TAKING DICTATION: MARIA MONTESSORI'S WRITING METHOD

This essay is constitutes a reading of Maria Montessi's 1909 text Il metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica applicato all'educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini, the founding text of the Italian and international Montessori movement. I claim that Montessori's writing method is central to this pedagogical enterprise, since it highlights two fundamental aspects of the Montessorian method. First, it is founded in a notion of the human subject understood as a constitutive absence, as is made clear, I argue, through a pedagogical relationship that is crucially anti-mimetic and based on the “imitation of nothingness.” Second, I relate this anti-mimesis to Montessori's desire to found a writing method in what she calls the “materialization of the abstract” in and through the disciplining of the body's senses. Constitutive absence and graphic presence, I argue, are closely dependent in her method, and as such place Montessori within a wider European and American debate about the body as the automatic producer of graphic signs. In a final section, I interrogate the uses and abuses of the Montessorian method by the fascist regime and the latter's own attempt at devising a pedagogy for the new fascist subject.