Some years ago, in his extensive account of the emergence of special education in Britain, D. G. Pritchard suggested that certain British pioneers, such as Mary Dendy (1855–1933), had been particularly influenced by “the Montessori method and its apparatus.” More recently, Carolyn Steedman has also identified Maria Montessori (1870–1956) as a pivotal figure in the translation of European educational styles to Britain. Although there were clearly similarities between the “medico-pedagogic” approach to the education of feebleminded children in British special schools and colonies around the turn of the nineteenth century and the “scientific pedagogy” developed contemporaneously by Montessori in Rome, it is unlikely that Montessori had a direct impact on British educational practices until the second decade of the twentieth century. Montessori had certainly visited London to study British approaches to mental deficiency in 1900, shortly after opening her “orthophrenic school” in 1899, but her work only became widely known after the translation of her seminal book into English in 1912, and her first official visit to England was not until 1919, nearly thirty years after the foundation of the first British special schools.

In this chapter, I want to challenge previous historical emphasis on Montessori as the key influence on the origins and evolution of British educational approaches to feebleminded children by analyzing in more detail both the precise form and the complex ideological and pragmatic roots of British pedagogic practices in special schools and colonies during the closing decades of the nineteenth and opening years of the twentieth century.