Big City Montessori School has AMI credentialed teachers. We are proud to have on our staff head teachers Evelyn Castillo, Sanath Jayagoda and Soumya Lokumalage. As mentioned, Miss Pearl retired in 2008, after 35 years of teaching at BCMS. She is the aunt of Mr. Sanath and Miss Soumya, who are the next generation to carry on the Montessori legacy. We are proud to provide you with the following history written by one of our founders Meighen Tideman.

Dr. Montessori and Miss Lena (Miss Pearl’s Aunt)

Dr. Montessori was a world renowned educator and the Montessori Method was practiced throughout Europe. It came to the United States in the 1920’s. Dr. Montessori herself did a demonstration class at the S.F. World’s Fair. But the followers of John Dewey, the founder of the progressive educational system, fought it tooth and nail. Since their methods were put into the public schools, Montessori was starved out of the U.S. The Dutch schools put Montessori into their public school system. Anne Frank was a Montessori child. Just before World War II broke out, Dr. Montessori went to India to attend an international convention of educators. She was in India, then controlled by the British, when the war broke out. She was an Italian and Italy was allied with Nazi Germany under Mussolini.

The British interned her. Since she was elderly they didn’t keep her in the internment camp long, but they sent her to a remote village in the mountains and forbade her to go beyond a ten mile radius of that village. Meanwhile, Miss Lena had graduated from teacher’s college in Sri Lanka and was teaching in a strict, conventional Catholic girls’ school. She read about Dr. Montessori being held in this village in India and she begged her father to let her go there.

Miss Lena had read all Dr. Montessori’s books and she admired her. She had always wanted to be a Montessori teacher but there was no training available in India or Sri Lanka. She went to India and moved in with Dr. Montessori. It was impossible to get anything from Europe so they worked together every night building/developing hand made Montessori material. The wives and children of the diplomatic corps were sent to the village to escape Japanese bombing so Dr. Montessori was able to start a school for children there with these children. Soon other young Indian women began to show up for training and Dr. Montessori ended up with a functioning school and training center. I heard that Miss Lena actually designed a lot of the higher math materials herself. At the end of the war, Miss Lena invited Dr. Montessori to come to Sri Lanka and help her start a Montessori training center there, which she did.

Dr. Montessori was fully trained as a medical doctor. She took the work of earlier 18th century French doctors and tried out their methods. They invented the movable alphabet. Originally all the letters would be jumbled in a box and children would have to sort through looking for their letters. It was a young Italian aide at one of her first schools in Italy who first made a box with compartments. A young Italian music teacher invented the musical bells. If you read her books she gives full credit to teachers she worked with over the years that came up with different exercises. She was a magnificent scientific observer who saw the direction normal child development took and realized that the earlier work of Drs. Itard and Seguin would serve this development. As she worked with teachers she was a great listener and was always willing to incorporate a new idea.

Child-sized furniture was the invention of the janitor in her first school. She asked him to make some tables and benches for the children and he made them child-sized. When she saw them she said “Of course, this is the right thing.” From then on, all her schools had child-sized furniture. Although today all preschools have child-sized furniture, it was revolutionary in 1906.