Maria Montessori was born in Italy in 1870 and was Italy's first female physician. Early in her career, Montessori's attention was drawn to questions of child development and education. In January 1907, eager to explore what she felt were possibilities untried with young children up to that time, she opened the Casa dei Bambini (Children's House) in a tenement building in Rome.

Given carefully prepared materials and new opportunities to learn, the children in that first Montessori environment grew in ways that seemed astonishing. They developed remarkable coordination, concentration, persistence, the ability to observe and discriminate, and a sense of order. Their abilities led to confidence in themselves, which in turn allowed them to undertake even more complex tasks. Under the guidance of the directress, the children chose what they wanted to work with, and Montessori found that in the security of the Casa, where materials were always available and help toward the next step was always forthcoming, the children were soon choosing to work with materials that corresponded precisely to what they most needed at that moment to learn. Since their work was self-motivated, the children learned eagerly and thoroughly. They were well on their way to developing independence, the confidence to choose goals for themselves, and the physical and intellectual abilities necessary to achieve those goals.

From the beginning, Montessori viewed education as preparation for whole life. She found that children wanted most of all to be helpful contributors in their own society. She deliberately structured the first Casa as a mini community, choosing a multi-aged grouping to model the real world at a not too daunting level. As the children learned to cooperate, sometimes helping a younger child, sometimes being helped by an older one, sometimes working alone, they developed respect for each other and began to understand what was needed for a community to thrive.

By the time Maria Montessori died in 1952, her ideas about education had spread around the world. Although specifics differ from culture to culture, at a broad level Montessori's educational objectives remain universal: to help children become eager, confident, capable, respectful, and contributing members of the community in which they live.