“鈥he Cosmic Plan can be presented to the child, as a thrilling tale of the earth we live in鈥.”
鈥 Maria Montessori
Part 1. An involuntary hiatus leads to a landmark Educational Innovation
In 1940, when Maria Montessori was already 70 years old, WW2 broke out while she and her son Mario were giving a training for Primary teachers in Mumbai. Because India was still under British rule, and Italy was allied with Germany, the Montessoris were held under house arrest, and barred from traveling back to Europe 鈥 as it turned out, until 1947.聽
They had no idea how long they would be detained, but it wasn鈥檛 long before Mario became worried that his mother鈥檚 life鈥檚 work would come to an involuntary end. The Montessoris鈥 Italian passports marked them as enemy aliens, but there was no animosity toward them from the communities they were permitted to live and work in. War was happening a world away. In rural India, they were welcome and respected.
To make the most of their stay, they decided to develop a plan for the materials and methods of the elementary classroom. Steeped for almost a decade in a rich, rural culture, and surrounded by diverse and (mostly) mutually tolerant eastern spiritualities and philosophies, it鈥檚 not surprising that they placed a holistic understanding of an unfolding and thoroughly integrated universe at the center of Montessori鈥檚 elementary curriculum. Far from being a 鈥渇orced retirement,鈥 their stay in India proved to be a formative period in Montessori鈥檚 thinking, allowing her to see the elementary years and develop the elementary curriculum from a more global and universal perspective.聽
Maria Montessori had a gift for telling stories. She didn鈥檛 gather children in large groups often, but over her many years in classrooms, she enjoyed telling short, dramatic, non-fiction stories, especially to聽 elementary aged children, who always pressed for more details. Often she would illustrate parts of her stories on large chart paper as she told them. Sometimes she would use simple experiments to demonstrate the ideas she was describing. Her collaborators noticed that certain stories seemed to be her favorites.聽
In time, her stories actually became central to the curriculum she was developing for the second plane (6-12) child.聽In the next part鈥 discover how stories became the secret sauce of the Montessori elementary curriculum.