OUR HISTORY

When Renilde Montessori, youngest granddaughter of Maria Montessori, assumed the leadership of Association Montessori Internationale in 1995, she recognized the need for the Montessori community to re-establish that essential link to her grandmother’s social mission.

Important work had always been achieved under difficult circumstances by pioneering Montessori educators, but Montessori’s profound vision of humanity was often under pressure of being regarded solely as an exclusive education “label.” Renilde’s view of bringing Montessori home was to be supported by the work, connections and advocacy of Montessori educators who embraced the ideas and mission of a return to the origins: serving disenfranchised populations, learning deeply from that experience, promoting children’s rights throughout society. These aspirations were to be incorporated into the vision and mission of Educateurs sans Frontières (EsF), established in 1998, and launched in 1999 (AMI Bylaws).

Initially, the so-called EsF Assemblies were the primary route of connecting Montessori educators who wished to support EsF and find inspiration from Maria Montessori’s commitment to humanity. EsF Assemblies create an opportunity for the participants to study Montessori’s works and ideas that apply to the broader social mission of the Montessori movement, the understanding of the development, rights and needs of children, who form a unique link between the past and the future. Essential to the assemblies is ‘the need for the community to inform itself from itself. Through the dynamism of the group itself come the ideas, come the connections, come the network, and comes the permission to develop something.

The first EsF Assembly was hosted in Città di Castello, at the Villa Montesca: which also symbolized a physical return to the landscape where Maria Montessori had delivered her first training course exactly ninety years earlier.