,
Montessori highlighted the necessity of constructing an environment
that could remain open to the intervention of the state. The initiative
would have furnished the tenements with new figures such as a
specialized teacher, a nurse, and a doctor, who would all have helped the
inhabitants to maintain order and decorum in their homes. With the
opening of the “Casa dei Bambini” on Via dei Marsi,
the tenement opened its doors to an educator, to the director of the
institute, and to a doctor who would have visited the children weekly.
By attending the “Casa dei
bambini” the child, who had to submit him- or herself to
hygienic norms imposed by rule, would have promoted hygiene within the
family. The weekly colloquium with the director of the school would
have then allowed the mother to be informed of her child’s
progress, thereby stimulating the improvement of the entire family.
These weekly visits would also grant the director an indirect way of
checking the family’s activities. The entire building would
bear witness to the high social function of the teacher, “a
true missionary, a moral queen among the people”.[16]
3. For Montessori, meanwhile, “the transformation of the house [should have] compensated for the lost presence of the woman [who had] become a paid worker outside the home” (una lavoratrice sociale).[17] The pedagogue added that this transformation of the role of women and their functions in the nuclear family necessitated a socialization of the home, a process that she was inaugurating with the experiment of the “Casa dei bambini” of San Lorenzo.
We thus come to socialize a “maternal function,” a feminine function, in the home. This is the practical act of the resolution of some of the problems of feminism that seemed unsolvable to many. What will become of the house, then – it was said – if the woman leaves it? The house will be transformed and will assume the former functions of the woman. I believe that in the social future, other forms of socialization will come, i.e. the nurse.[18]
The concept of social maternity, central to the Discorso Inaugurale, was omitted in the 1913 and 1926 editions without any specified reason for the cut. In my attempt to trace the motivation for this, I believe that it is important to analyze the concept of social maternity developed by Montessori in light of the considerations of the construction of the “social body” made by David Horn in Social Bodies.[19] According to Horn, the social sciences, which developed at a quick pace between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eroded the border between public and private, creating a hybrid zone of the social that became a terrain of intervention for the state. Horn emphasizes how “in the name of social defense and to promote the growth of the population, behaviors that were previously private became subject to a continual organization on the part of the State,”[20] which began to intervene, above all from the second half of the 1920s onward, in “the structure of familial relationships and the distribution of power and authority within the family.”[21] If, using Horn’s interpretive category, we compare the concept of social maternity with the measures promised by the regime to promote an increase in the birth rate and to protect the structure of the family, we can see how Montessori anticipated some of the strategies of penetration into the social sphere that were gaining international adherence and that were also later brought into being under fascism. First, there is the “organic connection between State and family” that was so evident in the politics favoring a higher birth rate that were present in the “totalitarian demographic.”[22] Furthermore, Horn emphasizes that the development of the social sciences created the basis for the creation of the “specialized personnel,” composed of workers in the public sector – principally teachers, nurses, and doctors – of whom the regime made use in order to intervene in the private sphere.[23]
4. Montessori, in my opinion, belongs to the hybrid category suggested by Horn;
however, it is still important to note that the pedagogue’s
interpretation of the concept of social maternity is founded upon
premises that are completely different than those of the fascist
regime. As Valeria Babini and Luisa Lama point out, the
“social Maria”[24] of which Montessori
speaks is an economically dependent woman who, put in the public
sphere, socializes the “domestic virtues, diffusing the
values of love and peace, traditionally cultivated in the family, into
the world.”[25] In other early
writings, Montessori illustrates how, with the advancement of
industrialization and consequent feminine emancipation,
women’s emotional bonds become more and more based upon
feelings rather than economic considerations. According to Montessori,
maternity itself would become women’s conscious choice, no
longer dictated by opportunity or imposed by the state.[26]
Montessori’s
perception of women thus differed from the fascist view, which held
reproduction to be an exclusively biological function. Montessori,
however, rendered reproduction an independent and freely made decision,
destined to regenerate the family.[27] After all, as
Victoria De Grazia writes in How
Fascism Ruled Women, in the ventennio “the state
declared itself to be the sole arbiter on the subject of
reproduction.”[28] Women were considered
antagonists to the state if, following their own interests and acting
for the good of their families, they did not aim at satisfying national
goals. De Grazia stresses that under fascism “[...] maternity
lost the social significance that had been attributed to it by almost
all Italian feminists [...] and began to coincide with the physical act
of procreation,” circumscribing the social role of women to
that of procreators.[29] Many of the political
measures – as well as those of social assistance –
promulgated by fascism sought to redefine the concept of maternity as a
social duty and not as an “inevitable fact of nature or also
a familial duty.”[30] Women were reduced to
being “makers of the race” (fattrici
della razza),
and any activity that might have distanced them from their natural duty
was discouraged by the state.[31]
5. A
further difference between Montessori’s and
fascism’s conceptions of maternity concerns the professional
training of the “specialized personnel” who were
responsible for controlling women’s bodies. The creation of
structures such as the Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia
(OMNI) was assigned by the regime to personnel selected not only on the
basis of their competence but also “on the basis of [...]
morality, adherence to fascism and the ‘predisposition to
take care of mothers and children.’”[32] Chiara Saraceno
describes the ‘dame visitatrici,’ women whose duty
was to inspect the behavior of the beneficiaries of OMNI, as
“chosen from those enrolled in the Fascist party and
belonging to the highest social strata.”[33] Montessori, on the
contrary, emphasizes the preparation of the teacher and the director in
the context of her method: she describes the teacher of the
“Casa dei Bambini” as a scientist for the spirit, someone who analyzed natural phenomena and had an even more
significant role in studying “man at the
moment of the awakening of intellectual life.”[34] One can thus see a
difference in the role attributed to the competence of the educational
environment and the welfare environment. The role of feminine personnel under fascism
was merely that of inspection, subordinated to the verification of the
higher-up men in the service. The political loyalty demanded by the
government de-prioritized women’s professionalism, which
embodied a fundamental role for Montessori – so much so that
she foresaw a preparation based on training courses held by herself.
Notwithstanding that some aspects of the Montessorian discourse on
social maternity could be considered innovative, there are other aspects
– for example women’s socialization of domestic
virtue – that redefine the range of her “scientific
feminism,” showing how much the pedagogue still considered
the domestic sphere as predominantly feminine.[35] Such positions must
nevertheless be evaluated in the light of the socio-historical context
that produced them:[36] the theme of
maternity as a choice was, for example, completely ignored in the
political sphere and was taken into scarce consideration even by the
newly founded feminist movement.
6. Finally, I believe it is important to clarify some aspects of the concept of social maternity that could suggest a socialist inspiration for the Discorso Inaugurale. In my opinion, such an interpretation is misleading – despite the fact that the socialization of women and the home could be likened to the Bolshevik experience – insofar as there are many differences between the socialist vision and that of Montessori’s. The socialization of the home, in light of the changes in the domestic aggregate caused by the absence of women who were in the workforce, is only superficially relatable to the proposals suggested by August Bebel in La donna e il socialismo.[37] According to Bebel, for women “domestic life will limit itself to the strictly necessary, while [women] will enter the social sphere.”[38] Lenin himself, in a 1920 conversation with Clara Zetkin at the Cremlin, suggested:
We place women in the social economy, in legislative power and in the government. We open the doors of our educational institutions so that they can grow professionally and socially. We create communal kitchens and lunchrooms, launderettes, laboratories, nurseries, and kindergartens, nursery schools, educational institutes of every type [...] so that women will be liberated from the old politics of massacre and their subjection by men. [39]
Notwithstanding the similarities between Montessori ’s discourse and that of these socialist thinkers, Paul Ginsborg rightly emphasizes how “the scenario outlined by the canons of Marxist doctrine of the period [was] that of a gradual waning of the family,” destined to disappear as a consequence of historical progress. [40] The family, attacked on so many fronts, would no longer be capable of taking care of its own children, who “would be attended to by the community and not by the parents.”[41]
7.
In my opinion, even Montessori’s references to the creation
of environments shared with the rest of the community, such as the
“socialized kitchen,”[42] should be analyzed in
reference to the pedagogue’s general thought. For Montessori,
women would have in fact become working-women, but would simultaneously maintained their centrality and privileged role as educator
within the nuclear family, which for the pedagogue remained an
indissoluble structure. Furthermore, the domestic sphere seems to
remain an exclusively feminine dimension to her that, despite its openness to
social workers, was never managed by men. Women thus maintained a
distinct role respective to that of men in Montessori’s view,
while in the socialist vision such differences tended to disappear.
The omission of the Discorso
Inaugurale is
due, in my opinion, to the fear of maintaining positions that
could have been perceived as too close to socialist ideology,
as well as her fear of seeing her ideas interpreted in
an by fascism in a manner that benefited the regime. The concept of
social maternity, with all its ambiguity, was at risk of being misunderstood that would be harmful to the diffusion of Montessori's work. In 1926, the idea
of social workers inspecting families could have been re-utilized by
the fascist regime for goals that differed from Montessori’s. In sum,
fascism’s intervention into the family environment could have
generated a nascent and reciprocal misunderstanding that the pedagogue
set out to resolve, clarifying fundamental points of her pedagogical
design.
8. The second edition of Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica was published after its author had already achieved international fame. [43] In 1913, Montessori took a trip to the United States, where she gave a series of conferences on the method that were very successful. The pedagogue had also published the English version of the text under the auspices of the Department of Education at Harvard University, and had written a series of articles on her methodology that had found favor with a large audience. [44]
The changes to the text with respect to the 1909 edition are few, but significant. [45] One of these regards the addition of new tables that illustrate the didactic material, as well as new photographs that depict teaching the method in English, French, and American schools that were meant to show the appreciation of her work abroad. [46] The very emphasis given to the diffusion of the method in other countries is a revealing factor suggesting that Montessori hoped to legitimate the method on the basis of its international success. Italian educators however, were increasingly concerned with the national implications of early childhood education, as can be seen in the Royal Decree of January 4, 1914. [47] The development of new and interesting pedagogic methodologies, and the new attention that the state paid to schooling, pushed educational theorists to research a methodology that would respond to the necessity of forming a mass school “in its turn capable of creating an ‘Italian’ child, a ‘little soldier of the nation.’” [48] The profound changes within Italian society tested the delicate socio-cultural equilibriums of the state, which worked at what Gaetano Bonetta defines as “modernization of socialization, and of scholastic socialization in particular,” that had to function as a nationalistic cultural agent. [49] With this goal in mind, the Unione Italiana Educazione Popolare (Popular Italian Education Union) organized a congress in April 1911, during which Agazzi, Froebel, and Montessori’s pedagogic methodologies were discussed. [50] Despite the intense and profitable debate, the congress did not succeed in choosing a pedagogical method with which everybody agreed. It was only later, through a state initiative promoted by the minister Luigi Credaro, that a national education theory was identified and adopted for preschools. A royal commission was charged with examining and evaluating the most utilized pedagogic methods in Italy. [51] Camillo Corradini,[52] Luigi Friso, Pietro Cavazzuti, Maria Cleofe Pellegrini, Maria Pia D’Ormea, Pietro Pasquali, and Giacomo Merendi[53] were among the members of the Commission. The text that they created, Istruzioni, programmi e orari per gli asili infantili e i giardini d’infanzia (Instructions, programs, and schedules for preschools and playgrounds), called for a new didactic orientation essentially in line with the pedagogy of the Agazzi sisters.
9.
The motivations choosing the Agazzi sisters' method are vague and, for the most part, demonstrate the necessity of finding a method that could be “suitable for
the Italian child,” even if there were no specific attributes
of italianità that were employed within the pedagogic approach. The commission ultimately chose to use the pedagogic method of Friederich Froebel. [54] It had found
immediate success in Italy, though it consistently received criticism, precisely because it was “born of a Protestant
and in a reformed country, since it already seemed too
‘ludic’ and too ‘geometrical’
and [...] capable of destabilizing the most functional welfare,
custodial, and scholastic concept of the Italian nursery
schools.” [55] The Agazzi
sisters’ method, defined as an Italian adaptation of the
Froebelian method, responded indirectly to the criticism leveled at the
German pedagogue.
Rosa
and Carolina Agazzi ’s experience was chosen as appropriate
for the reorganization of the Italian system of nursery schools. After
all, they were supported by Pietro Pasquali, their
“guide” as well as a member of the royal
commission, and had received positive feedback from the opening of the
first school in the Brescian countryside. The Mompiano School’s
method was founded upon the necessity of imbuing the scholastic
environment with elements of family life, in order to stimulate the
child’s creativity in continuous dialogue with the adult.
The pedagogues maintained that the mother was “the first
natural guide of the spontaneous development of the child”,
and that the teacher referred to this figure “to create in
class that domestic climate that assures the nursery school’s
success.”[56] The elements of
Froebelism appropriated by the sisters are “the spontaneous
concept of education” that emphasizes the child’s
self-education process, and “the importance attributed to
play.” [57] Another fundamental
characteristic of the Agazzis’ pedagogy regards the context
in which it was developed: the rural environment that surrounds the
school of Mompiano.
This
aspect struck many of the educators who, visiting the school, commented
favorably upon the fact that such an environment succeeded in
furnishing an ethical education “intent on making the young
country children acquire that mentality that is more appropriate to
their social class and to the life that they must conduct in the
future.”[58] The comments on the
Mompiano school were similar to Dina Bertoni Jovine’s
reflections on the behavior of the liberal ruling class with regards to the issue of popular instruction. Jovine
emphasizes, on one hand, the tendency towards expansion in popular
education, and on the other, concern about the possible social effects
that had the possibility of threatening the immobility of the social
classes, a principle that assured stability to the nation.[59] Other critics embraced the rural environment emphasized in the Agazzi method, claiming that:
The merit [of the Agazzi sisters is that of] having given back the character of sincere, unsophisticated italianità to our playgrounds, with a completely new general direction, with practical and common tools, directly useful, derived from the same environment of the small rural world.[60]
10. On the contrary, the Montessorian proposal sought to respond “to the social needs of urban infancy and of the working class. The Montessorian child [...] seems to represent the most progressive child of Italy, aims at surpassing the traditional agricultural society and [...] oriented towards industrial society, conceived upon a different use of human resources to be prepared with an education [...] realized in a climate of commitment and liberty,” based on the interiorization of the individual discipline.[61] Other aspects that caused the commission to lean in favor of the Agazzian proposal were the low cost of the didactic material and the fact that the teachers did not require a long period of professional training. In fact, they were only asked to have a particular maternal instinct and a teaching vocation. The decisions approved by the royal commission in 1914 had, in fact, already been made. In 1908, the Royal commissioner Luigi Friso, (a later member of the commission), had visited the schools that adopted the method of the Agazzi sisters, who, in the same year, received the gold medal for educational methods. [62] Giuseppe Franzè reports that “following the inspector Luigi Friso’s positive account of the Mompiano school, Minister Credaro instituted a ministerial commission for the reorganization of nursery schools[. The task of reorganization was entrusted to Pasquali.”[63] Such an affirmation implies that the royal commission was probably constructed for the purpose of confirming the fitness of the Agazzi sisters’ method, and was not an unbiased an analysis of the full spectrum of Italian pedagogical methods. Furthermore, the presence in the commission of Pasquali and Friso, both supporters of the Agazzian method, seems to confirm this hypothesis. Pasquali’s own words confirm this: in the essay “Mompiano, famiglia di bimbi” (Mompiano, family of children), he emphasizes that “a three- or four-year-old child is not yet a boy: the Kindergarten is thus not a school.”[64] Such declarations seem to be repeated in the results of the royal commission, which stressed how “it [is not useful to the child], thus, to read or write; mathematics is not useful to him [...]. These simple considerations lead us to conclude that it is wrong, dangerous, perhaps blameworthy to occupy the child prematurely with any system, with reading and writing, with reciting speeches, dialogues, and poems from memory.” [65] The decree affirmed the “essential ludic and pre-scholastic character of kindergarten,” [66] pointing out as negative those aspects that were, in fact, among the most important conquests that Montessori had obtained with her educational method and to which she had guaranteed the most success at an international level, such as, for example, the phenomenon of the “explosion of writing.” [67] In an article published in 1919 in “La cultura populare”, Battistelli recounted Montessori’s protest that her educational method was criticized as debased on “prematurely introducing reading and writing to the child.” [68] Furthermore, Paola Trabalzini cites a letter written by Montessori to Minister Credaro in which the pedagogue shows her disappointment with the veiled comments that had been made about her in the Istruzioni and with the lack of recognition of her conquests in the pedagogical field on a national level in a moment in which her work was obtaining great success abroad, above all in the United States, where Il Metodo had been recently published.[69]
11.
The decree instead clearly highlighted many of the Agazzi
sisters’ proposals, such as the vocational character of the
teacher’s profession and her maternal effect on the child,
the emphasis on cleanliness for transmitting “to the poor
common people [...] the habit of washing oneself and being
clean,” open-air exercises, and activities linked
“to the flowerbeds of the garden, to the hen-house and to the
birds-houses.” [70] The italianità of the pedagogical
proposal seemed to constitute the fundamental trait of the Agazzi
method, despite the fact that one could not give a clear definition to
the concept, beyond these general references to a
“ludic” and idealized rural childhood. Confusion
about italianità characterized
pedagogy in this period. The educator Guido Della Valle defended the Montessori method against the
attacks of the German Froebelian method at the congress of the Unione Educazione Popolare (Popular
Education Union) in 1911. Della Valle thanked the
“Signorina Montessori, who has had the merit of reacting
against the German influence which threatened to invade our conscience. She has given a principle of liberty to Italian national
education.” According to Della Valle, Froebel proposed to
form a new German character in the attempt to reinforce it through
order, discipline, and harmony, with the goal “of avoiding
the repetition of memorable defeats such as those of Jena.”[71]
Soon
after the issuing of the Istruzioni (1914) the
anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi published an article in “Nuova
Antologia” in which he examined the reasons why the Case dei
Bambini became diffused throughout the United States and Great Britain
so rapidly. His reflection focused on the attention given in the
Anglo-Saxon world to the formation of the individual in freedom, to the
exercising of choice and autonomous thought. Sergi emphasized that
these characteristics inspired the success of the Montessori schools in
the Anglo-Saxon world, where “the maximum grade of sentiment
of the personality is the base of responsibility and initiative in
active social life. This sentiment must be developed in our country,
where the character is so oscillating and variable.”[72] The Montessori
method, with its emphasis on the process of self-education and growth
according to the potential of the child, was founded upon a
differentiated path that highlighted the gifts of the individual.
Emphasis was also given to the role of the teacher-partner in the
creation of man,[73] who is in the
classroom not to impose activities upon the children but to supervise
the correct utilization of the didactic material. Such a method left
ample space to accommodate the wishes and interests of the child. In
the moment in which Il
Metodo was published, many pedagogues criticized the apparent lack of
attention paid to the theme of discipline and the sections in which
Montessori suggested the abolition of rewards and punishments. The 1913
edition responded to some of the criticisms through the introduction to
the chapter La
Disciplina nelle case dei Bambini. Furthermore, the
1913 publication of Il
Metodo took
up once more many of the changes introduced in the American edition of
the work. Before the publication of the text in the United States,
Montessori had published an article in “McClure’s
Magazine” in 1912 entitled “Disciplining the
Children” that was included in the text as the final chapter.[74] In this text, the
pedagogue analyzed the concept of discipline in an attempt to respond
to the innumerable criticisms leveled at her about this issue.[75]
The
discussion around the concept of the method’s italianità, with the inevitable
connections to the rural vision of the country, would continue to be
relevant in the fascist period when, despite the regime’s
exalting of the agricultural population,[76] Montessori’s worked was attempted to be valorized as a
“national product.”
12. The third edition of Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica should be analyzed in relation to the numerous attempts made by Montessori since the beginning of the 1920s to reinstate bonds with the Italian government.[77] The pedagogue had moved to Barcelona in 1916, and her contacts with her homeland had subsequently decreased notably. In 1922, Montessori had a series of conferences in Naples on the invitation of the minister Antonio Anile,[78] and, as Rita Kramer reported in July of the following year, the minister of Education Giovanni Gentile[79] had expressed his own interest in the method as well as his intention to collaborate with Montessori on the spreading of her pedagogical methodology throughout Italy.[80] Initially encouraged by Queen Margherita, Gentile’s emphasis on children’s self-education brought him to look favorably on the Montessori method. [81] In the winter of 1923, Mario Montessori, son of the pedagogue, wrote a letter to Mussolini in which he asked that his mother’s method, now spread throughout the world, be given due consideration in her country of origin as well. Mussolini did not respond to the letter, but he directed the Foreign Minister to investigate the Montessori schools and their diffusion throughout the world. Moreover, given that the pedagogue was in Rome at the time, Mussolini requested to meet her. Kramer attempts to investigate what his real intentions were, and advances the hypothesis that il Duce was not interested in “constructing a nation of free thinkers;” but was interested in the academic achievement demonstrated through the surprising results of the method: children who learned to read and write at the age of three or four.[82] According to Kramer, Mussolini’s main goal was to promote the modernization of the Italian state utilizing a pedagogical method that promised surprising results and that consequently should be incorporated into the fascist scholastic system, which had recently been reorganized thanks to the Gentile reform of 1923.
In April 1924, the Societ à Amici del Metodo (Society of Friends of the Method) became the Opera Nazionale Montessori, and Giovanni Gentile was named president.[83] From this moment a strong campaign promoting the method began, and by the summer of the same year the number of Montessori schools had increased notably throughout Italy. The nomination of Maria Montessori as honorary president of the association was followed, in 1926, by the nomination of Mussolini as president, while Gentile took on the post of director of the offices in Rome. In the spring of 1925, Mussolini received the news of the diffusion of the Montessori method and of its international success. The same Foreign Minister, reports Kramer, was surprised by the importance of the spreading of the method. Montessori’s work had the full support of the government that, following the confirmation of the ample appraisal, could boast of having succeeded in re-discovering the merits of a compatriot.[84] Mussolini thus decided to support Maria Montessori’s work despite, as Luisa Lama emphasizes,[85] the fact that their relationship had been veiled by ambiguity from the very beginning, an ambiguity that resolved itself only with the moving of the secretary of the A.M.I. from Rome to Berlin in 1932, and with Montessori’s distancing of herself from Italy in 1934.[86] During the course of the 1920s, Montessori attempted to move a great part of her pedagogical activities to Italy, while Mussolini, “who still had to be held accountable for high, never-erased levels of illiteracy,” decided to sustain the pedagogue’s program, which was considered to be an indispensible instrument favoring the “explosion of writing.”[87]
13. As Marjan Schwegman and Luisa Lama maintain, Mussolini,
besides the benefits that Montessori could have brought to the Italian
education system, wished to utilize the pedagogue’s fame to
expand the consensus that fascism was already obtaining at an
international level.[88] The same woman who, a
few years before, had been indirectly accused by a government act, the Istruzioni, of having created a
method that had little to do with the characteristics of the Italian
child, now became a symbol of italianità abroad. According to
Lama, in fact, Mussolini believed that it was “advantageous
to exhibit the italianità of
great personalities held in high esteem abroad,” with the
goal “of entering in full title among the great
powers.”[89] On a related note, it
is interesting to examine the comments on the edition of the most
famous of Montessori’s works, Il
Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, made by Giuseppe
Lombardo Radice, partner in the Gentile reform of 1923.[90] I believe that it is
particularly important to evaluate Lombardo Radice’s comment
on the dedication to Alice Hallgarten Franchetti, in which the italianità of
the Montessori method is evaluated.
In
the 1926 edition, the dedication to the Baroness does not appear, but
was instead present in the 1909 and 1913 publications.[91] The noblewoman had
been one of the principal promoters of the method and had pushed
Montessori to publish the work that had been conceived while the pedagogue was a guest at the Montesca di Città di
Castello, in the Baron Franchettis’ residence. In the second
edition, the dedication changes to emphasize the patron’s
recent death.[92] In the 1926 and 1950
publications, it is eliminated, though it is present in the 1935
reprinting in the form “Alla cara memoria di Alice
Franchetti.”[93] As Trabalzini points
out, the omission could have been caused by the pedagogue’s
necessity to distance herself from the first phase of her work and to
emphasize the evolution of the educational experience of the Case dei
Bambini.[94] Montessori’s methodology, now diffused almost everywhere in
the world, was used in extremely heterogeneous contexts and had
benefited from the publications of other works by the author.[95] The dedication was
inserted early in the process of publication, after the printing of a few
copies, Montessori decided to remove it, cutting the page, an operation
that Lombardo Radice defines as a “mutilation of the
text.”[96] Radice,
analyzing the different omissions of the 1926 edition, berates
Montessori for the loss of the “Franchettian”
spirit, seen as a betrayal of the Italian character of the work. In his
opinion, these cuts signify a lack of historical memory on
Montessori’s part, as well as ingratitude towards those who
had worked with her since the beginning of her experience at the Casa
dei Bambini.[97] Lombardo Radice also
maintains that Montessori “cuts out the fragrance of love for
the suffering,” present in the Discorso
Inaugurale and in the work of Alice Franchetti, lavish with “such
feminine kindness and Franciscan charity.”[98]
14. Retracing the essence of the “Franchettian spirit” and analyzing Lombardo Radice’s comments on the “Italian” nature of Montessori’s work is not a simple matter. I believe, however, that it is important to examine the most interesting traits of Alice Franchetti’s pedagogical work in order to offer new interpretations of Montessori’s attempt to distance herself from Franchetti, with the consequent detachment of a pedagogy focused on a child’s contact with nature. One of the characteristics of Alice Franchetti’s Montesca Schools was, in fact, the “direct contact that the student establishes with living nature, in plants and animals that hide and grow” that had been taken from Lucy Latter’s nature study movement.[99] A further element sustaining this position is the letter sent to the president of the Comitato pro metodo Montessori Giovanni Gentile that Lombardo Radice discusses in his article about the publication of the third edition of Il Metodo. Radice emphasizes that, in the letter, not only does Montessori omit Alice Franchetti’s name but also that of Lucy Latter, who had influenced Franchetti so greatly in the establishment of the Montesca Schools.[100] In my opinion, only by connecting the 1926 edition with the debate on the Istruzioni of 1914 can one understand the reasons for the omission of the references to Latter and Franchetti. The context in which the Montessori method was founded and developed is, in fact, of fundamental importance; that is to say, Rome in the process of urbanization and economic growth, is quite different from the country environment in which the pedagogical projects of the Agazzis and Franchetti were born. The Montessori method, unlike that of the Agazzi's, which centered on a rural context that dealt little with the problems posed by the process of industrialization, came from the idea of educating a child of the urban proletariat, thus finding greater development outside of the countryside. Radice’s comment could thus be inserted into the critique that had been made of Montessori in 1914, during the moment in which the Agazzi method had been chosen for the reorganization of the Italian pre-school system, a moment when the principal critique of the Montessori method was that it favored an urban child, of a certain class and environment, who was not considered to be representative of the national context as a whole.
15. In this light,
Augusto Scocchera ’s opinion becomes questionable; he
interprets the omission of the dedication as Montessori’s
attempt to emphasize “the universality of the
pedagogue’s thought” in the face of the specificity
of San Lorenzo’s experience.[101] Scocchera argues this
in light of the list of the various translations of the method that
Montessori makes in the preface of the work.[102] In my opinion,
rather, this list has an entirely different significance and places
itself among the changes that Montessori makes in order to emphasize
the italianità of
her work. The pedagogue specifies, in fact, that “in faraway
countries [...] that we would least expect to be interested in Italian
things [...] exist schools that reproduce the spirit and material
appearance of the Italian school.”[103] This comment is
intriguing if connected to the debate on the italianità of the method that
the 1913 edition had incited and that the 1926 edition reopened. In
fact, this comment of Montessori’s seems to express her
satisfaction with what I would define as “the export of an
Italian product abroad,” distancing herself from the
transnational dimension that the dedication to Franchetti had promoted.
The dedication to the pedagogue from New York, an American citizen who
had moved to Italy and tested new pedagogical methodologies, had in
fact signaled one of the moments of the Montessori schools’
greatest openness to the worldwide debate on education.[104] Another important
change in the 1926 edition is the addition of the papal benediction
received by the pedagogue in November 1918.[105] Montessori’s approach towards Catholicism and the
collaboration with Gentile and Mussolini puts into place the Case dei
Bambini’s method in the analysis of Tracy H. Koon, who
interprets the school reform of 1923 as a “base upon which
the cooperation with the Vatican is constructed.”[106] The Gentile reform
had welcomed many examples “of the traditional Catholic
program: the crucifix on the wall, teaching of religion in elementary
schools, state exams and liberty of teaching.”[107] Put in this context
and in the light of the talks that led to the signing of Patti
Lateranensi in 1929, the benediction of Il
Metodo acquires still more importance. Added to the papal benediction,
furthermore, is the publication in 1922 of the work I
bambini viventi nella chiesa, dedicated to
teaching the precepts of the Catholic doctrine to children.[108] In the same year,
writes Lama, “Civiltà Cattolica”
published one of the first positive commentaries on the method,
describing it as “notable for its perspicacity of pedagogical
intuition and the delicate grace of its religious
understanding.”[109]
16. The early 1920s
thus saw Montessori benefiting from the protection of the newly created
Fascist government; the pedagogue ’s method also seemed to
finally be appreciated and valued finally in its country of origin. During
these years, despite her nearness to the fascists, the pedagogue
always professed her own apolitical nature. In 1926, Montessori was
named honorary member of the fascist party, the first political
affiliation that the pedagogue had had, notwithstanding her youthful
sympathy for socialism.[110] Considering the fact
that 1926 was also the year of the creation of the Opera Nazionale
Balilla, Lama suggests the possibility of the pedagogue’s
attachment to fascism that was caused by a misunderstanding of the
attention the regime paid to the problems of infancy.[111] The author alludes to
the fact that Montessori could have seen in fascism the possibility of
realizing the “century of the child.”[112] In my opinion, this
interpretation does not take into account the fact that
Montessori had already had enough experience to render her capable of
evaluating the content of the fascist educational programs for infancy,
and of ascertaining the regime’s attempts to indoctrinate the
children. Apropos of this, Koon’s analysis of the scholastic
curricula under fascism and of the changes in action in the schools
during the 1920s illustrates how “each school had been
converted into a sub-section of the fascist party.”[113] Thus, I do not
believe that it is possible to speak of a misunderstanding on
Montessori’s part of the situation of education in Italy and
of the role of fascism. I do, however, believe it to be possible that
Montessori attempted for many years to entertain a relationship with
the regime without compromising her own position. She collaborated
nominally with the fascists, in order to implement her method
throughout Italy. Such an adherence, which I would characterize as a
facade, did not create problems until Montessori wished to
strengthen this link in order to bend it to her political goals. The changing of the
secretary of the party with the nomination of Achille Starace quickened
the process of the fascistization of the schools. Already by the
beginning of September 1929, the Minister of Public Education became
Minister of National Education and inaugurated the new educational
course that sought to educate the child according
to the principles of fascist doctrine.[114] In 1923, in a
circular to educators, Giovanni Gentile had ordered the teachers to
have respect for the ministerial directives that must be considered
sacred by them, to be considered with military devotion and ready,
willing, absolute, and unconditional obedience.[115] Beginning in 1929,
the favoritism that Montessori enjoyed began to decrease. In 1927, Montessori had sent a letter to Mussolini in which she lamented the
fact that to teach her method, though developed in Italy, she was
forced to go to London.[116]
17. Montessori
concluded her letter by requesting funds from Mussolini for a study
center in Rome, a request that the head of government immediately
satisfied with the opening of a Montessori school for the training of
teachers and the financing of the newspaper “L’idea
Montessori”, an official part of the ONM.[117] At the end of the
same year, Mussolini presented the request for the creation of a
college for training teachers that would be inaugurated in the Monte
Mario neighborhood in January 1929. It was during the very inauguration
ceremony of the college that Montessori, restating her own
non-involvement in politics and her exclusive interest in
“the child,” fractured her relationship with the
regime. [118] The imposition of the
teaching of religion and fascist culture ratified one of the last
compromises that Montessori was disposed to accept. During these years, the
inspections increased and there were many accusations of antifascism
made against the Montessorian teachers, who were anonymously reported to
the police. Schwegman writes that the requests for a
“Montessorianism without Montessori” became ever
more insistent.[119] The final break
occurred in a letter from the president of the Opera Nazionale
Montessori, addressed to Mussolini, in which the ONM President made reference to the bad
character of the pedagogue, pushing Maria and Mario Montessori to
decide[120] to withdraw from the
association. The discussions
became even more high-pitched during the second international
Montessorian congress, held in Rome in April, 1934. Lama relates
the directives that the Ministry of the Interior gave to the police
commissioner of Rome: Maria Montessori “had to be [...]
guarded during her trip to Rome.”[121] It was further requested that Orazia Belsito Primi, the teacher of fascist culture
that had accused Montessori of antifascism two years earlier, be
present during her lessons.[122] From this moment on,
the ambiguity of the relationship between Montessori and the fascists
became clear: the pedagogue had abandoned the gray zone of political
neutrality that had marked the first years of collaboration, and
Mussolini could not accept such a strong personality that was so little
disposed to collaboration.[123]
18. My analysis of the three editions of Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica helps contextualize Maria Montessori’s thought and work. The changes and cuts made to Il Metodo reveal its historical context, and shed light on the debate that this text generated throughout Liberal Italy and Fascism. Analyzing the various revisions of Il Metodo shows how the concept of italianità was used variously to attack or praise the method, throughout the different stages of Italy's history. The work, however, remains open to a more thorough analysis of how Montessori judged two of the most important pedagogic issues during fascism: the dichotomy between city and country, and the role of Catholic instruction.
[1] Maria Montessori. Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all’Educazione Infantile nelle Case dei bambini, Lapi, Città di Castello 1909.
[2] See also: Salvatore Valitutti, Due pionieri della nuova educazione: Alice e Leopoldo Franchetti, «Vita dell’Infanzia», n. 2, 1954, pp. 1-7; Salvatore Valitutti, Ricordo di Leopoldo Franchetti, Opera Pia Regina Margherita, Rome 1967; Enrico Zangrelli, Leopoldo e Alice Franchetti: la scuola della Montesca, Prhomos, Città di Castello 1984; Paolo Pezzino e Alvaro Tacchini (edited by), Leopoldo e Alice Franchetti e il loro tempo, Petruzzi, Città di Castello 2002.
[3] Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method: scientific pedagogy as applied to child education in the Children's Houses with additions and revisions by the author, Stokes, New York 1912.
[4] Giacomo Cives, Carattere e senso delle varianti di Il Metodo, in Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle “Case dei Bambini”. Edizione critica, Opera Nazionale Montessori, Rome 2000, p. XVII.
[5] Ivi, p. XIX.
[6] Ibidem.
[7] David Horn, Social Bodies, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1994.
[8] Marjan Schwegman, Maria Montessori, Il Mulino, Bologna 1999, p. 103.
[9] The speech given on the occasion of the opening of the “Casa dei Bambini” was published for the first time in 1907 in the magazine “Vita femminile italiana” (“Italian Female Life”). The text was then added to the 1909 and 1950 editions even if it was not reproduced in its entirety in the latter. Cfr. Valeria Babini e Luisa Lama, Una donna nuova, Franco Angeli, Milano 2000, p. 208.
[10] Maria Montessori, La scoperta del bambino, Milano, Garzanti 1950.
[11] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia scientifica, cit., pp. 136-137.
[12] In 1907, Montessori opened the first Montessori school, or Children's House, in the slum district of Rome San Lorenzo. The press referred to neighborhood as “the shame of Italy”. In Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1976, p. 109.
[13] Valeria Babini e Luisa Lama, Una donna nuova, cit., pp. 197-213.
[14] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia scientifica, cit., p. 142.
[15] [Italics in the original] Ivi, p. 139.
[16] [All translations in this article are by the author unless attributed otherwise] Ivi, p. 151.
[17] Ivi, p. 155.
[18] Ivi, pp. 156-157.
[19] Cfr. David Horn. Social Bodies, cit.; Michel Foucault, Graham Burchell, The Birth of Biopolitics (Michel Foucault: Lectures at the College De France), Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan 2008; Michael Foucault, “Bisogna difendere la società”, M. Bertani e A. Fontana (editors), Feltrinelli, Milano 1998; Nadia Maria Filippini, Tiziana Plebani, Anna Scattigno, Corpi e storia, Viella, Rome 2002; Aa.Vv., Questioni di biopolitica, Bulzoni, Roma 2003.
[20] David Horn. Social Bodies, cit., p. 24.
[21] Chiara Saraceno. Costruzione della maternità e della paternità, in Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani, Mario G. Rossi e Enzo Collotti (editors), Il regime fascista: storia e storiografia, Laterza, Bari 1995, pp. 475-497.
[22] Ivi, p. 475 e cfr. Carl Ipsen, Demografia totalitaria : il problema della popolazione nell'Italia fascista, Il Mulino, Bologna 1997.
[23] David Horn. Social Bodies, cit., p. 11. Mariuccia Salvati, L’inutile salotto, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 1993; Cecilia Dau-Novelli, Famiglia e modernizzazione in Italia tra le due guerre, Studium, Rome 1994; Lorenzo Benadusi, Private Life and Public Morals: Fascism and the ‘Problem’ of Homosexuality, in «Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions», vol. 5, n. 2, Autumn 2004, pp. 171-204.
[24] Montessori speaks for the first time about “Maria,” the symbol of social maternity, in an article published in the women’s magazine “Eva moderna” (“Modern Eve”). Montessori uses this metaphor to talk about social maternity in opposition to the “Eva moderna” of the title, chosen by Anna Maria Mozzoni, founder of the magazine. La donna forte, «Eva Moderna», anni II, n.10, 30 June-15 July 1906, in Valeria Babini e Luisa Lama, Una donna nuova, cit., p. 188.
[25] Ivi, p. 138.
[26] Valeria Paola Babini, Un altro genere. La costruzione scientifica della «natura femminile», in Nel nome della razza. Il razzismo della storia d’Italia 1870-1945. Edited by Alberto Bugio, Il Mulino, Bologna 1999. pp. 475-489, p.489. Valeria Babini e Luisa Lama, Una donna nuova, cit., pp. 88-91.
[27] Marina D’Amelia, Storia della maternità, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1997.
[28] “Citing the overriding national interest, the state declared itself the sole arbiter of population fitness” [translation by the author], Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, University of California Press, Berkeley 1992, p. 5.
[29] Above all, motherhood lost the special social meanings that all Italian feminists had invoked. Henceforth, maternity became tantamount to the physical act of making babies. Women’s procreative role now potentially defined every aspect of their social being. [Translation by the author]. Ivi, p. 44.
[30] Chiara Saraceno. Costruzione della maternità e della paternità, cit., p. 480.
[31] Ibidem.
[32] Ivi, p. 493.
[33] Ibidem.
[34] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, cit., p. 77-87.
[35] Montessori defined her feminism as a “scientific feminism” insofar as it was founded upon faith in the power of science to change things. In Valeria Babini e Luisa Lama, Una donna nuova, cit., pp. 85-90.
[36] On this subject, Enzo Catarsi speaks of “the moderate character of Maria Montessori’s feminism”. Cfr. Enzo Catarsi, Giovanni Genovesi (editors) L’infanzia a scuola. Juvenilia, Bergamo 1985, p. 95; Enzo Catarsi, La giovane Montessori, Corso, Ferrara 1995; G. Conti Odorisio, Storia dell’idea femminista in Italia, ERI, Torino 1980 e Anna Rossi Doria, La libertà delle donne, Rosemberg & Sellier, Turin 1990.
[37] August Bebel, La donna e il socialismo, Milano 1891, in Paul Ginsborg, Le politiche familiari nell’Europa del Novecento, Passato e Presente, n.57, Franco Angeli, Milan Sept.-Dec. 2002, p. 44.
[38] August Bebel, La donna e il socialismo, cit., p. 407.
[39] V.I. Lenin, L’emancipazione della donna, Edizioni Rinascita, Rome 1905, p. 85, in Paul Ginsborg, Le politiche familiari nell’Europa del Novecento, cit., p. 46.
[40] Paul Ginsborg, Le politiche familiari nell’Europa del Novecento, cit., p. 44.
[41] Ivi, p. 45.
[42] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia scientifica, cit., p. 156.
[43] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato alle case dei bambini, Loescher & CO., Roma 1913.
[44] Valeria Babini e Luisa Lama, Una donna nuova, cit., pp. 16-30.
[45] This principally refers to the changes made to the dedication, variations in punctuation, stylistic stettings, information about the spreading of the method throughout the world, and the addition of two chapters entitled Ordine e Gradi nella presentazione del materiale e negli esercizi (Orders and Grades in the Presentation of Material and in Exercises) and La Disciplina nelle case dei Bambini (Discipline in the “case dei Bambini”).
[46] Cfr. Paola Trabalzini, Maria Montessori-da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino, Rome, Aracne 2003, pp. 158-159.
[47] R.D. 4 Gennaio 1914, N. 27 Istruzioni, programmi e orari per gli Asili infantili e Giardini d’Infanzia.
[48] [Virgolette basse nel testo] Cfr. Gaetano Bonetta, La scuola dell’infanzia, in Giacomo Cives (editor), La scuola italiana dall’Unità ai nostri giorni, La Nuova Italia, Firenze 1990, pp. 29-30.
[49] Gaetano Bonetta, Corpo e nazione, Franco Angeli, Milano 1990, p. 67.
[50] The authors who have written about this subject have discordant opinions concerning who organized the conference: Catarsi and Genovesi maintain that it was organized by theUnione Italiana Educazione Popolare, while Bonetta mentions the Unione Nazionale Educatrici dell’Infanzia. Cfr. Gaetano Bonetta, La scuola dell’infanzia, cit., p. 30. Cfr. Enzo Catarsi e Giacomo Genovesi (editors), L’Infanzia a scuola, cit., p. 106.
[51] Cfr. Paola Trabalzini, Maria Montessori - da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino, cit., p. 83.
[52] Camillo Corradini, president of the commission, was responsible for the report on the state of primary school instruction in 1910. Corradini, director of primary school instruction, was charged by the minister of education Daneo with drafting a report on the schools that brought to light the lack of scholastic institutes and the inadequacy of the scholastic buildings, as well as the lack of didactic material. Cfr. Redi Sante Di Pol, Scuola e popolo nel riformismo liberale di inizio secolo, Sintagma, Turin 1996, pp. 51-53.
[53] Gaetano Bonetta, La scuola dell’infanzia, cit., p. 30.
[54] “For Froebel, the child was made in the image and likeness of God, and all the divinity that is in him must be brought out, developed according to Christian goals, whether interior or exterior, though an education, combined with a self-produced education, centred on the child and valorous of his spontaneity, carried out in a context – the kindergarten – protected from negative adult influences.” Ivi, p. 23.
[55] The criticisms refer to the process of self-education accomplished by the child in the absence of the negative influence of adults, and with the Froebelian use of “gifts.” The child, having overcome the first phase of spontaneous play, becomes guided by the activity of the programmed use of these gifts, which consist of a cube, a sphere, and a cylinder, and three other cubes that split into other, different shapes. Through the use of the gifts, the child begins to acquire a spatio-logical and formal-logical vision that permits him to see the divine order in natural order. Ibidem.
[56] Giuseppe Franzè, Fanciulli oggi, uomini domani: Agazzi, Pizzigoni, Montessori –itinerari didattici, Magi, Rome 2000, pp. 104-158.
[57] Enzo Catarsi, Giovanni Genovesi (editors L’infanzia a scuola, cit., p. 96.
[58] Cfr. Emma Boghen Conigliani, Il giardino infantile modello di Mompiano giudicato sotto l’aspetto sociale, Canossi, Brescia 1902, in Enzo Catarsi, Giovanni Genovesi (editors) L’infanzia a scuola, cit., p. 97.
[59] Dina Bertoni Jovine, La scuola italiana del 1870 ai giorni nostri, Editori Riuniti, Rome 1958, pp. 97-101.
[60] Cfr. G. Contesini, Il giardino infantile rurale di Mompiano giudicato sotto l’aspetto pedagogico, Canossi, Brescia 1902, in Enzo Catarsi, Giovanni Genovesi (editors) L’infanzia a scuola, cit., p. 98.
[61] Gaetano Bonetta, La scuola dell’infanzia, cit., p. 29.
[62] Giuseppe Franzè, Fanciulli oggi, uomini domani, cit., p. 102.
[63] Ivi, pp. 97-98.
[64] Pietro Pasquali, Mompiano, famiglia di bimbi. In R. Mazzetti, Maria Montessori nel rapporto tra anormali e normalizzazione, Armando, Rome 1963, p. 192.
[65] Paola Trabalzini, Maria Montessori-da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino, cit., p. 84.
[66] Ivi.
[67] With this statement I refer to the emphasis given to the phenomenon of the “esplosione della scrittura”, to which many articles on Montessori published by the American press refer. I believe that it is particularly important to refer to the reception of the method in the United States insofar as Montessori had barely completed her first trip to the country, where she had received a warm welcome. In Rita Kramer. Maria Montessori A Biography, Perseus, Cambridge 1988, pp. 177-211.
[68] V. Battistelli, Pensiamo agli asili, «La cultura popolare», a. IX, n.2, February 1919, 114-116, in Paola Trabalzini, Maria Montessori-da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino, cit., p. 85.
[69] Ibidem.
[70] Enzo Catarsi, Giovanni Genovesi (editors) L’infanzia a scuola, cit., 105.
[71] Ivi, p. 106.
[72] Giuseppe Sergi, Alcune idee sull’educazione, estratto da «Nuova Antologia», 1 March 1914, Rome 1914, p. 7, in Paola Trabalzini Maria Montessori-da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino. cit., p. 156.
[73] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, cit., p. 65.
[74] Maria Montessori, Disciplining the Children, «McClure's Magazine», New York: May 1912. Vol. VOL. XXXIX, Iss. No. 1; p. 95.
[75] Montessori’s article published in McClure’s Magazine follows a series of articles written by Josephine Tolzier in the same magazine. Their success and the public’s interested in them pushed Samuel McClure to contact Montessori and to take on the entire organization of her first trip to the United States. For a more in-depth discussion of Maria Montessori’s first trip to the United States Cfr. Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori- A Biography. Perseus, New York 1988, pp. 158-176.
[76] Mario Isnenghi, Il ruralismo nella cultura italiana, in Piero Bevilacqua (editor), Storia dell’agricoltura italiana in età contemporanea, vol. III, Mercati e istituzioni, Marsilio, Venice 1991, pp. 877-910 e Georges Canguilhem, Il fascismo e contadini, il Mulino, Bologna 2007.
[77] Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori A Biography, cit. p. 280.
[78] Ivi, p. 281.
[79] Giovanni Gentile, La riforma scuola in Italia, (edited by) H. A. Cavallera, Le Lettere, Florence 2003; Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: una biografia, UTET, Turin 2006; Jean-Yves Fretigne, Les conceptions educatives de Giovanni Gentile: entre elitisme et fascisme, L’Harmattan, Paris 2006.
[80] Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori A Biography, cit. p. 280.
[81] Giovanni Gentile filosofo e pedagogista, (edited by) Daniela Coli, Le Lettere, Florence 2004.
[82] Ivi, p. 282.
[83] The foundation was created though a Royal Decree issued by King Vittorio Emanuele III under the patronage of Queen Margherita. Queen Margherita had supported Maria Montessori’s initiatives from the very beginning. She had, in fact, sponsored the second Course on Scientific Pedagogy held by Montessori at the Suore Francescane Missionarie di Maria in via Giusti. Cfr. Corso per educare fanciulli col Metodo Montessori, «Vita femminile italiana», a. IV, n. 1910, pp. 348-349.
[84] Much of the information about the relationship between Mussolini and Montessori is taken from Rita Kramer’s Maria Montessori: A Biography, which remains of the most exhaustive texts on the subject. Cfr. Rita Kramer. Maria Montessori: A Biography, cit., pp. 280-285.
[85] Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista. Un compromesso fallito, «Il Risorgimento», a. LIV, n. 2, 2002, pp. 309-339.
[86] Due to the restrictions imposed by the fascist regime, A.M.I. was transferred to Berlin in 1932. Mario Montessori, Che cosa è l’A.M.I., «Vita dell’Infanzia», n. 10-11, ott.-nov. 1952, p. 15.
[87] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, cit., p. 554.
[88] Cfr. Marjan Schwegman, Maria Montessori, cit., pp. 97-110; Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit.
[89] IVI, p. 319.
[90] Cfr. Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: una biografia, Giunti, Firenze 1995; Monica Galfré, Una riforma alla prova: la scuola media di Gentile e il fascismo, Franco Angeli, Milano 1999; Monica Galfré, Il regime degli editori: libri scuola e fascismo, Laterza, Rome 2005.
[91] Alla nobile ê Baronessa ALICE FRANCHETTI-HALLGARTEN ê e al Barone LEOPOLDO FRANCHETTI ê Senatore del Regno ê dedico questo libro ê che è stato da loro voluto ê e che per opera loro esce oggi alla vita del pensiero ê battezzando nella letteratura scientifica ê le «Case dei Bambini». [Capital letters in the text], in Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, cit., 59.
[92] ALLA CARA MEMORIA ê DELLA ê BARONESSA ALICE FRANCHETTI. [Capital letters in the text], Ibidem.
[93] Ibidem.
[94] Paola Trabalzini, Maria Montessori - da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino, cit., 181-183.
[95] Maria Montessori, L' autoeducazione nelle scuole elementari, Loescher, Rome 1916. Maria Montessori, Manuale di pedagogia scientifica, Morano, Naples 1921. Maria Montessori, I bambini viventi nella chiesa: note di educazione religiosa, Morano, Naples 1922.
[96] Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, La nuova edizione del “Metodo della Pedagogia scientifica„ di Maria Montessori, «Educazione Nazionale», n. 7, luglio 1926, pp. 1-19.
[97] I focus in particular on the omission of the dedication, even if Lombardo Radice also analyzes the cut of the names of Ravizza, Talamo, Nuccitelli etc. On this subject, it is essential to compare such comments with Trabalzini’s analysis of Radice’s article, in which she highlights how much these cuts from the 1926 edition had already been discussed by Montessori in the 1913 edition, though according to Radice they were unjustified. Cfr. Paola Trabalzini, Maria Montessori - da Il Metodo a La scoperta del bambino, cit., 157-161.
[98] G. Lombardo Radice, La nuova edizione del “Metodo della Pedagogia scientifica„ di Maria Montessori, cit., p. 18.
[99] Salvatore Valitutti, Due pionieri nella nuova educazione: Alice e Leopoldo Franchetti, «Vita dell’Infanzia», n. 2, February 1954, p. 8.
[100] Ivi, p. 1.
[101] Augusto Scocchera, Maria Montessori un ritratto quasi inedito, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1990, p. 64.
[102] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, cit., p. 64.
[103] Ibidem.
[104] For a more thorough discussion of the Baron Franchettis’ life Cfr. Salvatore Valitutti, Due pionieri nella nuova educazione: Alice e Leopoldo Franchetti, cit.; Salvatore Valitutti, Ricordo di Leopoldo Franchetti, Tiferno, Città di Castello 1967.
[105] The book’s title acquired historical importance after Pope Benedict XV copied it with his own hand in all its length in order to give his approval and benediction to this eductational method: “The papal benediction ... is a pledge of those graces and celestial favors with which we wish to render Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini fertile with goodness.” 21 November 1918 Benedictus S.S. XV. [Italics in the original] Maria Montessori, Il Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica, cit., p. 64.
[106] Mussolini also saw Gentile’s reform as laying down the basis for cooperation with the Vatican. [Translation by the author]. In Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1985, p. 60.
[107] Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit., p. 320.
[108] Maria Montessori, I bambini viventi nella chiesa, Morano, Napoli 1922.
[109] «Civiltà Cattolica», vol. 3-4, 1922, p. 455. In Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit., 312.
[110] Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori A Biography, p. 300.
[111] Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit., p. 325.
[112] Lama attributes the quotation “the century of the child” to Montessori. I find it more plausible that Montessori, using such an expression, was making reference to the work of the Swedish pedagogue Ellen Key. Key, Century of the Child, Putman’s Sons, New York 1909.
[113] “Every school has been converted to a sub-branch of the Fascist Party”. [Translation by the author]. In Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, p. 63.
[114] Koon points out that fascism substituted the concept of instruction of the child with that of education, meant to signify indoctrination and political formation of the child. [Corsivo nel testo]. Ivi, p. 63.
[115] Giovanni Gentile, Contro demogogie e demagogi, in G. Gentile, Fascismo al governo della scuola, pp.83-84, 128-129, circolare ai provveditori datata 23 aprile 1923. In Tracy H. Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight, cit., p. 67.
[116] “I am thus doubly sad to have to go back there, thus distancing myself from my homeland to teach what is notoriously known to have been born in Rome, and to give with my presence a disillusion to those who have come from so far away, only to meet the person and not her environment, to study in schools so far from the marvelous Country where they originated.” Letter by Maria Montessori to Mussolini, written in Milan on 4 April 1927, cit. in Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit., pp. 326-328.
[117] Rita Kramer, Maria Montessori: A Biography, cit., p. 303.
[118] Ivi, p. 302.
[119] Anonymous notice d.d. 30.10.1932, Archivio centrale di Stato, Ministero dell’Interno, (Mi), Polizia politica (Pp). In Marjan Schwegman, Maria Montessori, cit., p. 106.
[120] Marjan Schwegman, Maria Montessori, cit., p. 106.
[121] Cit. in Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit., p. 338.
[122] Ivi, p. 339.
[123] Montessori had clearly expressed her own pacifist views to the League of Nations in the first months of 1932. This episode certainly had percussions on Mussolini’s behavior during interactions with Montessori. Such an action, as Lama points out, would cause the burning of her books in Berlin in 1933. In Luisa Lama, Maria Montessori nell’Italia fascista, cit., p. 334-335.