The Child is the Teacher by Cristina de Stefano

Overall summary: don't bother with this book.

Looking for a book to recommend to WWURA members, I turned to the recent biography of Maria Montessori, The Child is the Teacher, by Cristina de Stefano (2020), translated by Gregory Conti (2022).  De Stefano explains that she is not a professional educator, so she will not go into the details of Montessori pedagogy, but instead will present the biography of a brilliant and difficult woman. 

Fair enough, but the picture that de Stefano provides is frustratingly dry and general. For example, she reports that Montessori repeatedly failed to get adequate government sponsorship for a permanent teacher training and research institute in Italy, but states the reasons why only in the most general terms, giving us no idea of the processes, factions, and personalities involved. Again, she reports the bare facts about Montessori’s son, Mario: that Montessori refused to marry his father because marriage would interfere with her career, that the new-born was raised in the countryside by a wet-nurse until he was six, when he was claimed by his father, and that the fifteen-year-old broke completely with his father when Montessori first reached out to him, never leaving her side thereafter, even when he married a student of hers and had children of his own. De Stefano tells us that Montessori grieved her loss of the child in the years before reclaiming him, but has nothing to say about this whole peculiar relationship or Mario’s emotional development, except that he was devoted to his mother. (So was Oedipus.) 

So the narrative is mostly a chronology. Montessori started a clinic here or attracted a devoted follower there or went to New York and delivered a well-attended speech. That kind of thing.

I think the reason for this aridity is that de Stefano sticks to what she can document (there are hundreds of footnotes). But even when she uses Montessori’s letters, early diary, articles, and interviews, she quotes mostly general ideas on education and religion. She honorably refuses to imagine or infer or speculate about the personal life. It makes one realize that a satisfying biography must be partly fiction, or at least, must go beyond the documented facts if we are to feel we have been given any insight into a human being.