Most people are familiar with Maria Montessori from the eponymous 'Montessori schools' dotted about the world. When one hears the phrase "Montessori method", one thinks of soft play, unstructured classes, arts and crafts, and soft-spoken teachers. If you have personal acquaintance with Montessori schools you might also remember the strange obsession with measurement :

The sharp-eyed reader will notice one of these measurements is a bit strange. What does "Cephalic index" mean? Something very precise: you take the maximum width of the head (biparietal diameter), multiply it by 100, and then divide it by the maximum length (occipitofrontal diameter). Besides its fairly benign use for correcting cranial deformities, the cephalic index was also famously used by scientific racists to demonstrate the racial superiority of Europeans over Africans. So what is it doing in Maria Montessori's 'Anthropological Notes'?

The answer is rather simple: Maria Montessori was a eugenicist. You won't find this on Montessori school websites, nor will you find it in any of the recent scholarship on the 'Montessori method.' Wikipedia tactfully excludes her racial views and Claude daintily tip-toes around them, noting she was a 'product of her time' and someone who 'transcended eugenics in her later thought.' All of this tracks with the Montessori legend: a highly capable, independent woman (first to get a medical degree in Italy!), who pioneered child-centred education for the working classes. 'Dr. Montessori' is now something of a educational prophet, acting as the guiding role-model and intellectual leader of a vast network of research centres, charities, charities, and schools.

If Montessorism is a religion, then The Montessori Method is its bible. Initially published in 1913, The Method outlines Montessori's experimental school in improverished Roman tenements called 'La Casa dei Bambini.' It is a well-wrought narrative in which Maria, an educated intelligent woman digusted with the harsh rigours of the mainstream schools, decides to revolutionise education. Her new school will be child-focused, allowing children to grow and develop according to their own inner needs. The climax of The Method is Maria's finding that children reared using the Montessori method outperform those in orthodox schools, even the 'deformed and degenerated' ones.

Every Holy Book needs a corresponding set of aprocypha. Three years prior to The Method, Montessori published a stranger, mostly forgotten book: Antropologia Pedagogica. It is a collection of her research and lectures on the difference between human races. The Montessori world is divided into two groups: the 'macrocephalic' and the 'microcephalic.' The former, exclusively confined to Europeans, represent the "triumph of all the elements of beauty over … those ugly forms which were characteristics of primitive races." The latter, on the other hand, comprise the inferior races: "American Negroes, Australian Bushmen, Hottentots, Bantus, Tasmanians, Africans, Polynesians, American Indians, the Chinese, and Hindu Indians."

Montessori records that Europeans have an average cranial volume of between 1500 and 1600 cubic centimetres, American ‘Negroes’ 1400 to 1500, whilst Australian Bushmen only 1250 to 1350 (Fallace, 2023). What does this mean? ‘The microcephalic cranium is of the inferior type', Montessori clarifies, 'suggesting that of an ape.' All of this followed the orthodox race science of her time, much of which pioneered by the Italian anthropologists Cesare Lombroso and Giuseppi Sergi. Montessori had even studied with the latter during her medicine degree. Like Sergi, Montessori believed the superior macrocephalic had its own internal divisions: she found, for example, the Northern Italian race ('Orte', or 'Fate') were smarter, better looking, and had larger skulls than their Southern Italian neighbours:

Followers of Montessori typically ignore these racist views, arguing they are not central to her pedagogical theory. A closer examination merely reveals how bizarre her views actually were. A crucial characteristic of European civilisation, according to Montessori, was its power of 'changeability': it possessed so-called ‘unlimited powers of evolution.' Montessori was not a Mendellian evolutionist but a Lamarckian, thus allowing her Casa Dei Bambini to directly supervene on the biological 'essence' of her students. That is why we give children the freedom to wander: to prevent deformities and foster the healthy development of the race.

Montessori's Lamarckian beliefs distanced her from her Mendellian contemporaries; she took another step away by celebrating racial 'hybridisation', arguing the 'Neo-Latin' race, by mixing Mediterranean and Nordic, helped further the teleology of mankind. What was this teleology? Well this is where things get strange. Montessori was a life-long Catholic and believed education could be used to evolve a "New Man." Montessorian evolution is animated by a 'mysterious force' with its own hidden purpose: inanimate matter is guided towards animal life, animal life to humanity, and humanity towards a messianic superorganism. Through the dynamos of science, hard work, willpower, Man will create "Supernature." All minds will link; war will be literally unthinkable.

Montessori believed the child was the key to this process: in The Secret of Childhood Montessori proposed that children had an 'absorbant phase', during which they would intake the sin of society into their biological essence. The Montessori school had to provide a pure and beautiful space insulated from this corruption, so that children could continue humanity's racial evolution. In her view, unspoiled children embodied the Christ spirit and served as “the vehicle which transports mankind through the evolution of civilisation.”

It is hard to argue Montessori distanced herself from any of these views. In 1932 she wrote a letter to Mussolini claiming her method would ‘create a real mental hygiene that, when applied to our race, can enhance its enormous powers that—I am certain—outstrip the powers of all other races.' Then, in 1949, three years before her death, she published the following in The Absorbant Mind :

It's not pretty, but it is there. So, as followers of 'Dr Montessori', what are we going to do? Can we detach the the pedagogy of Montessori from her intellectual foundations? Modern Montessori schools certainly think so. The axiology of Montessori's pedagogy was a fusion of Catholocism and Theosophy: modern Montessori schools jettison this core and replace it with what Charles Taylor calls 'expressive individualism.' Instead of all the creepy catholic race science, Montessori schools now brand themselves as sites of 'personal development', 'harmony', and 'individuality.' Fittingly, they have also abandoned Montessori's goal of a unified society. There is no single Montessori institution - the 'Montessori' schools you see advertised today are independent private businesses with vastly differing interpretations of The Method. Some are little more than fancy daycare, others are highly test-oriented. In many countries their prohibitive cost ensures they are an elite affair.

Montessori schools are not the true heirs of her theory. Thought-complexes like Montessorianism, Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere, and Nazi race science are bizarre and wacky. They are also surprisingly familiar. Free from the post-war consensus, our old friends 'the Nordics', "Mediterreans', and 'Africans' are returning on X; Eastern Establishment moggers now express anti-Italian and anti-Irish sentiment; twitter-heads celebrate the beauty and elegance of Ancient rome; and there is a rise in "Cultural Christianity." Montessori today would almost certainly be alt-right, especially given her obsession with birthrates and biologically improving children.

Here is a theory I am currently toying with: given certain dispositions, social positions, and empirical beliefs, only certain ideologies can form. There is a structure to thought. Christo-accelerationism and crypto-Nazis are the ideological flora which naturally form given a particular environment of belief. They were dead once, yet now they return. Can you feel it in the air? Our ideological climate is becoming stranger: hereditarianism is challenging egalitarianism. Feminists are alleging the sexual revolution has failed. Social media slop is making it impossible to deny some culture is 'low.' Gaza is confounding the mythos of WWII and Holocaust memoriam. New media forms promise a new mass consciousness. The winds of change are blowing.

Welcome back to the 1930s.