Table Of ContentHISTORICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION
America’s
Early Montessorians
Anne George, Margaret Naumburg,
Helen Parkhurst, and Adelia Pyle
Gerald L. Gutek · Patricia A. Gutek
Historical Studies in Education
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William J. Reese
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John L. Rury
Education
University of Kansas
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·
Gerald L. Gutek Patricia A. Gutek
America’s Early
Montessorians
Anne George, Margaret Naumburg, Helen
Parkhurst and Adelia Pyle
Gerald L. Gutek Patricia A. Gutek
Education and History La Grange, IL, USA
Loyola University Chicago
La Grange, IL, USA
Historical Studies in Education
ISBN 978-3-030-54834-6 ISBN 978-3-030-54835-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54835-3
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Series Editors Preface
’
Historians have long recognized the importance of trans-national influ-
ences upon American educational thought and practice. In the late eigh-
teenth century, England provided the example and inspiration for the
adoption of Sunday schools and charity schools. In the early decades
of the nineteenth century, American reformers traveled to Prussia to
observe its new pedagogical practices. And child-centered educators still
study the writings of John Amos Comenius, John Locke, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Johann Pestalozzi, and Friedrich Froebel. Never a single,
monolithic movement, child-centered, or “progressive education,” was
born in Europe but traveled to America before the Civil War.
Although most famous educational reformers were men, women were
nevertheless central to the unfolding history of child-centered education.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, white women became the
majority of high school students, and they increasingly attended Amer-
ica’s colleges and universities. Though their salaries paled compared to
men’s, women were deemed superior as teachers of young children, and
they formed the great majority of elementary school teachers by centu-
ry’s end. Whether they appeared in private institutions, public schools,
or settlement houses, kindergartens became the most important institu-
tional expressionof early childhood education and were invariablytaught
by women.
America’s Early Montessorians, by Gerald L. Gutek and Patricia A.
Gutek, explores the history of the first attempts to establish schools
v
vi SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
inspired by Maria Montessori in the United States, which occurred in
the early twentieth century. Initially trained as a physician, Montessori
founded her first school in a poor neighborhood in Rome in 1907.
Her instructional practices and pedagogical ideas emphasized the self-
activityandsense-trainingofyoungchildrenandsoonattractedconsider-
able attention outside of Italy. Like many innovative educators, Montes-
sori had a magnetic personality, drawing followers from many nations.
Four remarkable Americans—Anne George, Margaret Naumburg, Helen
Parkhurst, and Adelia Pyle—traveled to Rome and attended her teacher
training program. But only a few Montessorian schools were established
in America by the 1920s, and this book explains why.
The Guteks illuminate the lives and achievements of these remarkable
women, including Montessori, who was unable to maintain tight control
over training teachers for schools established in her name outside of
Italy. Numerous obstacles blocked the establishment of such institutions
in America. By the early twentieth century, kindergartens were increas-
ingly common in many urban districts, and they were strongly endorsed
by professors in normal schools and university-based schools of educa-
tion. Many American progressives, including John Dewey and William
Kilpatrick, criticized aspects of Montessorian instruction, believing it too
closely linked to peculiar theories of child development.
Like Montessori, the four women who comprise the heart of Ameri-
ca’s Early Montessorians were often independent thinkers. Two of them,
HelenParkhurstandMargaretNaumburg,onlypartiallyadoptedtheItal-
ian’s ideas, which they selectively wove into their unique pedagogical
plans. Parkhurst established the Dalton Plan of individualized instruction
and founded a still-thriving private school in New York City. Naumburg
founded the Walden School and pioneered in art therapy. Progressive
schools, often privately funded, took many forms.
Maria Montessori and some of her would-be acolytes became memo-
rable, influential figures in the history of education. Like other famous
innovators,however, Montessorimade educational historybut not as she
pleased.
William J. Reese
John L. Rury
Preface
For us, one project leads to another. Our writing of “America’s Early
Montessorians: Anne George, Margaret Naumburg, Helen Parkhurst and
Adelia Pyle,” was stimulated by our previous book, Bringing Montessori
to America: S.S. McClure, Maria Montessori, and the Campaign to Publi-
cizeMontessoriEducation.(UniversityofAlabamaPress,2016).Whenwe
began our work on “America’s Earliest Montessorians,” we had already
doneextensiveresearchontheearlyhistory,thefirstphaseofMontessori
education in the United States.
Maria Montessori initially concentrated on educating children from
two to six years old, at a time, 1900–1920, when early childhood
institutions were underdeveloped in Europe and the United States.
Finding traditional schools to be wholly inadequate, even miseducative,
Montessori created her own unique alternative to the existing school
with her “prepared environment.” The major institutional alternative to
her method was the kindergarten developed by the German educator,
Friedrich Froebel in the nineteenth century.
Montessori developed her educational theory in Italy. After receiving
international attention, there was a public enthusiasm to import the
method to American schools. Since Montessori insisted that her method
could only be taught by qualified teachers she had personally trained, the
first step in transporting and implementing Montessori education in the
vii
viii PREFACE
UnitedStateswasforAmericanstotraveltoRomeandenrollinMontes-
sori’s training course. On their return home, the trained teachers, called
directresses,facedthechallengingtaskofestablishingMontessorischools.
TheyoungAmericansinourstory–George,Naumburg,Parkhurstand
Pyle—actually had to establish their own schools to institutionalize the
Montessori Method in the United States. Their attempts to do so were
resisted by America’s educational establishment. Kindergartens, treating
the same age cohort as Montessori schools, had already been estab-
lished in public school systems. Kindergarten educators, committed to
Froebel’s philosophy, were suspicious of the Montessori intrusion into
their educational territory. Teacher preparation programs in American
colleges and universities were largely controlled by progressive educators
influenced by John Dewey’s Experimentalist philosophy. Many progres-
sives such as William H. Kilpatrick adamantly rejected the Montessori
approach.Finally,Montessori,whodemandedabsolutecontroloftraining
her teachers, was, herself, a serious obstacle to the entry of her method
intoAmericanteachereducationprogramsandintopublicschoolsystems.
WedecidedtotellthestoryofearlyMontessorianismthroughthelives
of Americans who played key roles in its introduction. Because of their
importance in the early Montessori movement in the United States, we
selected Anne George, Margaret Naumburg, Helen Parkhurst and Adelia
Pyle who Montessori had trained as directresses. Significant in Amer-
icaneducationalandwomen’shistoryinadditiontotheircontributionto
Montessorianism,thesefourindividualsmadesubstantialcontributionsto
education, psychology and religion after having the shared experience of
being students in Montessori’s training courses.
The four directresses, George, Naumburg, Parkhurst and Pyle, had
appeared in our earlier book. Anne George had a large secondary role
serving as Montessori’s aide and translator during her American lecture
tour in 1913. Parkhurst played an important role as Montessori’s desig-
nateddirectressatthedemonstrationschoolatthePan-PacificExposition
in San Francisco in 1915 and as Montessori’s appointed representative
for all Montessori educational endeavors in the United States. Pyle and
Naumburg, we thought, were supporting members of the cast.
Because she was the major character in our first book, we knew quite
a bit about Maria Montessori. Her biographers—Standing, Kramer and
Povell—all agreed that she was a truly remarkable women, a physician
andaneducatorwhousedhermedicalandscientifictrainingtoconstruct
an innovative philosophy and method of education. She challenged the
PREFACE ix
traditional educational patterns of the late nineteenth and early twen-
tiethcenturies,strugglingagainsttheinertiaandroteroutinesinschools.
ShehadtoovercomethelateVictorianera’sgender-basedrestrictionson
women in the professions. We knew Montessori as a determined indi-
vidual who successfully surmounted the barriers that limited the freedom
of women to chart new careers. We found her to be a multidimensional
person, who, while truly a great educator, was a complex personality,
determined at all costs to control what she had created. We learned that
she expected total loyalty, almost fealty and submission, from those she
had trained. We expected that Montessori’s demanding personality could
be a possible source of tension between her and her four students. We
hoped to explore how her relationships with her students affected the
establishment of her educational plan in their country.
WiththeirenrollmentinMontessori’strainingcourses,George,Naum-
burg,ParkhurstandPylecametoacrossroads,anintersection,intheirlife
journeys. They arrived at the Montessori training courses with the eager
expectation that they would be instructed by the greatest educator in the
world,truly“aneducationalwonderworker.”AwedtobeinMontessori’s
presence and enthralled by her personality, the four students studied to
become Montessori directresses.
We decided to use parallel biographies of George, Naumburg,
Parkhurst and Pyle to develop our story. Of course, the four life stories
needed to be viewed in relationship to the biography of their teacher,
Maria Montessori. Our research and writing plan was to place their
training with Montessori as a pivotal intersection, possibility a defining
juncture, in the lives and careers of our four subjects.
Anne George was the first and most prominent Montessori directress,
as a key player in the American Montessori Educational Association, as
translator of The Montessori Method, in 1912, and as Montessori’s aide
and translator on her American lecture tour in 1913.
Adelia Pyle served as Montessori’s assistant for ten years after
completingthetrainingcourse.However,ourresearchonPyle’slifetook
usalongwayfromhertrainingasaMontessoridirectress.Itledustoher
dedication to the Catholic mystic and stigmatic, the Italian priest, Padre
Pio.
When we began our research, we knew that Helen Parkhurst and
Margaret Naumburg, in addition to being trained as Montessori direc-
tresses, were both leading figures in American Progressive education.
