Montessori's Flawed Diffusion Model: An American Montessori Diffusion Philosophy. Occasional Paper. Series One.

This paper contends that Maria Montessori had a negative effect on the diffusion of the Montessori method in the United States. Throughout her life, Montessori held to the belief that her thoughts and their expression remained her exclusive intellectual property. She therefore tried to exert as much control as possible over the training of teachers in her methods and the establishment of Montessori schools. The main flaw of this approach was that teachers versed in her method were invited to see themselves as independent contractors, not as teachers working with other educators in the community. After the second World War, Nancy McCormick Rambush and a number of educators in the United States who admired Montessori's educational methods but not her restrictive personal control established an American Montessori movement. This American Montessori movement supported: (1) the critical role of parents as first teachers; (2) American Montessori education as a plurality of possibilities, not as a single orthodox iteration of Maria Montessori's thought; and (3) a reevaluation of the process of transmitting Montessori's message, in which insights on the Montessori method in America are seen as coming from those who receive the massage, not those who send it. (MDM)