There is a good deal of research on Maria Montessori's educational ideas, but not much on the movement that she initiated. In the period between the two World Wars, Montessori attracted a large following. The spiritual and social liberation of the child was the motto of the Montessori Movement. The aim of the present project is to investigate how the message propagated by the Montessori Movement was received in three different countries, England, Italy and Sweden, from about 1912 to 1939. The focus will be on the interrelationship between educational innovation and the shaping of public opinion in the media. How, for instance, were such central concepts of the Montessori Movement as "freedom" and "auto-education" understood in these diverse national contexts? And how should we explain the movement's lack of impact in Sweden, during a period when many other experiments in social engineering were encouraged? The initial hypothesis of this study is that the Montessori Movement concerned itself not only with the school curriculum and the marketing of didactic materials but also with more far-reaching questions about the place of children in society. The child was the "forgotten citizen", a children`s party ought to be created. The Montessorians were among the first to reflect upon the growing generation gap. Social evils such as war and criminality were traced back to the war between adults and children. The "normalizing" education provided by Montessori schools might, however, solve all these problems.