| "I
stepped into my first classroom fifty years ago as a teacher
in a one-room schoolhouse. Five continents, a million miles,
thousands of students and dozens of schools later, I have
reached another first in my professional journey…I've
created a comprehensive program which will empower parents
to become their young child's first and best teachers."
 Dr.
Joseph D. Randazzo, founder of Randazzo/ Montessori and developer
of the Smart-Start Learning System, began his teaching career
in the 1950's in a rural community in the foothills of the
Berkshire Mountains in Massachussetts.
It was that experience, in a one-room
schoolhouse, that launched his lifelong quest for the optimum
learning environment for all young children and their families.
The journey was long and rewarding, and took him to teaching
in farming communities in Portugal and Spain, to inner-city
internships in London and Bergamo (Italy), and then back to
London to join the Montessori/British Infant School reform
movement in the 1960's. His studies and experiences on the
Continent allowed him the incomparable distinction of having
personal and professional relationships with two of the most
celebrated education families of the 20th century -- the Montessoris
(Ada and Mario) and the Piagets (Jean and children). Dr. Randazzo's
groundbreaking 1969 publication, "The Case For Early
Learning," resulted from these fruitful experiences and
friendships.
Returning to the United States, Dr. Randazzo
carried the reform banner of the Association Montessori Internationale
(AMI) to Connecticut, Massachussetts, and South Florida as
a teacher, principal, associate professor of education, associate
superintendent of schools, and dean of the School Center at
Nova University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Dr. Randazzo
was the founding Headmaster of the University Schools and
the Randazzo Schools, private preparatory schools serving
infants through high-school students.
Today, Dr. Randazzo seeks to reconnect
contemporary, changing families to the age-old virtues of
childrearing and nurturing. In creating the Smart-Start system,
Dr. Randazzo infuses the spirit of home and family into the
classroom and, for young children, reconnects the classroom
to the home and family where it used to be, and once again
should be.
The Randazzo/Montessori Smart-Start Learning
System is Dr. Randazzo's latest contribution to education,
his lifelong profession. Smart-Start provides parents with
educational materials in the framework of a specially designed
learning system, so that they can shape their children's education
at home during the critical years of their young lives, from
birth to age 6.
"If I have a mission,
it's to encourage you to become your child's first and most
important teacher. I want to show you how to help your child
become the happy, well-adjusted and bright person that only
you can help him be."
Through Smart-Start, every parent
becomes a teacher, and every child becomes a successful learner.
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