«She yielded to the impulse to philosophize». Maria Montessori under the judgment of the Company of Jesus (1910-1929)
Marcello Grifò
In the twenty years between 1910 and 1929 the pedagogy of Maria Montessori was the subject of numerous almost always severely critical articles that appeared in the Italian and foreign press of the Society of Jesus. The charges against the scientist’s educational system essentially focused on her presumption of being able to build a pedagogical training that, apart from the reality of the sin of protoplasts, was marked by a vain pedagogical optimism. She was also accused of dangerously subverting the foundations of social stability by longing for a community of equals and of developing a fallacious theoretical framework in support of her doctrines based on a distorted application of the classical categories of philosophy. The present study strives to reconstruct the evolution of this controversy, sometimes mitigated by attempts to recover Montessori’s educational experimentation to Catholic and philosophical orthodoxy, emphasizing the different understanding of the notion of philosophy and its social function.
Keywords
Maria Montessori, philosophy, Jesuits, method, experimental pedagogy.