Hacker News Reader

Comment by araneae | Hacker News Reader

You too can cheaply imitate a Montessori school by

a)Taking your kid out of public school and

b)Encourage your kid to do things he finds interesting with you at home and take him to museums and crap

True, it requires a mostly unemployed parent, but Montessori has just discovered how kids learn naturally at a young age. Just like a kid learns a language without having to be formally taught, he learns other things without formal education as well. The older years it's a different story, but there's really no need to pay a ton of money for a Montessori pre-school. Any parent can do it.

View on HN

This is a bit disingenuous. As mentioned in a previous comment, there is a method to Montessori. It's not "let the kids do whatever they want". It is a form of "formal" education and took years of research to come up with.

While parents can certainly homeschool, you can't claim it's an equal substitute for Montessori education.

I was challenging that; I think that the reason Montessori kids do better isn't because Montessori is genius, but because it's more in tune with how kids learn naturally. It's more that standard education is bad, not the Montessori is good.

But it's still so wrong.

Even if we can agree standard education is bad, that doesn't make everything else good by default. Including just "let your kid do things he finds interesting and take him to museums and crap".

How do you know that the Montessori method is what makes Montessori good, though, rather than the GP's theory?

It doesn't matter. It seems there has been a least one study that suggests Montessori is "better" than standard school (the premise of this whole discussion).

But to try to extend that to say that almost anything BUT standard school is good puts a huge burden of proof on the original poster.

If a>b, it doesn't automatically make c-z better than b too.

Your comment sounds like you don't know anything about Montessori education. The program of education you suggest has basically nothing in common with Montessori schooling, except perhaps for being different from traditional schooling.

Montessori's method is centered on structured, self-directed individual activities with materials prepared to focus children's attention on one or another particular skill considered important. Traditionally, it does not involve "doing things with you", "museums and crap", or just "doing things [one] finds interesting".

My wife and I are somewhat nervously heading this direction after one year of kindergarten with our autistic son. Homeschooling just seems to be a better fit.

> Any parent can do it.

Yeah, but it's easier to shift the responsibility to other, more "professional-looking" people, especially if you have the money to do that.

Which doesn't mean that I don't agree with you. One of my first childhood memories is of my father teaching me the letters of the alphabet, when I was 4 or so. He was on a lunch-break, I remember that, he worked on a construction site. After that it was easy to learn to read by myself at about 5, one day I just opened a kids' book and, as I had already knew what those letters meant, it was easy to start reading. He also taught me the first words and expressions in French ("ceci est une pipe" and all that), when I was 8 or 9. Nothing too fancy, he just taught me how to pronounce the words in French and we read a couple of simple phrases out-loud. That gave me a huge advantage over my school-colleagues a couple of years later, when we started to learn French in school.

It also mattered a lot for me that my parents' house was full of books, and the fact that I saw my father reading each and every day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com