Born on August 31, 1870 in Chiaravalle (Ancona), Maria Montessori in 1896, at the age of 26, was the third Italian woman to graduate in medicine and later specialized in neuropsychiatry.
She took part in the first feminist struggles and devoted herself to the dramatic situation of disabled children, then called "oligophrenic" and managed to raise national interest, proposing the importance of an intervention that was more educational than medical.
in 1897 she participated in the National Congress of Medicine, held in Turin, denouncing the responsibilities of society towards juvenile delinquency. Responsibility that she identified in the lack of care and assistance towards retarded and disturbed children identified by her as potentially at risk (which we define here as fragile). For this reason she argued that attention should be placed on the search for the causes of delinquency in order to be able to carry out preventive interventions, oriented towards the social and pedagogical relevance of the determining factors. In her speech at the First Pedagogical Congress of Turin, held in September 1898, Montessori proposed actions "to redeem and educate children who, due to special degenerative characteristics, cannot benefit from the common school", and asked that additional classes be established in elementary schools to collect difficult children, while for the most seriously deficient she suggested the creation of medical-pedagogical institutes, annexed to provincial mental hospitals. Both these initiatives, supported by eminent representatives of the State, required adequate training of teachers and professors of pedagogy.
Photo of the Psychiatric Hospital of Gorizia, in 1958, in the conditions found by Franco Basaglia, when he became its director
The Kid: 1921 silent film written, directed and starring Charlie Chaplin
Montessori's proposal for the education of fragile children is reiterated in the writing entitled "Social Poverties and New Discoveries of Science" 1898.
The social reasons were connected to the fact that with the progress of modernization, fragile children had more and more difficulty adapting to the ever-growing world, which required greater efforts of adaptation. There was therefore a social, environmental and historical origin of mental distress, both in terms of solicitations to which the weakest children were unable to respond, and because the living conditions were often terrible: precarious hygienic situations, physical and moral misery, all elements that contributed "to further impress the degenerative notes".
In essence, Maria Montessori, at the end of the 19th century, argued that the school was not able to welcome fragile children and that teachers were not prepared to teach degenerate children and used traditional pedagogical methods that, being unsuitable, ended up being reduced only to punishment, chastisement and therefore to removal from the school institution that failed precisely where its intervention would have been essential.
«The reform that is needed - the doctor underlines again in Pedagogical Anthropology - is that of the school and of pedagogy, which leads us to protect all children in their development, including those who prove refractory to the environment of social life».
The battle for the re-education of fragile children and the acceptance of diversity was at the beginning, while the proposal of their "separation" represents the beginning of the path of awareness and acceptance that Maria Montessori practiced throughout her life.
In Social Poverties and New Scientific Inventions, the scholar, dwelling on her work, states that «the basis on which the marvelous work of educating idiots is founded is this principle: to seek out what exists in them and to use all resources, even the smallest ones, to earn as much as possible».