The Miseducation of Maria Montessori
<i>dusts off HN account</i><p>I’m part of a now-large-ish Montessori startup and am a sort of Montessori scholar. The biography reviewed here is very good and worth checking out. Overall it’s the best of the biographies available, and is a significant improvement over Kramer’s from a few decades ago.<p>Just an aside: the extended tangents in the review about Montessori’s entrepreneurialism turning her method into a classist privilege are, uh, really strange. The idea in the review seems to be that the rarity and expense of Montessori in the US is because she charged for trainings and tried to parent some materials. Purely as a matter of historical fact, this is a narrative in search of evidence that isn’t there, and a narrative that isn’t really face plausible. Montessori education is rare because the progressive intellectuals that built the US school system adamantly and vociferously rejected Montessori for pedagogical reasons. There are just way better explanations available for why her work didn’t take hold more widely.<p>Glad to see Montessori and Stefano’s biography in particular getting coverage though. I’ve enjoyed reading the many comments here about people’s experiences with Montessori!