Montessori’s house, and a prepared room

Among programs for very young children, this account takes two as representative: the Montessori program and the Reggio Emilia approach. Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and educator who gave herself to the study of early education, worked under the influence of Seguin and Itard. Success in teaching children with intellectual delay, the account says, led her to ask what principle would let children of lower measured ability reach the same school achievement as their typical peers. She began to care for delayed children from an educational point of view, not only a medical one, and in a poor district of Rome she opened a school she named the Children’s House (Casa dei Bambini), in 1906. From observation she developed her own materials.

A prepared environment, in her sense, is a concrete setting in which a child’s needs can be met without a break. It includes rooms, equipment, and materials, and also the human surroundings — the child, peers, parents, and teachers. Two elements are named: educational materials and practice, and the teacher who prepares the concrete setting. The child is given real freedom of action, to find what to learn without adult interference, and to develop capacity. Peer relationships, too, are treated as a way of learning.

A tank, a horse, and what a project is for

After the Second World War, in the 1950s and early 1960s, educational demand rose in Italy, progressive “education for living” was taken up, and authority shifted from the center toward local government. In the city of Reggio Emilia, in Emilia-Romagna in the north, women took the lead and sold a wrecked tank, a horse, and trucks to found a parent cooperative school. The education, the account says, began from the motives, will, inspiration, and intuition of teachers and parents who had given themselves to young children. Malaguzzi, moved by this, turned parent cooperatives into a municipal system and, in 1963, reopened a progressive kindergarten — the first setting for the Reggio approach. Its educators insist it grew from their own history more than from borrowed theory, even if some likenesses can be found.

Children are encouraged to solve problems together, to play, and to represent what they know through interaction and talk. Teachers observe and document constantly, to support, guide, and monitor. An emergent curriculum means the teacher holds general aims but does not fix the detailed aims of each project in advance; hypotheses are formed from past experience and from what is already known of the child, and goals stay flexible as interests appear, including those the teacher helps to draw out. A project is a spine of active learning: learning by doing, talking in a group, revisiting ideas for a deeper hold. Children decide and choose with peers, and that, the account says, builds trust in their own minds and a stronger wish to learn. Two teachers in a class work with an atelierista and a pedagogista to plan and record. The writer’s close is that no program, however historic, works at full strength without a fit to the child’s level and a capable teacher; the basic conditions have to be in place, and the method should be the one that fits the situation. A fuller Korean report on the same ground is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. An account comparing the Montessori program and the Reggio Emilia approach: the Children’s House in 1906, a prepared environment, and the parent school in Reggio Emilia that began when women sold a wrecked tank, a horse, and trucks. Malaguzzi’s municipal kindergarten in 1963 is dated as the source states it.

Last updated: 14 November 2026