January 6 in History

In January 1907, the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori opened the first Casa dei Bambini, or "Children's House," in a working-class apartment block in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. Though modest in scale, it became the testing ground for an approach to early education that now shapes thousands of schools around the world. Its central idea, that young children learn best through self-directed activity in a carefully prepared environment, challenged the rigid, teacher-centered classrooms common at the time.

In 1912, the German meteorologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener publicly proposed that the continents had once been joined and had slowly moved apart over geological time. Known as continental drift, the idea was dismissed or resisted by most scientists for decades. It was later vindicated in modified form by plate tectonics, which now underpins the whole of modern Earth science. The summary's phrasing is a common shorthand, but Wegener did not propose plate tectonics itself. He proposed the drifting of continents, and he lacked a convincing mechanism to explain it.