The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori by Cristina De Stefano, translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti. Other Press, 348 pp., $28.99
By the time Maria Montessori died in 1952, at the age of eighty-one, she had invented a new kind of childhood for the twentieth century. Rather than being deficient adults-in-waiting requiring discipline and chastisement in order to land on the shores of maturity, children, Montessori proposed, already carry the necessary wisdom within. “The child, a free human being, must teach us and teach society order, calm, discipline, and harmony,” she famously declared. Or, as Cristina De Stefano proposes in the title of her new biography, it’s the child who is the teacher, and the grown-ups are playing catch-up.
In the seventy years since her death…