People Who Build Schools
NRTA Live & Learn
By: Anne Mollegen Smith | Source: AARP.org | February 26, 2007
The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa opened in January of 2007, exactly 100 years to the month after the first Montessori school opened in Italy. Like Smith College in Massachusetts, the single-sex Leadership Academy for Girls focuses on excellence in education to prepare women for leadership in society.
Maria Montessori was the first female graduate of Italy's institute for medical education in 1896, and it was her work as a doctor that led her to become an educator. Her school was for the supposedly “uneducable” and certainly impoverished children of laborers living in the tenements of Rome, children she'd seen and treated in her medical practice. She found a teaching approach that let them master necessary skills for reading, writing, and self-management. And so the study of early childhood was born as a scientific focus along with a method of teaching children for “the release of human potentialities” that she saw in them. Now Montessori schools circle the world.
Sophia Smith was a stone-deaf spinster in her sixties in 1861 when she inherited the fortune her father built and her brother had enhanced, and which she felt helpless to dispose of wisely on her own. She first thought of founding a school to teach literacy to the deaf. As her own hearing failed, books had become her main comfort. But a nearby town in Massachusetts soon became the site of the Clarke School for the Deaf, filling the need.
Finally, with the guidance of her pastor John M. Greene (who would become the college's first president), she left the bulk of her fortune, amounting to $387,468, to create “an Institution for the higher education of young women, with the design to furnish for my own sex means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our Colleges to young men.” She wished such a school had existed for her. Opened in 1875, Smith College has become the largest independent liberal-arts college for women, preparing generations of women for leadership.
Miss Smith and Dr. Montessori both believed that good schooling provides for “the release of human potentialities,” just what the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls means to do.
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