As part of the celebration of Dr. Montessori’s birthday last week, I was asked to participate in a global, daylong series of webinars, sponsored by Montessori-Haus Asia that spanned five time zones: China, Australia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, and my house in Berwick, Maine, United States.  As a nine hour event, it was meant to reach an international audience with the question, “One hundred fifty-five years after Maria Montessori’s birth, what is her legacy?” The word legacy seems, at least for me, to connote something that is finite. It was accomplished, in the past tense, and it’s been left to a school, a community, the world. That doesn’t really fit how I see Dr. Montessori’s work, and that formed the basis of my session. I see the Montessori method as alive and current. What she initiated as supposition, has become accepted conclusion.

I talked about the enormity of research, really over the last 50 years, be it educational or even neurological, that supports what Dr. Montessori somehow intuited over a century ago. They are too numerous to list here, but here are a few, just in the last 20 years, to highlight a small fraction. A study comparing Montessori and non-Montessori elementary students found Montessori children showed “superior outcomes in reading, math, executive function, and social problem-solving, suggesting the method supports both academic and social development.” (Lillard & Else-Quest (2006, Science) Research following Montessori middle school graduates into high school found they “performed as well or better than peers in math and science, indicating Montessori builds a strong foundation for later academic success”. (Dohrmann et al. 2007, Journal of Research in Childhood Education) An early difficulty interpreting Montessori studies was that it was conducted by Montessorians, which is of course, just bad science. There is much more rigor in these more recent studies. A randomized controlled trial of Montessori preschool programs showed “children had better academic outcomes, social understanding, and mastery orientation compared to peers in conventional classrooms.” (Lillard et al. (2017, Frontiers in Psychology) According to another study, using experience sampling (when subjects record their feelings and thoughts in real time), Montessori adolescents reported “higher levels of intrinsic motivation, interest, and engagement in learning than peers in traditional schools.” Rathunde & Csikszentmihalyi (2005, American Journal of Education)  A similar study found Montessori students demonstrated “greater social cognition and positive peer interactions, suggesting the prepared environment fosters not only academic but also social-emotional growth.” (Lopata, Wallace, & Finn (2005, Journal of Research in Childhood Education). And last Spring, I read a fascinating study, reported in MontessoriPublic, titled, “Learning by Heart or with Heart: Brain Asymmetry Reflects Pedagogical Practices”, published in Brain Sciences (August 2023). This study used “neuroimaging to compare brain hemisphere asymmetry in schoolchildren educated in traditional versus Montessori settings.” On admissions tours at the Cornerstone School, I often joke, sort of, that, “Montessori kids are just wired differently”. I was right! Traditional‐schooled children showed “greater rightward asymmetry—linked with fixed, situation-specific memorization, but Montessori students showed left-dominant asymmetry, associated with semantic encoding and flexible conceptual connections.”  As Montessori educators, we feel that our classrooms support not only  in-depth learning, but also a deeply integrated experience that weaves knowledge in all curriculum areas into an integrated whole. A tapestry of understanding. It’s gratifying to know the concepts which Dr. Montessori felt were true, are in fact demonstrably true.