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Dr. Elisabeth Caspari (1899-2002)
Elisabeth Caspari was born in Chateau d'Oex, a small alpine village in French-speaking Switzerland, on September 9, 1899. By the age of 30 she had, earned a terminal doctoral degree in music and pedagogy from the Ecole Normale de Musique in Lausanne, Switzerland, established a successful music school and married Charles Caspari, an engineer. On a journey to study world religions in Tibet and India 10 years later, the Casparis met and studied with Dr. Maria Montessori in Adyar Madras and Worked with Dr. Montessori for four years in the Hill Station of Kodaikanal. Elisabeth Caspari had just arrived in India in 1940 when she met Dr. Maria Montessori in Adyar, Madras, where she had gone to train Indian teachers at the invitation of Dr. George Sidney Arundale, President of the Theosophical Society. On that occasion, Caspari explained to Dr. Montessori how she used colors to help children learn to read music. Montessori responded by saying: "...you were a Montessorian before you met me! Why don't you stay and take my course." Caspari wanted very much take the Montessori course at that time, but she had the responsibility of accompanying Mrs. Gasque, the President of the World Fellowship of Prayer, who was leading the study tour on which she and Charles had embarked. Some months later, WWII broke out and neither the Casparis nor the Montessoris were able to leave India. It was then that Elisabeth Caspari was able to take the course with Dr. Montessori in Adyar Madras.
After completing her course, Dr. Caspari was invited by a Dutch classmate to stay with her in her bungalow on the beautiful hill station of Kodaikanal, in the Palani Hills of India, where the altitude reduces the severity of the heat that blisters the coastal planes in summertime. Soon, the British authorities sent Dr. Montessori and her son Mario to live in Kodaikanal as well. Elisabeth Caspari had the privilege of working with Dr. Maria Montessori for four years during the war. A devoted advocate of the Montessori system of education forever after, Dr. Caspari came to the U.S. where she opened the Wee Wisdom Montessori School in Lee’s Summit, Missouri in 1947. That was the first Montessori school to be opened in the U.S. after the Second World War. She also opened the first Montessori Teacher Education Center in the U.S. after the War in 1948. Over the years Dr. Caspari offered Montessori Teacher Education courses and established schools in Missouri, Mississippi, Florida and Mexico, where she and Dr. Feland Meadows founded the Pan American Montessori Society in 1973.
In 1976, Dr. Caspari moved to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina to prepare teachers and to support the work of Montessori Schools on the island and in Savannah, Georgia. After the death of her beloved husband, Charles, in 1978, Dr. Caspari moved to California where she continued to prepare teachers and help to found schools in several cities in California and Colorado. She finally moved to Montana, where she and Patrick and Anita Wolberd founded the Caspari Montessori Institute in 1998.
Among her many honors was the "Maria Montessori Lifetime Achievement Award" given to her in 1994 by the Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education (MACTE). Dr. Elisabeth Caspari celebrated her 100th birthday with some eighty friends from around the world in Livingston, Montana in September of 2000. She began to fail about a year later and she passed away in her home in Paradise Valley, Montana on July 11, 2002. She died only a few days after recovering enough to enjoy lunch with Dr. Feland Meadows, who had flown to Montana from Georgia to give final examinations to her students.
Elisabeth Caspari is missed and mourned by hundreds of students and friends throughout the world, who have been inspired by her life and who have adopted her motto: "Love is the Key."
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Dr. Feland L. Meadows
Feland L. Meadows, Ph.D. is the first Candidate for Investiture as the Roberto C. Goizueta Endowment’s Distinguished Chair of Early Childhood Education at Kennesaw State University’s Bagwell College of Education. Feland Meadows was born and raised in Mexico and is bilingual and bicultural. After Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Meadows served as President of the College of the Humanities in Mexico City and as Ford Foundation Consultant for University Reform to five Central American National Universities. He also is a founder of the Polytechnic University of Nicaragua. When his five-year-old daughter needed a better education, Dr. Meadows visited a Montessori school in Mexico City. He sat on the floor in a classroom one whole morning watching 3, 4 and 5 year-old children working independently, at their own initiative, with little or no intervention by the teacher. He enrolled his daughter in that school and soon decided that he needed to change careers. In 1970, he resigned his position as college President, employed five teachers trained in Italy and opened Sunny Hill Montessori School in Mexico City. The school served 250 children from six weeks to twelve years of age and they learned to speak Spanish, English, French and Japanese. In 1972, Dr. Meadows met Elisabeth Caspari, who had studied and worked with Dr. Maria Montessori in India for four years. He invited her to go to Mexico City to train him and 150 other teachers. She stayed and helped him train many more teachers for four years. During the seventies, Dr. Meadows had a great deal to do with improving the quality of Early Childhood Development and Education in Mexico. |
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As a consultant to two Mexican Presidents, Dr. Meadows researched and documented the devastating effects of malnutrition and the lack of stimulation upon the development and intelligence of millions of children who live in poverty in Mexico. |
Click to see more pictures of Dr. Meadows work in Mexico |
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In response to his study, the Presidents ordered all Government Ministries to increase food services tochildren in poverty throughout the country. Dr. Meadows trained Otomi and Nahuatl Speaking Candidates as Bilingual Teachers. With these teachers, he established 125 Bilingual (Spanish and Otomi or Nahuatl) Montessori Schools under thatched roofs in Indian villages where no schools had ever been before. Dr. Meadows helped to train five hundred Nahuatl Speaking Indian Women. These women mastered skills in community sanitation, childbirth, child development, nutrition, horticulture, raising rabbits and bee keeping. These women became effective change agents in their villages! Dr. Meadows transformed hundreds of Government Child-Care Centers in Mexico from child storage warehousing facilities, where children became retarded for lack of stimulation, into Child Development Centers, where millions of children have received stimulating, developmentally appropriate experiences and education for the last thirty years. In 1983, Dr. Meadows moved to California where he served as Coordinator for Montessori Education for the Irvine Unified School District. He secured $4,600,000 in grants from the U.S. Department of Education to fund an Early Intervention Program to Prevent School Failure for one hundred and seventy five at-risk 3-5 year-old children from Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Farsi and Spanish speaking communities in Irvine. In 1995, Dr. Meadows moved to Georgia to prepare one hundred and fifty teachers for the State Pre-K Program. He stayed on to prepare many more teachers while serving for seven years as the Fuller E. Callaway Foundation’s Distinguished Chair of Early Childhood Education at Fort Valley Sate University. Dr. Meadows served on the Georgia State Professional Standards Commission’s Early Childhood Advisory Council from 1997-98 and on its Zero to Five Taskforce in 2003. He proposed that the PSC create a separate credential, based upon a bachelor’s degree program of preparation, for teachers who serve children from zero to five years of age. In response to a groundswell of support for this proposal, the Professional Standards Commission established a credential for 0-5 teachers on September 14, 2004! Dr. Meadows has prepared more than two thousand five hundred teachers to serve children from birth to five years of age in the states of Georgia, Florida and California, and abroad in Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, France and Switzerland. Kennesaw State University and the Goizueta Foundation have charged Feland Meadows with the responsibility for establishing a Regional Center of Early Childhood Education that can serve Georgia and the South Eastern States. In accepting that charge, Dr. Meadows indicated that a bilingual, Spanish/English, Early Learning Laboratory School, designed to serve three hundred children from six weeks to five years of age, would be needed as a model for Georgia and the South Eastern Region. It will also serve as a site for 0-5 teacher candidates to conduct their one year practice teaching internship. Dr. Betty Siegel, President of the University, immediately placed the Early Learning Center at the top of her list of priorities for 2004-2005. Dr. Meadows immediately set to work, in collaboration with Dr. Wesley Wicker, V.P. for University Advancement, and with KSU Facilities Planning Architect John Anderson, in a search for funding resources and a property upon which to build the Early Learning Center Laboratory School. CERTIFICATIONS California State Administrative Services Credential California State Bilingual Certificate of Competence: Spanish California State Clear Single Teaching Credential, Social Sciences Pan American Montessori Society -- Early Childhood, 2.5-6, Certificate Pan American Montessori Society -- Master Teacher Certificate, summa cum laude Franz Liszt, National Academy of Music, Budapest, Hungary -- The Zóltan Kodály Concept of Childhood Music Education Certificate RECENT PUBLICATIONS Meadows, Feland L. (2006) Children Are Different: Have You Noticed? – What is Essential is Invisibleto the Eye. This research monograph is the first to be published by the Bagwell College of Education’s Department of Early Childhood and Elementary Education in its new On-line Journal —Taking Teaching-Learning Seriously, 02/24/2006. Meadows, Feland L. (2005, Sept/Oct.) Perché Johnny non sa leggere. In Vita dell’Infanzia Revista Mensile dell ‘Opera Nazionale Montessori, Septembre/Octobre 2005, Anno LIV - N.9/10, pp.47-57. Rome, Italy: ONM. Meadows, Feland L. (2004) SO, YOU WANT TO TEACH READING, RIGHT? The Center for Field Experiences and Partnerships, Kennesaw State University. Meadows, Feland L. (2002, September) Normalización, disciplina y límites en el aula Montessori. In Revista de la Pan American Montessori Society, Otoño, 2002. Meadows, Feland L. (2002, May) Quel che é essenziale é invisibile. In Vita dell’Infanzia Revista Mensile dell ‘Opera Nazionale Montessori, Maggio/Giugno - Luglio/Agosto 2002, Anno LI - N.5/6, pp. 82-89. Rome, Italy: ONM. Meadows, Feland L. (1999, October). Los Periodos Sensibles del Desarrollo. In Oquetza -Hacer Camino,Gaceta Educativa de la Asociación Montessori Mexicana, A. C.,Revista #36 octubre-noviembre, 1999. México, D.F.: AMME. Meadows, Feland L. (1999, March). Montessori -- Pionera del Constructivismo. In Oquetza - Hacer Camino, Gaceta Educativa de la Asociación Montessori Mexicana, A. C., Revista #34, marzo-abril, 1999. Mèxico, D.F.: AMME. OTHER RESEARCH AND WRITING A Study of Elements to be Considered in the Preparation of a Conceptual Framework for Teacher Education at Fort Valley State University, 2001-2003. Used by the Professional Education Faculty in preparation for the NCATE visit. Institutional Self Study Report of Fort Valley State University, for the Renewal of Accreditation Review by the MACTE Commission on Accreditation, 2003. Institutional Self Study Report of Kennesaw State University, for the Transfer of Accreditation From Fort Valley State University to KSU by the MACTE Commission on Accreditation, 2005. A New Early Learning Paradigm Can Help Most Children Write And Read Before They Are Six, An Educational Research Grant Proposal submitted to the INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION SCIENCES of the USDE November, 2006. RECOGNITION 2007 Fondazione Chiaravalle Montessori, sponsored by the President of the Italian Republic, The Honorable Giorgio Napolitano, the Italian Ministry of Culture and the City of Chiaravalle, selected Dr. Feland L. Meadows to serve as the sole Representative of the Montessori Community of the entire North American Continent. Dr. Meadows gave two Keynote Addresses to the Maria Montessori--Design at the Service of Education International Conference in Chiaravalle, Italy, Oct. 26-27, 2007. Dr. Meadows was awarded the Comune di Chiaravalle Maria Montessori Medal in recognition of his lifelong contributions to Montessori Education around the world. 2003 Opera nazionale Montessori, Rome, Italy -Appointed to serve on the ONM Instituto Superiore Montessori di Ricerca e Formazione, the Society's Institute of Research and Education. 2002 Opera Nazionale Montessori, Rome, Italy – Keynote Speaker for the biennial Education and Peace Conference held in Rome and Chiaravalle, Italy. 2000 Opera Nazionale Montessori, Rome, Italy – Candidate for the International Education and Peace Prize for work with poor, and at-risk children in Mexico and the U.S. (The Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Children’s Village in India, a much more worthy candidate, was awarded the Prize.) PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS
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