Editorial policy

This page states, in one place, the rules this project applies to every page before it is written, not as an afterthought. The copyright and neutrality questions around Montessori content are genuinely easy to get wrong, and this project would rather over-document its own discipline than risk getting either wrong quietly. The page exists so a reader can check this project’s own claims to independence and accuracy, rather than take them on faith.

1. Copyright and quotation

Maria Montessori’s own original-language texts are in the public domain in the EU and most Berne Convention countries as of 1 January 2023 (life-plus-seventy-years from her 1952 death). In the United States, anything published in 1930 or earlier is in the public domain, regardless of her date of death (as of 2026; the US cut-off moves forward by one year every 1 January). This covers works of her sole authorship. Editions that others edited, compiled or revised, including editions of her lectures, each need their own rights check.
English translations are a separate, distinct copyright, generally held by the Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company (its own description of its relationship to AMI is set out, with a dated source, on the Historical Timeline), and several remain actively asserted, specifically The Absorbent Mind (1949) and The Secret of Childhood (1936), each checked against its edition’s own publication history rather than assumed from the general rule above.
House rule, with no exceptions: Montessori’s own words are paraphrased, or quoted briefly in this project’s own translation. A quotation is taken only from a work of her sole authorship published in her lifetime, after a rights check of that specific work, and is cited to that work. Published translations of her writing, modern ones included, are never quoted. A general rule about “her work” is never treated as a substitute for checking the specific work.
The same discipline applies to any other copyrighted source used for research, including academic papers and organisational materials: synthesise and cite, never reproduce wholesale.
This project’s own original writing (the synthesis, explanation and analysis composed for this site, excluding quoted or paraphrased third-party material and excluding the site’s own software) is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). In short: anyone may share and adapt it, even commercially, provided they credit this project, state what they changed, and release their own version under the same licence. The site’s own software is not covered by this licence and remains the author’s.

2. Neutrality between organisations

No organisation (AMI, AMS, MACTE, NAMTA, Montessori Europe, Svenska Montessoriförbundet, any other national association, or any other body) is presented as more authoritative than the evidence it can actually point to.
Where organisations differ (training length, fidelity standards, historical disputes such as the 1967 US trademark ruling on the word “Montessori” itself), this project states the disagreement and its sources, rather than adopting one organisation’s framing as the default truth.
Comparative pages (Choosing a School, Training and Certification Pathway Comparison, International Comparative Data) are written so that a reader affiliated with any one organisation, or with none, would recognise the description of their own organisation as fair.
Readers asked to check these pages for fairness are invited as individuals, in a personal capacity, never as representatives of an organisation.

3. Evidence framing

Research findings are described outcome by outcome (for example reading, executive function or social problem-solving) and presented as exactly as strong as the methods behind them support. No finding is described as “proven” or “settled”, and Montessori education is never summed up in a single verdict, for or against.
Earlier versions of this policy described the evidence as “promising and increasingly well-supported”. That phrase is retired: it implied a strengthening of the evidence that a 2026 review disputes (see the next point).
Where a finding is itself disputed among researchers (for example, how strong the evidence for Montessori education is, on which a 2026 review reached a sharply different conclusion from the 2023 syntheses), the dispute is reported as live and unresolved, not resolved in favour of whichever side was published first or is more widely cited by Montessori organisations themselves. See Evidence Status for that argument in full.
This site assigns no rating of its own, such as “supported” or “promising”, to any outcome until an independent advisory group exists to review such ratings. It reports how each study was designed (for example, whether places were allocated by lottery) and what its authors concluded.
Single-source statistics are flagged as such on the page, rather than presented with false precision, until they have been checked against a further source.

4. Privacy boundaries

No content on this site is a biography, CV, or promotional vehicle for its author, any specific school, or any identifiable child, family, or staff member. Material drawn from private correspondence, used only to establish this project’s own tone and voice, is used for style alone and never reproduced for its specifics.
This boundary does not apply to Maria Montessori herself as a historical figure: her own biography, including its genuinely difficult parts (her conflict with Fascist Italy, her years of restriction in India during the Second World War, her complex personal history), is legitimate and important subject matter for this site (see Maria Montessori: a Fuller Biography), because she is the public historical figure the entire project is about; hagiography would itself be a neutrality failure.
The one disclosed exception to “no biography” is the conflict-of- interest statement in §5 below. Naming the author’s own board role is disclosure, not biography or promotion: it exists so a reader can weigh possible bias against this project’s claimed independence, nothing more.
This site holds no data about any child. Any future research involving children is carried out by a research partner, which holds any data, collected with consent, under its own ethics approval; this site publishes only aggregate results, never data about an individual child. Adults who contribute to the site may be credited by name, with their consent.

5. Conflict of interest disclosure

This project’s author has chaired the board of Malmen Montessori, a Swedish Montessori school, for over a decade. That role is disclosed publicly, in the site footer in both languages, precisely because it could otherwise look inconsistent with this project’s stated independence from every Montessori organisation (§2).
Disclosure is not promotion. No page on this site recommends, favours, or defers to Malmen Montessori specifically, and the privacy boundary in §4 still applies: the board role is named for transparency about potential bias, not as a biography or a showcase for that school.
Recusal: that school is never used on this site as an example, a pilot, a study or test site, a partner, a reader panel, a recruitment channel or a co-applicant. The author stands aside from writing anything that compares named schools.
If this role, or any future one, is ever found to have shaped a specific page’s content or framing, that influence is corrected the same way any other factual error is corrected, per §6 below.

6. Correction discipline

When new research changes this project’s own understanding of a fact (as happened when a 2026 review reached a sharply different conclusion from the 2023 Campbell review this site had already cited), the correction is made directly in the affected page and recorded in the public corrections log, not quietly smoothed over.
Flagged gaps (missing citations, unverified statistics, sections not yet written) are stated explicitly on the page itself, so the absence of coverage is visible rather than silently implied to be “nothing further to say.”

7. What “verified” means

A claim is verified on this site when it has been checked against its primary source: the study itself or its publisher’s record, or the official text of a law, guideline or statistic. A summary, a press release or another website is not enough. Where only part of a source has been checked, such as a review’s published abstract, the page says so.
The author is responsible for each page’s checks, which cover its sources, as above; its English and Swedish versions against each other and against the site’s fixed Swedish terminology; and any Plain Language edition, to confirm that the same hedges survive. No second bilingual reader has yet checked the translations between English and Swedish.
A check confirms that a source says what the page says it says; it does not make the source itself right, which is why §3 exists. What these checks have missed is recorded in the corrections log. Its entry of 10 October 2026 concerns a citation that was published without being checked against the publisher’s record.

8. Activities, rewards and research

Nothing on this site uses reward mechanics for anyone, whether children, adolescents, educators or other adults: no points, badges, streaks, leaderboards or timers.
Any trial of an activity this site offers is run only through a research partner, with ethics approval in place before it starts. The partner, not this site, holds any data (§4).

9. Languages

Every page is published in full in both English and Swedish, with the same claims and the same hedges in each language.
Plain Language editions are labelled by their format, never by who is expected to read them.
If other languages or other formats, such as audio, are added later, each will be declared a partial set, stating which pages it covers.

10. Crawlers and AI

Crawlers that honour the licence in §1 are welcome, including those that gather text for search, AI training or AI-generated summaries. The aim is that when this site’s descriptions of the evidence are reused, their caveats travel with them.
Using this site’s text for AI training or in AI-generated summaries is subject to the same CC BY-SA 4.0 conditions as any other reuse: credit this site, indicate what was changed, and release adapted material under the same licence. As the licence itself states, its conditions do not apply where a copyright exception or limitation covers a use; this site asks to be credited even then.