Frierson P. R. (2025). Maria Montessori's Philosophy: Following the Child. Oxford University Press ISBN: 9780192883285.

Maria Montessori's Philosophy: Following the Child

Patrick R. Frierson’s Maria Montessori’s Philosophy: Following the Child presents a rigorous and expansive reevaluation of Maria Montessori as a significant philosophical thinker. Through detailed textual analysis and historical contextualisation, Frierson argues that Montessori developed a distinctive form of “pedagogical naturalism,” a philosophical approach grounded in empirical observation of children but deeply engaged with questions central to epistemology, moral philosophy, metaphysics, and political theory. Far from being solely an educational reformer, Montessori emerges in this study as a philosopher whose work challenges the boundaries between scientific inquiry and philosophical reflection. By centering children’s lived experiences and developmental trajectories, she offers an embodied, relational, and experimental framework for understanding human cognition, ethical agency, and social transformation. Frierson’s work contributes both to Montessori scholarship and to broader efforts to diversify and expand the philosophical canon by foregrounding the theoretical richness of thinkers historically excluded from it.

Erica Moretti