The American Montessori Society, based in New York, reported 7 percent membership growth in just the past year, and many of the schools are getting ready to celebrate the centennial of the Montessori beachhead.
Once considered a maverick experiment that appealed only to middle-class white families in the States, Montessori schools have become popular with some black professionals and are getting results in low-income public schools with the kind of children on which Montessori first tested her ideas.
The stubborn Italian physician and her contemporary, U.S. philosopher and psychologist John Dewey — who believed that learning should be active — are considered perhaps the most influential progressive thinkers in the modern history of education.