Casa dei Bambini

Education pioneer Maria Montessori opened her first school on this date in 1907. It was called Casa dei Bambini, or Children's House, and it was located in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Rome. Montessori had some revolutionary ideas about education. She didn't believe in traditional classrooms where "children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place." She believed that the teacher should pay attention to the students and not the other way around. And she also believed that children were naturally interested in practical activities and liked to master tasks that they saw adults doing every day. So she made the furnishings child sized, and gave them "work": sweeping, helping prepare meals, washing up, and gardening. She gave them lots of hands-on activities and plenty of unstructured time for self-guided learning, and her experiment was a success.
-Writer's Almanac