(PDF) Montessori education: a review of the evidence base

Running head: MONTESSORI’S IDEAS FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG CHILDREN
MONTESSORI’S IDEAS FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG CHILDREN
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MONTESSORI’S IDEAS FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG CHILDREN1
The base of a child’s education starts from the very moment when the child is put into the
formal process of acquiring education. The process of acquiring educations in its very first stage
begins when basic understanding of language, expressing one’s mind, and starting the process of
writing alphabets or numbers begin. The informal education of a child begins when the parents
and close relatives starts to speak with the child and he or she hears and starts to understand very
basic aspects of communication. There are various theories, ideas and models developed by
various scholars around the world to supplement the process of childhood education. The
Developmental Interaction Approach reflects the process of learning through discovering the
surrounding. The developmental process in childhood takes place in five ways “Physical, social,
emotional, linguistic and cognitive.”
The “social cultural learning theory” was developed by the Russian psychologist Lev
Vygotsky in which he has emphasized on the learning process of an individual child through the
help of his social surroundings. Another theory that aimed at explaining the learning process of
the children is the constructivist theory developed by Jean Piaget, who stated that the process of
learning happens from inside and the child develops the process within himself (Ültanir 2012).
David Kolb has developed the experimental learning theory that has put forward the view that in
order to learn the children needs to go through experience and learning, experimenting as they
learn.
Throughout the world it is seen that different scholars, activists and researchers who have
worked in the field of childhood education has taken heavily from these theories. They have
endeavored in developing a concise process of advancing the learning process of the children in
a way that it can help them with the most efficient system of imbibing knowledge (Kirkham and
Kidd 2017).

MONTESSORI’S IDEAS FOR THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG CHILDREN2
The “Montessori Process of Education” is one of the most popular process of educating
the toddlers throughout the world. It has become so popular that the word Montessori education
has now become synonymous with toddler education in most of the part of the world today
(Lillard 2013). This system of education was developed by Maria Montessori who observed the
children from their birth to the end of their childhood age, and then developed the learning
process in the most efficient way possible in order to make childhood education effective and
stable in the mind of the children (Montessori 2013).
The person who developed this particular theory of educating and training the children
her name was Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori and she was from Italy. She developed the
scientific system of pedagogy and devised the philosophy and process of childhood education
that is now known as the Montessori education throughout the globe and most of the schools
around the world have developed this process where they have the separate class for Montessori
teaching of the toddlers (Kramer 2017).
Montessori herself drew a lot from the philosophies of “Jean Marc Gaspard Itard,
Édouard Séguin, Friedrich Fröbel, and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi”. These scholars had all
emphatically stated the importance of sensory induction of learning, which denotes the
manipulation of the sense organs of the children to induce the process of learning. Montessori
herself in the first phase of her career worked with disabled children whom she imparted training
by inducing sensory method such as perceiving light, vision, smell or sound to communicate and
learn (Kramer 2017). She has further indulged in various psychological researches on the subject
and has done research works about various elementary schools and called the process as
“scientific pedagogy”. She was quoted as saying "The new methods if they were run on scientific
lines, ought to change completely both the school and its methods, ought to give rise to a new