Maria Montessori and Joan Ganz Cooney

MARIA MONTESSORI

JOAN GANZ COONEY

Hillary and Chelsea

Chelsea

Growing up in late nineteenth-century Italy, Maria Montessori was encouraged by her mother to pursue her studies, including in higher education—a rarity for Italian women at that time. Over the objections of her father, she studied medicine at the University of Rome. Although she confronted antagonism and harassment from her male colleagues and professors, in 1896 she graduated with the highest honors and became one of Italy’s first women doctors.

A physician specializing in pediatrics, Maria was an early advocate for children’s rights, including the right to an education. Refusing to accept the prejudice and cynicism of those who believed that differently abled children could never learn, Maria wrote to the relevant authorities to advocate for special classes and schools. Her persistence was rewarded in 1899 when she was appointed as a counselor to the newly created national league dedicated to the protection of children with disabilities. The following year, the league opened its first school to train teachers, complete with a laboratory classroom. Students in that first year’s class passed the so-called normal school’s year-end exam, and the new schools’ efforts were deemed a success.

“Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a nation.”

—MARIA MONTESSORI

Over the next few years, Maria created a new system of education and, in 1907, opened her first preschool, Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House), in the low-income San Lorenzo neighborhood of Rome. The Casa’s teachers would demonstrate a task, then encourage the students to complete the same task on their own. Rather than requiring children to simply listen, as other Italian schools did in the early twentieth century—Maria was a vocal critic of schools where “children, like butterflies mounted on pins, are fastened each to his place”—Casa dei Bambini helped children direct their own learning through “free choice.” They were encouraged to explore using all their senses and to help clean up after they were finished, to leave the space clear for the next child’s discovery.

“The world of education is like an island where people, cut off from the world, are prepared for life by exclusion from it,” she said of traditional Italian education. It seemed obvious to Maria that allowing children to learn from their surroundings was a much better approach. Maria’s pedagogy was not haphazard: She had researched and analyzed how brains acquire and store information. For Maria, her strategy, heralded as being more humane and child-centered, was the clear outcome of science. The success of students in that first school inspired her to open many more schools, and the Montessori Method became a standard approach in Italian education.

In 1909, Maria published her first book, and it was quickly translated into many languages. (Its English title was succinct: The Montessori Method.) By 1911, there were Montessori schools across Western Europe and in the United States. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, she showed her approach to early education in a “glass classroom” that allowed passersby to watch young students making their own choices and working with intense focus. The following year, Maria expanded to elementary schools and explored how best to extend her method to older children.

In 1922, the Italian government appointed Maria the country’s inspector of schools, quite a few of which were by then Montessori schools. In 1934, after years of growing fascism and the Italian government’s alignment with Hitler’s Germany, Maria left her beloved home country to live in Sri Lanka, Spain, and eventually, the Netherlands, where she died in 1952.

Today there are an estimated twenty thousand Montessori schools around the world, including thousands in the United States. I went to a Montessori preschool and adored it. (My favorite lessons were about the cicadas and our careful—and respectful—explorations of their shed skin.) It took guts to revolutionize what education could mean, particularly for the youngest learners and differently abled children. It’s not surprising that Maria won multiple recognitions in multiple countries and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She pioneered an approach that, for the first time, embraced the idea that children are creative, curious, and eager to learn, and deserve to be treated as individuals. As she reportedly said: “The greatest gifts we can give our children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence.”

Hillary

Born fifty-nine years after Maria and six thousand miles away in Phoenix, Arizona, Joan Ganz Cooney would also revolutionize children’s education—through a very different means.

Joan started out in the early 1960s as a television producer, working on documentaries for educational station Channel 13 in New York. She later explained that she was influenced by Father James Keller’s Christopher Movement, which called on people of faith to apply their principles to the world around them. “Father Keller said that if idealists didn’t go into the media, nonidealists would,” she recalled.

Joan’s first programs were dedicated to teaching the public about major issues. One day in 1967, she went with her boss to a meeting at the Carnegie Corporation to discuss whether television could not only inform adults, but help prepare young children for school. When the idea of a study on the subject came up, Joan’s boss answered for her: She wouldn’t be interested in that. But Joan exclaimed, “Oh yes I would!” She traveled across America for her study, talking to experts and observing children. “Children all over the country were singing beer commercials,” she said. “So it wasn’t a question of ‘could it teach,’ the question was ‘could it teach something of potential use to children.’ ” In her report, “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education,” Joan proposed a show like Sesame Street.

The report helped make a case for foundations and the U.S. Department of Education to contribute $8 million to fund a new company, the Children’s Television Workshop. In the male-dominated fields of scholarship and television, people worried that the new project wouldn’t be taken seriously with a woman in charge. Though it had been her study and her idea, Joan had to sit down and write a list of names of men who could be considered for the job. “I was told that if they chose one of them that I would be number two,” she remembers. “And I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I won’t be number two.’ It was absolutely what I was born to do, and I knew it.” She successfully overcame the skepticism to become the executive director when Sesame Street premiered on PBS on November 10, 1969.

Sesame Street was a hit with kids and parents alike. The newspapers called her “Saint Joan” and said a miracle had occurred for children, who were learning their ABCs and 1-2-3s with the help of catchy songs and characters like Oscar the Grouch. Chelsea especially loved Big Bird as a little girl, and I loved watching her light up when she learned a new word thanks to Sesame Street.

Of course, even a beloved show like Sesame Street had its detractors. Six months after it premiered, a state commission in Mississippi voted to ban the show from airing on public television. One of the commission members leaked the story to the New York Times, explaining that “some of the members of the commission were very much opposed to the series because ‘it uses a highly integrated cast of children’ ” and that those members felt that Mississippi was not yet ready for it. Joan called their decision “a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi.” After public outcry, Mississippi was forced to reinstate the show after banning it for twenty-two days.

Joan remained in her position until 1990 and served on the Children’s Television Workshop board for years afterward. I served for a few years on the board alongside her, where I saw firsthand Joan’s dedication to educating children. When asked about her “legacy” a few years ago, Joan scoffed, “A legacy is when something’s over; this just keeps going.” She’s right: Sesame Street is still going strong, and so is Joan.

Joan helped revolutionize children’s television in the 1960s, and she isn’t finished yet. Sesame Street is now in more than 150 countries, and Sesame Workshop is bringing play-based learning to hundreds of thousands of children in refugee camps and communities around the world. In 2007, Sesame Workshop created the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a research lab that is now studying how to design entertaining and engaging educational programming for children using digital media.

Both Maria and Joan had to fight for the chance to follow their passion into higher education and a meaningful career. It can’t have been easy. But they were determined to do it anyway, and because they did, the world of education has never been the same.