Education for Mentally Handicapped Children.

Dr. Maria Montessori was a medical student in the 1890s serving as an intern in the psychiatric clinic of Rome, Italy, which housed the "idiot children" then relegated to insane asylums. Appalled by what she saw happening to these children, she began a lifelong study of mentally deficient children and then quickly extended her work to the study of normal young children. The approach to educating the very young which she pioneered in her "Homes of Children" over several decades resulted in successes that exceeded even her own expectations. In working with retarded children she transformed threeto-seven-year-olds into avid pupils who learned cleanliness, manners, "grace in action," and they became acquainted with animals and plants and with the manual arts. They got both sensory and motor training and learned rudiments of counting, reading, and writing. When, in 1912, Montessori published...