On December 8, 1913, Maria Montessori stood on the stage of Carnegie Hall in New York before a capacity crowd. She showed films of children in her school in Rome, and a second lecture followed a week later.¹

America seemed to be hers. Mabel Bell, wife of Alexander Graham Bell, led the Montessori Educational Association. The publisher S. S. McClure, whose magazine had made her famous, organized the tour. Schools using her name were opening across the country.

Within a decade, the movement had faded.

How a triumph collapsed

Several things worked against her. In 1914, William Heard Kilpatrick of Columbia, a student of John Dewey and one of the most respected voices in American education, published a sharp critique, The Montessori System Examined. Many educators adopted his verdict.² The First World War, language barriers and suspicion of foreign ideas did the rest.

The deepest wound came from inside. Montessori had given McClure her power of attorney, and the partnership turned into a fight over control: who could train teachers, who could use the name, who could sell the materials. McClure wanted to scale fast. Montessori insisted on authorizing every training course herself, while former students began offering their own. The association dissolved, and by the early 1920s the American boom was over.³

What she did next

Montessori drew a lesson from it. A method spreads through trained people, and enthusiasm fades without them. In 1929 she founded the Association Montessori Internationale to train teachers and keep the standards.

The lesson was tested again. Fascist Italy turned against her schools in the mid-1930s. She moved to Barcelona, fled Spain when civil war broke out in 1936, and settled in the Netherlands. In 1939 she traveled to India for a three-month course. The war kept her there until 1946. Together with her son Mario, she used those years to teach course after course, training more than 1,500 Indian teachers.⁴

The movement in America returned in the 1960s. Today, Montessori schools operate in well over a hundred countries, carried by generations of teachers trained in her method.

Talent Takeaway

  • Measure an idea by the number of people who can teach it well without you, and plan how to double that number.
  • Invest in training before you invest in launch events.
  • Protect quality with clear standards, and let trusted people teach within them.
  • When a door closes, as it did for Montessori more than once, keep teaching wherever you land.

¹ AMI Archives (2019, December 8). On this day, 8 December 1913. Association Montessori Internationale. https://archivesdev.montessori-ami.org/node/98

² Kilpatrick, W. H. (1914). The Montessori system examined. Houghton Mifflin.

³ Gutek, G. L., & Gutek, P. A. (2016). Bringing Montessori to America: S. S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the campaign to publicize Montessori education. University of Alabama Press; American Montessori Society. History of Montessori. https://amshq.org/About-Montessori/History-of-Montessori

⁴ Association Montessori Internationale. Biography of Maria Montessori. https://montessori-ami.org/resource-library/facts/biography-maria-montessori