The Long Shadow of Maria Montessori

The Long Shadow of Maria Montessori

The dream of the perfect child.

This book puts the long shadow of the world-famous Maria Montessori under the magnifying glass. It places her thinking into what has been a largely suppressed but currently (once again) highly topical context of eugenics, racial theory and the pursuit of optimisation.

On the day when Maria Montessori (1870-1952) presented her quiet and disciplined ‘Montessori children’ in a glass showroom to visitors to the ‘Panama-Pacific International Exposition’ in San Francisco in 1915, the Italian doctor and biologist had reached the pinnacle of her career. Together with the eugenicists and racial ideologues of her time, she demonstrated to a world which believed in progress the possibilities of creating the ‘new Messiah’ via education and biotechnology. A good 100 years later, advances in the fields of genetic and reproductive technology are catching up with Maria Montessori’s biopolitical visions of a ‘Ministry of the Race’ (1951) and her lifelong dream of the perfect child.