The Miseducation of Maria Montessori
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Every day we dropped him off he would cry and throw a tantrum, and it would break our hearts, but you know... that's life.
He was falling behind all his classmates, his speech hadn't developed, he didnt sing the songs, do the dances, etc. All the other kids were doing great.
I attended one of his classes and noticed he refused to sit at his chair, all he wanted to do was stare out the window to try to spot airplanes.
That's when we decided to switch over to Montessori, mainly because I wanted him to have more freedom, and at least enjoy school even if he didn't learn much.
The change frankly has been incredible, after just one week he was waiting inpatiently at the front door of our home, anxious to go to school. The only crying when we dropped him off was from my wife, when he ran into the school without looking back every morning.
His speech and abilities have normalized with the rest of his class after a year.
Now I'm not saying everyone will have the same outcome,maybe he just grew and would've developed any way.
I just wanted to share my personal experience in case anyone finds it useful.
Traditional education is just shit and evokes a poor response in most of everyone. And alternative methods are better, even for those who can tolerate the former.
In this case there isn't an equivocal middle ground. Anyone who attended public schooling can tell you that our K-12 education system is a dumpster fire.
Eg from what I can tell, traditional German Kindergartens are just fine and most kids love them. (German schools are a different beast.)
Sweden is also getting worse, we have some weird idea that everyone should be in the normal classes, even the ones with different diagnoses. "Everyone should feel included". This leads to a lot of youth not able to get anything done in school and having to get help after school to keep up. Some of them get aggressive because of their ADHD and disturbs the rest of the class.
And the grading system has apparently completely broken down. Now the kids in 7'th grade gets judged towards the goals for 9'th grade. So someone that feels they are doing great in 7'th grade gets an E (F is worst) because they didn't get to learn what they are supposed to learn in 9'th grade. How are they supposed to know if they are doing well or not?
Its not like e.g. Korea where this is basically obligatory to use.
My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany has been forced to change their kids school or use homework help or other way of paying for help in school because the parents either aren't educated enough to help by themselves or just don't have the time to help them due to working two jobs to keep up. This is ofcourse in a small area in Germany but it is one of the densest populated.
When walking in the streets I see homework business in the former shopping windows even in tiny towns. And they are visibly used by youth.
I also had a hard time believing this about Germany when I first started hearing about it 20 years ago but I have met so many parents that repeat the same thing and it hasn't changed a bit. No wonder Montessori and Waldorf schools are so popular there.
In Sweden the homework help is part of school. Our kids school has four different homework help after school that is run either by state/school or teacher students as a project. On top of that comes extra teachers for the kids with diagnoses. They always follow the student around to classes and help out where the teacher isn't enough.
> My "proof" is that everyone I know in Germany [...]
See, the problem is that other people seem to have different anecdotal experience. So that's why in an online discussion it can make sense to appeal to published statistics and other articles.
Welcome to the truth: the main determinant of a child’s education success is the socioeconomic background of their family.
> or just don't have the time to help them due to working two jobs to keep up.
This is a real problem in the English speaking world, where rents are higher than the average salary and where a kindergarten cost 2000£ per month. In Germany, where you can live pretty much everywhere on minimum wage, this is much much less prevalent.
I grew up in (Eastern) Germany, but left in 2009. As far as I can tell, cram schools like that are rather niche.
Compared to my adopted home of Singapore at least, where you see them on every corner.
Do keep in mind that the educational system in Germany is run by the individual states. And I have only seen Saxony-Anhalt directly on a day to day basis. Though I probably still had more exposure to the other states than someone from outside the country.
I didn't like German schooling that much. But I have no clue about the other complaints in your comment.
This may be me getting old and starting to have strong, rose-tinted memories, but I am sure many who get good grades today would have been close to failing only twenty short years ago.
I find this rather hard to believe. A German teacher makes way more money teaching in a school than whatever they could make with a homework help business. An entry-level high school teacher earns between 40K and 60K, depending on the region.
The reason for this "freedom of education" is that in the early 20th century, religious parties wanted to allow religious schools, whereas socialist and liberal parties wanted everybody to be allowed to vote. They compromised and enshrined both in the constitution.
The result of this is that anyone can start a school, as long as they meet a bunch of criteria and teach the correct curriculum. So public schools, protestant schools, Montessori schools, anthroposophic schools, and islamic schools all receive the same funding and have to teach the same curriculum, but they have freedom in how they teach it. If the quality of a school drops, they have to improve or get closed.
I think the system does a reasonable job of ensuring everybody can find a school where they can thrive. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but it seems to work well enough. In recent years, there seems to have been a lot of focus on making sure highly talented kids get sufficiently challenged; my oldest son went to a special 1 day a week school for talented kids, and half a day to a talent class in the school itself, and he skipped a grade, so all of that is possible. My youngest son struggles with language (originally speaking, now reading), and gets extra support for that.
There is an awful lot of testing, though. When I was a kid, there was just a single standardised test at the end of primary school (age 12). Now there's standardised testing in every year starting in the second year of kindergarten. I'm a bit baffled by the amount of testing, but I can only assume it helps them find kids that need some extra support or extra challenge.
Kindergardens are pretty relaxed so. I can recommend the church run ones in Bavaria, despite the name they don't care about religion beyond some stuff around christian holidays.
Just like there are many similarities between shopping at German hard discounters (despite them being run by totally different companies) vs shopping at big box stores in the US (who are also run by totally different companies).
My experience (public schools in Arlington, MA, class of 92) paints a different picture; I feel I received an excellent education. And though I put my teenage daughters in Montessori kindergarten (a fantastic experience that I believe continues to benefit them today), their public school education in Duxbury, MA has also been very good.
In my view, the worst thing about public education in the US is how inconsistent quality is from district to district. One public district can be excellent, well-funded, full of great teachers, while the district in the next county over is a dumpster fire. I've got a kid now so we played this game when deciding where to move. I could move to one street, which is in a great quality School District, or I can save $300K and move one block to the west, where gangs run the high school and your kid will not learn multiplication. This is a result on the US's obsession with micro-local control (and funding) of education.
What counts as 'standard' is wildly different around the world. Where are you based?
Eg 'standard' Kindergartens in Germany are fairly relaxed. In contrast, Kindergartens in Singapore are much more regulated. So much that even their ostensibly Montessori or Waldorf branded ones are much stricter and less play based than German 'standard' Kindergartens.
I would give GP the benefit of the doubt here as he's referring to a more "traditional" education when compared to something like Montessori, Waldorf, Outdoor School, etc. My only experience is with schools in Taiwan, Japan, Korea and US. While these countries do have big differences, they can still be categorized together when compared to something like Montessori.
To compare and contrast between the two categories, testing does not usually happen in Montessori schools and I would consider testing a core part of traditional education.
While there are some odd things in anthroposophy, I think a great deal of it is actually metaphorical and coming from someone with a good intuition about how humans work. You have to look past the terminology, though, and the 1910-20ish free speculation about how the world works. :)
There's an emphasis on self-development, too, which I've come to see as a vital part of working with humans. If you can't look past your own self and own biases, you'll never be able to work with all sorts of people on their terms.
Montessori schools emphasised interaction and discovery using the simple tools of the day, like tools and toys.
In todays school, the kids are often overstimulated by our current multi-media world. Montessori schools provide a calmer environment.
So my pet theory is that they started out as stimulating under-stimulated kids, and today are calming down over-stimulated kids.
What Montessori and Waldorf both intuited is that children have a natural state which is optimum for learning. I too disagree with many aspects of how they get there, but the orientation matters.
I even saw this growing up homeschooling, where arguably no institution is involved.
Homeschooled kids who hated learning and mostly felt no one cared what they thought were taught with textbooks.
Kids who were homeschooled with unschooling, Montessori, unit studies, or basically any other form of student-directed learning seems “in themselves.” They we’re curious, relaxed, interested in the world, helpful.
Their parents could be weird, they could be raised in a cult, still it held up.
There really is a fundamental gap in “what a human being is for” between authoritarian and self-determinate approaches.
Authoritarians truly have no idea what they are trading for in order to enforce the “values” they pretend to have. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work to introduce human-first approaches to education institutions. Authoritarians recognize this approach as one they can’t relate to and they are afraid of it. Even when teachers, parents, and students are willing, authoritarian admins will completely shut it down.
There’s one reliable way to distinguish these systems - tune into your kid as a parent and believe what you are feeling.
It can hard to do in the face of societal expectations & realities, it’s even hard for me sometimes and I have a lifetime of choosing my own path.
“Most Likely to Succeed” is an incredible body of research from Harvard on this and the documentary that goes with it hits even harder.
Parents/guardians who care about their kids deserve to trust their intuition about what they need.
Kids have homework in their first year of primary school???
That means that the two to three years of primary school without homework mostly equate with the last two years of kindergarten in Germany (which obviously also do not assign any homework)
To be honest, I don't know if and how much homework is assigned in primary school. I imagine that this also differs between states and even schools.
If Tommy diligently practices math every day and does all his homework, but gets worse test scores than lazy Billy, it's impossible to know whether he is studying in a counterproductive manner, has poor test-taking technique, or is just less able than Billy. If the inverse is true, intuition and a desperate desire for justice tell us that Tommy's hard work is what made his performance better (and possibly, that he works harder because he's more intelligent).
Some goof off all day at school instead of doing any work- should they be able to then not take the work home and do it there and still get the same grade as the students who don't goof off and get their work done in class?
Should all students be required to spend the same amount of time at school doing school work when some would prefer to do their work at home?
At what grade level is it appropriate to allow students to manage their own schedules and where they do their school work? Elementary? Junior high? High school? College?
One size does not fit all.
Oh ok, if you say so. I'm sure we'll get right on that. But until that goes into effect, we'll have the homework to compensate.
Not new, really. I was assigned lots of homework in grade school, back in the early 90s. I just easily got all of it done at school (still with tons of time to spare for reading, writing, and drawing), so it never actually went home.
Both schools were regular ones, and in both cases - there wasn't any bullying. I don't remember what the problem was, but the fact is that going to a different place had a great effect.
In your particular case, it could be the change itself that had an impact, rather than the "Montessorinness" of the new school. Also, consider the Hawthorne effect - it could also explain the situation.
Looking back at those times, 30 years ago, I really cannot tell why I didn't feel well in the environment managed by with my first primary school teacher. She was a decent lady, she treated her pupils with respect and never shouted at us, or anything of that sort.
Naming the 'why' behind the emotions is a job for 12+ year old, not for the kindergartener.
An important part of the human developmental process is learning to calibrate these sorts of things, and one way to calibrate one's reactions is to have adults check whether the child's intuition about something was correct or not.
There can be some cases e.g. hidden abuse where the adult thinks the child may be being unreasonable where they are not, but in situations where the child and adult have equal information it's a valuable learning tool.
Taiichi Ohno called it genchi genbutsu in the context of manufacturing. First, go to the floor and look at the work that is being done.
Edwards Deming said "Don't just do somthing; stand there!" in the context of data analysis. Allow the data to tell you something. If you meddle with it you destroy the signal.
In other words. First, observe. Try to understand the problem before you rush in with a solution.
This is like step 0 of the scientific method and yet we forget about it so often, in a hurry to just do something.
As far as I understand it, in non-Montessori schools, a lot of teacher effort is spent on the wrong things, like grading, anti-cheating measures, very strict lesson orders, and so on.
Somehow, these private schools offer better education for less money than that.
We need to stop funding schools and start funding children.
Let them take that money to the place where they learn the best. I’d bet teachers would be paid better and bad teachers would be removed much more quickly. I’d also conjecture that teachers would enjoy their jobs much more
They don't have as many "problem" kids who get one-on-one dedicated personnel, self-contained classrooms with two staff just for ten kids, et c. Nor do their regular classroom teachers have to put up with as much disruption, both because there's less to begin with and because they can kick kids out much more easily than public schools can.
And even "private schools" is too broad a category. Most private schools are no better, or even worse, than nearby public schools. Often this is because their appeal is religious, first, over education. However, many of the secular or more gently-religious ones that look better on paper may actually deliver worse education, but look superior purely due to selection bias—this can be revealed if their students move to public schools. They don't always come in and breeze through because they were ahead (to be clear, that does sometimes happen if the school was good!), instead they may be badly behind, despite having had good grades at their expensive private school.
Those numbers don't include other Full Time Employees like aids, tutors, and other support staff that work with students.
On the other hand, it's really visible that the method doesn't work for everybody.
So, I think that "it's for gifted children" is the wrong conclusion here, but there is something to discover on that line.
I have observed children one might believe as ‘stuck’ in an unruly category transition into one that seems ‘gifted-from-the-start’.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori#1896%E2%80%93...
Jean Anyon's work is really the baseline[0] and describes just how fundamentally different the schooling process experienced by the privileged and less privileged is. She looked entirely at public schools.
>In the two working-class schools, work is following the steps of a procedure. The procedure is usually mechanical, involving rote behavior and very little decision making or choice. The teachers rarely explain why the work is being assigned, how it might connect to other assignments, or what the idea is that lies behind the procedure or gives it coherence and perhaps meaning or significance. ...Work is often evaluated not according to whether it is right or wrong but according to whether the children followed the right steps.
>In the executive elite school, work is developing one's analytical intellectual powers. Children are continually asked to reason through a problem, to produce intellectual products that are both logically sound and of top academic quality. A primary goal of thought is to conceptualize rules by which elements may fit together in systems and then to apply these rules in solving a problem.
[0]https://www1.udel.edu/educ/whitson/897s05/files/hiddencurric...
If you want to see how an egalitarian education system reaches the best education system results in the world - Estonia and Finland are the countries to look at. Their education indeed follows the second model here. But rote learning is also included - the point is to challenge and support the child in manifold ways and keep in mind that they should enjoy themselves.
My point is though while in some countries this might be a class difference, really it comes down to a quality difference. Good quality does not actually need to be very expensive/rare, you can reach it at system level as do Estonia and Finland.
And I was about to argue with 40 years old by saying i think it was written in the 1980s! And I caught myself
It’s easy to point the finger at unions- mostly because it is a narrative that has been pushed hard for years.
The issues are way larger than the person in front of the classroom. Bad teachers don’t help but thinking I can just take test data at the end of the year and figure out which teachers are bad is wildly useless
The US in many places is still arguing endlessly about Charter schools and homeschooling to allow 'teaching' the most woo-woo nonsense, and offer endless bloviating about testing batteries but nothing about curriculum/pedagogy requirements. Textbook publishers cater to opposing markets (California and Texas) and its just as adversarial as every other element of US society these days.
I'd suspect it's likely that in countries with much larger populations, socio-cultural-economo class-like variance is probably higher, and inertia greater, so change is more difficult.
I live in Tasmania, half the adult population is functionally illiterate, and voting is compulsory, so we have a situation where the pool of talent to select from for society wide decision making is more limited, perhaps, and the decisions being made have to be somewhat tolerated by the population.
Agree in the general sense though, we should be looking to model our systems more on places like Finland and Estonia, rather than US / UK.
And while Estonia is small (1.4Mio), that still means we are talking about 600+ schools spread over an entire country (land area of the average US state), with a very low budget and vast differences by region, e.g. an impoverished east with Russian speakers, some very rural areas, and Tallinn and Tartu as major university towns with startup scenes.
Finland is a bit bigger in population but even more population diversity, from a significant Swedish and Russian minority in the cities and east to finns spread out over rural and city areas, up to nomadic reindeer herders with their own unique language in the far north. So definitely an entire education system with its own challenges, which was not always good.
I found that Australians (in terms of politicians) are particularly probe to make these arguments how things can't be done here. The irony is that they go often both ways, either it can't be done because Australia is too big, or because its too small. High speed rail is another example, supposedly it's not feasible because of the low population density, completely ignoring the fact that the density is actually very concentrated, which is ideal for high speed rail. Just a connection Melbourne-Sydney would be perfect, that's (one of?) the busiest air routes in the world. This is all about political will, not feasibility.
1) work the relay they think they are supposed to work but have no idea
2) cost exactly zero dollars
3) function perfectly all the time
4) take their feedback and ignore the feedback of everyone else
American governance is so trapped by human paradoxes that it’s bound to function poorly. That’s particular to hear and particular to the societal narratives that we ((especially the right) ascribe to
Far from it, there is plenty of political will in both countries. What's missing is any sort of coherent political will to drive good and beneficial change.
Ay least in so far as I'm able to discern what good and beneficial are. Certainly isn't the direction either country is headed.
Your reply is to my point. Australia is pretty divided politically, and it seems there's a not insignificant portion of the population who are intent on railing hard against anything that benefit someone else.
Yeah, it's political, and I think my point was something like: bigger populations distributed over large areas are difficult to appease.
About half the population of Australia doesn't live in the big cities.
I’m part of a now-large-ish Montessori startup and am a sort of Montessori scholar. The biography reviewed here is very good and worth checking out. Overall it’s the best of the biographies available, and is a significant improvement over Kramer’s from a few decades ago.
Just an aside: the extended tangents in the review about Montessori’s entrepreneurialism turning her method into a classist privilege are, uh, really strange. The idea in the review seems to be that the rarity and expense of Montessori in the US is because she charged for trainings and tried to parent some materials. Purely as a matter of historical fact, this is a narrative in search of evidence that isn’t there, and a narrative that isn’t really face plausible. Montessori education is rare because the progressive intellectuals that built the US school system adamantly and vociferously rejected Montessori for pedagogical reasons. There are just way better explanations available for why her work didn’t take hold more widely.
Glad to see Montessori and Stefano’s biography in particular getting coverage though. I’ve enjoyed reading the many comments here about people’s experiences with Montessori!
It's mainly an intellectual issue. That is: it's a dispute about what is true in development and education.
In the early 20th c., when American progressives and intellectuals were very interested in education, this dispute was explicit. The (nascent) educational establishment reviewed Montessori's works, attended her trainings and published criticisms, and held whole conferences on the problems with the method. She was very popular for about five years or so, but the popularity was grassroots. The intellectuals always thought she was wrong. Just as one example: the intellectual current in the US was to delay it until later for largely Rousseauvian reasons (reading is an adult imposition that children aren't naturally interested in). Montessori became famous in large part because she taught children how to read earlier. (This is mentioned in the review above.)
There were dozens of issues like this. Montessori thought there should be "an education of the senses"—but progressives critiqued this idea as incoherent. Montessori thought there should be specific, synthetically designed learning materials. Progressives thought there should be more natural experiences and fewer, if any, truly curricular "learning materials". Some thought her approach was too rigid, others too anarchic. Despite widespread public popularity, Dewey, his students, the NEA, and many many many others were vocally critical of her method. By 1916 it had all but vanished from the country, and wouldn't come back for over 40 years.
(There are modern versions of every single one of these critiques, but the overall educational scene is also just much less intellectual than it was a hundred years ago, so it's not as visible.)
But the first half of the 20th century is also precisely when the US school system took shape! It became bureaucratized, and US progressive educators themselves flip-flopped between different pedagogical approaches—from "project based" approaches to "efficiency" approaches that were more vocationally directed. By the time Montessorians clawed back some influence in the US, the basic shape of the system was already in place, and the only outlet it could take was as a grassroots movement. Which meant: lots of entrepreneurial women starting small schools in scattershot ways. Which means independent schools. Which means tuition.
The school system in the US is so badly broken that it also affects the nature and costs of independent schools. And Montessori schools are largely independent schools. So they are more expensive and less accessible. There's a very explicit narrative at play in the review above, one that concludes with completely unmerited swipes at Amazon/Day One. A frank look at current and historical school policy dynamics would conclude that the barrier to getting more Montessori education in the US is the public school system, and that philanthropic and entrepreneurial efforts to push Montessori forward are the only things that have kept it going at all.
The idea that Montessori schools are expensive, rare, and inaccessible because Montessori pushed them to be this way is really ridiculous. It's belied not just by the above narrative, which is a better explanation, but by decades of work that she did that was strongly characterized by humanitarian and activist efforts for the very poorest students, by many attempted (and mostly failed) partnerships that she attempted to engage in with any national government would listen, by her work in India during WWII (which has tremendous and ongoing influence), and more.
I wrote a Twitter thread (was a bit irritated when I banged this out, unfortunately) that makes some similar points here with a couple of specific citations, newspaper clippings, etc. https://twitter.com/mbateman/status/1499590385638821889
I must admit that before my children started attending Montessori schools, I had this naïve view that Montessori education was somewhat similar to Waldorf, while on matters like this, they are pretty much diametrically opposed. It's somewhat amusing that there are multiple alternative school systems that claim for themselves to be "child centric" but have such startingly different theories of what children really want or need.
If you have not read “Founding Mothers and Others”, I highly recommend it. Many progressive schools were founded by women who studied with Montessori, sought to spread her pedagogy and gave her great respect and credit. Helen Salz and Flora Arnstein,founders of San Francisco’s Presidio Hill School, were inspired to launch their school after observing Montessori work with children in a glass walked classroom at the 1915 San Francisco Exposition. Other Californians attended her California lectures, studied her work, traveled to Italy or trained in her US programs. They went on to found schools and train teachers. This didn’t stop in 1916, indeed most of these schools were founded between 1918 and 194o. They still exist and acknowledge their Montessori roots.
Margaret Naumberg, who trained extensively with Montessori, simultaneously launched a public Montessori and a private one in New York. The schools had very different results but I don’t know why the public program was not replicated or sustained. I wonder what lessons we could learn from the difference in the public implementation and the private one which grew into The Children’s School, later the Walden School, which lasted for over 50 years.
Helen Parkhurst was purportedly the only person Maria Montessori authorized to train teachers. She is known as the “mother of the Dalton School” and the architect of the Dalton Plan which was extremely influential in inspiring school design not just in the US but internationally. Dalton remains a leading school in both popularity with families, credibility with college admissions offices, and with the education community. It would be interesting to learn how you think it is aligned with Montessorian pedagogy and how it differs.
The bigger question is what are the essential elements of a Montessori education and how are they adapted across different contexts? Should Montessori classrooms only have Montessori materials? For example, can they incorporate Caroline Pratt’s unit blocks? Can’t we teach educators to observe play with unit blocks & facilitate intellectual development through applying Montessori methods with these excellent non-Montessori materials?
Montessori principles are widely taught in education philosophy, early childhood, and child development courses. The basic principles are familiar but not the practices. Is that because the education establishment has shut them out or because the AMI & AMS have not made training accessible? That is probably a hot button question for a highly visible and rapidly growing start up but, IMO, the success of Higher Ground & the Bezos “Montessori inspired” schools will hinge on three things, accessibility, adaptability, and accountability. Indeed any form of transformation will have to tackle those three areas and that is one reason finding common ground is important.
Your work is interesting and important. Good luck!
https://harpers.org/archive/2022/02/every-child-an-emperor-o...
In the New Yorker article, the author takes issue with the fact that there are very few public Montessori schools, but fails to suggest why this might be the case. I'd offer that perhaps this this is because a Montessori education is child-focused, while public educational institutions (like the ones I attended) tend to be institution-focused. Valuing the worth of the child is somehow antithetical to the structure and order they impose.
But is that really true? For one thing, you can have a fail-over mechanism if something isn't working. For another, we already do: it's called special education. That's before we get to the part where "consistent outcomes" are not a feature of the current system, unless you impose a very low standard of 'consistency'.
I know that this is false because functional languages have existed for decades and still occupy a vast underproportion of IT projects despite being superior in the vast majority of use-cases. Also, argumentum ad populum.
The fact that recursion can compile down to iteration when written in a tail-call manner, while other languages are just providing iteration as a core part of the system, kinda implies that FP isn't "superior in the vast majority of use-cases".
Although, as the ol Verity Stob quote goes "Lisp is still #1 for key algorithmic techniques such as recursion and condescension".
And you're really nailing the latter.
My first impression when I learned about “infinite recursion via TCO” is that it was so much more beautiful semantically than your typical loop
> recursion and condescension
I’ve worked in probably 15+ languages of all types throughout my life since Microsoft BASIC in 1984 when I was 12. If this doesn’t give me the right to assert things like this, then what does?
Perhaps the real problem is that whenever someone mentions “functional languages”, the walls go up, the ears go closed and the baseless presumption of hubris skyrockets.
The fact is that you can use a functional style (and gain the advantages) in any language https://towardsdatascience.com/why-developers-are-falling-in... , you just lose the guarantees as soon as you touch another library
> I’ve worked in probably 15+ languages of all types throughout my life since Microsoft BASIC in 1984 when I was 12. If this doesn’t give me the right to assert things like this, then what does?
A realisation that opinions are subjective :) I've probably used a similar number of languages, although I started with QBasic, and while I've really enjoyed FP in Scheme, Erlang, and F#, I don't consider it vastly superior, I just consider it a different paradigm that is really good in some problem domains, and an awkward fit in others.
I don't consider any particular paradigm to be superior, each has strengths and weaknesses.
By the same logic gifted and talented education should be expanding, not contracting, and they should be doing much more acceleration and less enrichment, since we know those work. That’s not happening because education is a small part of the purpose of the school system.
To someone socialized into the normal school system, montessori is incomprehensible and measure as such. The outcomes that are targeted from the montessori philosophy are antithetical to the outcomes standard education seeks to measure. What is happening can easily be labeled 'lazy' or 'disorganized' and the people who are expected to provide outside oversight can't easily identify the learning that is occurring. Outside evaluation requires legibility.
The opposite is also true. Standard school looks confusing and stupid to someone trained in the montessori philosophy - but not quite incomprehensible. That isn't because montessori is special but because it is different and the description of anything different is typically anchored in what is known. If you only knew montessori normal school would look incomprehensible - but because it is inherently a reaction it is taught as such.
I was a montessori kid until 5th grade then ended up in a 'standard' school. I struggled because it was not what I knew. I was accultured to be self sufficient and self-manage and suddenly I was getting yelled at for it. I remember just getting up to go to the bathroom (which was the norm at my prior school so I didn't interrupt others) and getting yelled at for...disrupting others. I think if you looked at the content learning outcomes - the outcomes were effectively equal, some better some worse. But if you look at how each taught me to think there is no comparison - I still rely on the montessori education to this day.
All of this is the same reason why getting higher ed faculty to switch from lecturing to active learning is so hard - if all you know is lecturing its really hard to understand what is happening in an active learning classroom.
Said another way: >You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. ... In Montessori school you go paint because you have something to express or you just want to do it that afternoon, not because the teacher said so. This is really baked into how Larry and Sergey approach problems. They’re always asking ‘Why should it be like that?’ — Marissa Mayer, former VP of Google
Oh, is this like how the most popular technology is always the best one?
Even when there is clear evidence that an educational method is better (e.g., not tracking, especially in elementary school), it's very common for there to be political pushback against it that prevents, delays, or limits adoption in public schools, so that's not at all clear.
Ah yes, educational Darwinism, a mechanism that has definitely been proven.
"Is that a $20 bill?" one asked.
"Couldn't be, someone would have picked it up by now" replied the other, and they went on their way.
I find the Sudbury model more fascinating because the student bodies I’ve seen came across as motivated, and other education models seemed demotivating except to a few students with a externality of a self motivating gene or environment.
Sudbury specifically makes students part of a democracy for most operations and education. My skepticism was quelled by the outcomes.
I would pay a premium for Montessori or Sudbury schooling. How about an article from people that can comfortably afford it? I would alternatively consider having my future child(ren) schooled in a non-US developed country. The public option isnt in the running.
The only other thing i could see is whether I wind up living close to one or the partner has their own restrictions
Just seems like a much more privileged position to have an outside perspective than the people with kids who didn’t even know they can’t afford the choice, like the person in the article
IOW ultimately you have to look at the fruit that is born from these trees to judge their ultimate worth. If you just walk in on one of these schools in the early years, you might be shocked/appalled at the lack of structure and discipline.
Our five year old was playing at the park a week ago and chatted with another little girl about their respective schools. Afterwards he asked us why she said her school was boring. He couldn’t fathom a school that wasn’t interesting and fun.
So yeah, let me know how that universal consent goes ;)
> someone used a veto (which in sociocracy must be accepted without argument)
Some things I noticed:
- there are kids who are doing really well, and there are other kids who (I think) have more trouble than I'd expect in a classic elementary school
- a few kids are learning at a faster pace, like my daughter who skipped 2nd grade.
- there is a shocking number of kids who are having trouble and have to repeat a grade, usually 3rd grade. Last year, 3 out of 6 third graders had to repeat third grade. Not sure how statistically relevant it is, and it feels closer to home as those three are my daughter's best friends, but it was quite surprising and made us wonder whether it's the right school for our younger daughter (who's a bit wilder and has less patience and discipline).
- in addition to the usual ADHD stuff, there is a surprising number of kids who are diagnosed with dyscalculia. Not sure what's normal, and of course this is a small sample, but still makes us feel a bit uneasy.
- a possible reason why some kids are struggling could be the student/teacher ratio. There are 27 kids per teacher. I think that's way too high to support kids who are having difficulties.
- I should also mention that Covid interrupted Montessori schools more than traditional schools. Kids are supposed to work with Montessori materials, and they weren't available in home schooling. Teaching via video was difficult in mixed-age classes. Even today, kids do not experience the school as intended, as the class needs to stay together all day and they are not free to roam to other rooms, like workshops or the library.
> I should also mention that Covid interrupted Montessori schools more than traditional schools
Oof yeah thatll amplify this issue
First year was terrible, her educator constantly complained about her, she wasn't eating at all, a lot of days she wasn't sleeping, there were days they called us to pick her up in the middle of the day because she was inconsolable.
The moment she switched educators everything resolved -- she started eating, no more tantrums, sleeping, doing great in her activities.
Montessori is as good as the individual educators are.
Looking back I can see all the red flags -- the fact that I know about the on-and-off divorce of the first educator from her alcoholic husband tells a lot. And there were all sorts of passive-aggressive little things like "Dear parents, tomorrow will be my birthday, I will spend the time with my family and not at work, that is the way we do things here...."
I think that's true for any school system. Of course society tried to capture and automate whatever it is that makes good education, but the simply fact is that it always requires individual attention. We need to invest more in good teachers, and in a system that's flexible enough that every kid ends up in a class where they fit.
So the quality of Montessori schools can vary greatly even down to the classroom/teacher level, due to a lack of standardization on teacher education, teacher training philosophies, and school philosophies.
As a Montessori class has students in three different year levels together (e.g. a Casa class would have children aged 3, 4, and 5) and part of the philosophy is for the senior students in a class to assist in teaching the junior students, the class has to have a sufficient number of students in order for this approach to work. Small class sizes don't have enough students to support the learning model.
In my experience 27 children in a class is very typical and not at all an over-populated class. I've seen larger classes work just as well.
The Montessori school my daughter went to would have a director/directress and an assistant in each class.
I think it's important to remember that these techniques were defined in 1912 though. There seems to be a sort of worship of the Montessori method, and a "black and white" mentality about what is correct. Using a 100+ year old book/method without adjustments and chasing purity in following it seems misguided.
Most schools today are still stuck into the factory model of 200 years ago. They are still trying to take uneducated peasant children and discipline them to mindlessly follow a 9-to-5 factory work schedule. Applying Montessori principles would be an improvement to most.
Regular people severely underestimate how outdated and unscientific the current model is. Everywhere.
And we know about this for more than 50 years and we've done very little to improve things.
One of my sisters made sure that my nephew was in a Montessori kindergarten. He went to a regular school afterwards but those Montessori years can still be felt. There is a kind of emotional stability that still permeates his behavior. A level of presence and calm that brings me joy and gratefulness.
I don't have any complaints against this book, my comments were more about general things I've noticed around the Montessori community.
My own experience is that Montessori puts the kids years ahead of age group peers and the learning benefits last into adulthood. My eldest earned a PhD in spite of learning challenges and the second eldest senior manager in a Govt department. #3 taught herself a 3rd language at age of 3. To many things to attribute just to home life and DNA.
Not familiar with other systems mentioned but I do see any environment where kids are respected and observed carefully seem to get similar and lasting results from their education.
What I like about Montessori is that if a child finds a "work" that interests them, they can really focus in on it until mastery instead of feeling pressured to follow a specific curriculum on a specific timeline. I also like the de-emphasis on grades and testing. These are distractions from learning IMO. As for academic progress, one of my kids picks things up early and the other picks things up late. It just depends on the child. We aren't yet to high school, so I can speak to that transition. I'd be lying if I said it didn't worry me a little, though, mostly because I think of high school as a stressful place and my kids are currently in a very low-stress place.
What's really telling is that there have been a few preschoolers who have been gently nudged out of the school for having needs the school couldn't (or didn't want to) deal with.
Still, I think there are two things Montessori gets right:
1. Giving kids a lot of structured self-direction.
2. Mixing kids of age ranges and having them instruct each other.
In my experience, everything other than that is crunchy granola window dressing.
Montessori is not a trademarked name, and so you get a lot of schools that call themselves Montessori with various levels of fidelity to the principles. Getting AMI accreditation is the best way to verify you’re legit.
Even so, I agree that many good Montessori schools cultivate a certain clientele. That teacher/student ratio and the materials aren’t cheap, and they have a reputation to uphold to keep rich people coming. As per the article, it’s unfortunate because Maria Montessori started her original program for disadvantaged children. We’ve decided for our own children that after a few years of Montessori they go to public school, to be around kids with a wide range of perspectives. Best way to make schools better is to be part of them.
It really was a super bad fit for me.
Now when i look back at it, it is super obvious montissori is great for talented children and those who are able to have dicipline and organize them selfs, without much guidance.
Me myself has always lacked that and always will. This made be fall behind so bad in school that the only way i was able to finish it was because of a private tutor my parents hired.
Now its not _all_ because of the school, it also is my own abilities. I am simply not a smart learner nor very good at problem solving.
But the lack of organization, clear learning paths and a mindset of letting a child try to learn all by him self was super bad for me. It was also clear it benefitted girls a lot more than boys.
Today i really resent everything about montessori, it was a complete failure for me and only let my lack of dicipline/organization and insufficient problem solving skills run my schooling for ten years while everyone in the school thought i would just magically develop abilities i lacked on my own.
I performed much better when i entered "gymnasiet (late high school)" and had a more traditional and structured way of teaching, despite having learning and discipline issues. But i strongly think that if i had been put in that environment early on i would have developed that areas which i lacked naturally much better.
Every Montessori school implements their own interpretation of it, sometimes so they can charge more.
Because of how inconsistent its implementation is in practice, the results will be completely random.
There are many stories of Montessori system failures out there that you can read to understand when things go wrong.
Actually, in many ways we probably can.
Just like with any mass solution from the industrial age, the traditional system is not meant to suit your needs, but the needs of a hypotetical average person.
But if we really look at the human space, I'm pretty sure in terms of education nothing actually fits, except compliance and the willingness to accept highwaters and blisters.
AMI begs to differ, even though their certification is by no means obligatory.
My conclusion, after having seen 3 schools: a huge part of the equation is the self-selection of the teachers. It's like comparing "SPA and microservices" with PHP as technologies, without taking into consideration that each attracts a different type of developer.
1: state curricumum, but with specific pedagogical philosophy, focusing on confidence, team-work, etc.
This sentence from the New Yorker reminded me: “that children are, in their essence, methodical, self-directed beings with a strong work ethic“
The ‘spiritual’ adjective is something that would have been in this sentence had Montessori written about it, as she discusses the spiritual well-being of children often in her writing.
That the upper-crust of secular society conveniently ignores this isn’t surprising, but I wonder if ignoring it contributes to the growing mental health crisis.
I.e. if spirituality doesn’t matter at all, how can you actually convince children they aren’t being raised as economic cogs in a materialist world?
Looking at the materials online, it looks like the overall idea makes sense, but somehow there is a _rumor_ that most Montessori childs struggle to adapt to a _normal_ curriculum after, and generally lean toward short studies and manual jobs.
I would say that adjusting to a "normal" curriculum took a little time. However, I think that learning independence and keeping my love of learning was worth that tradeoff. I was also happy going to school, something that I feel was beneficial from a developmental standpoint.
For context, I don't currently work a manual job and successfully graduated college.
Many adopt a few ideas but really aren’t much different than other schools.
As a result, I had amazing test scores in public school, but bad grades overall because I felt that the homework was a waste of my time.
I still appreciate my time on a Montessori school though.
It's still a sore point for me 30 years later. I do a lot of graphics programming, and I know I have the type of mind that can handle complex math, but I missed that fork in the road.
They're in regular primary school now and adapted just fine.
I don't know the Montessori system, but in the Waldorf system, some of the intellectual stuff is moved from the first years to the later years compared to the public school. So if you compare midway on the public school metric, you'll find a gap.
Of course, if you compared midway on a Waldorf metric, you'll find that students from those public schools have a gap in the other direction.
I talked to a Waldorf school principal about this, and she said that if you enter the system at later grades, say halfway through, they could see that there are some things that such a child just don't learn.
That's interesting. My impression is that kids with ADHD would function better in a Montessori setting compared to a traditional education. Where do you plan to send your kids?
The Montessori philosophy is very much NOT laissez faire: Kids are free to choose their activity, but then they are supervised and assisted to persist at that activity for a period of time (AND to put everything away neatly afterwards AND to not interfere with others). A properly run Montessori school might be very well suited for your children, but of course you'd have to evaluate that yourself.
Both of my children transitioned to the state school system without too many difficulties (the younger one had some initial problems adjusting to the rougher environment). We loved Montessori as a school concept; one problem with sending your children to a private school in Switzerland however is that it puts them in a social bubble (in a telling anecdote, the other children once referred to my wife as my son's nanny, because so many of them were picked up at school by hired help), and we preferred a more egalitarian environment.
Personally, I'm envious. I did well enough in school, but I was never a great match for industrial education processes. Too curious, too independent. But that's exactly what I've needed in my tech career; technology is now so complex and changes so quickly that we're all effectively self taught.
I don't think that kind of self-directed adaptability is going to become less necessary in the future, so I hope more schools adopt similar approaches.
In particular, I don't know small multiplications by rote as well as some others. But that's the major problem I've found.
On the other hand, I did huge 20-digit multiplications well ahead of others because I liked it.
I learned a second language (English) when I was very young because me and a friend was interested in it.
I performed violently exothermic chemistry experiments (in controlled ways, of course) after regular class hours because the teacher saw our interest in things that go boom.
I made HTML-based role-playing adventures to learn the stuff in history class.
I learned how the difference between science and fucking around is writing it down, performing endless series of flight tests of paper plane models and presenting the result.
Many of these things were highly useful to me later in education and life, and were not part of any standard curriculum. I did them because the teachers saw me and exploited an opportunity to make us both content.
Even in standardized countries like France or Switzerland, the gap between two classes within the same school can be large,so across city and country, it's a pipe dream to think education is equal.
School is all about maintaining the status quo on social classes.
There is however likely big variance in terms of which Montessori school exactly we talk about (literally which building).
The most common thing you'll find are Montessori preschools (3-6 years old). The biggest thing I got out of it was the love of learning. Children in a Montessori classroom are able to learn at their own pace, so if you gravitate towards numbers before reading, that's facilitated. Other way around? No biggie. It turns out child development at that age is pretty flexible, and most children all get to where they're supposed to be by the end of those 3 years.
The other benefit is the mixed-age classrooms. Younger kids are able to see the older children as role models, and the older children are able to _be_ that role model for the newer kids. All of this together creates an environment that often graduates children that seem to be more confident in themselves and in their innate abilities.
I will say that transitioning to a traditional school in first grade was a bit of a culture shock, but the lessons learned in Montessori definitely carried over. I still have that love of learning, and a strong inner voice.
My wife's school is Montessori through 8th grade, and her experience is that the children that graduate excel in whichever high school setting they go to, but this is of course anecdotal.
why journalism has devolved in ideological propaganda?
We love the foundations and philosophy. My wife set up our house according to the Montessori approach of making everything accessible for the kids.
Our oldest- She did fine at Montessori but we noticed that she would never push herself or be pushed - per the method. For example she would only go to the shelf with puzzles that she could easily master. It wasn’t a competitive environment and she thrives on that. She moved on to regular Kindergarten and is doing well.
Our second- Same problem as the first - but this was a bigger issue because he was far behind his developmental milestones and needed speech and occupational therapy just to get to Kindergarten.
Our third- She was born for Montessori. She loves independence and is the most capable two year old I’ve come across. She’s the only one who uses the Montessori set-up(s) at home that my wife made happen.
Our fourth- Still a baby - we shall see
In Europe, a lot of education is free and, believe it or not, also Montessori schools/kindergarten are.
I went to a Montessori school from pre-k to 6th grade. It was a very good experience overall. I learned at my own pace and got to do some pretty advanced math. But, I will confess, it was also a rather nice private school. I wonder how much of the benefits were from Montessori versus the small class sizes and indulgent teachers. It also ended right around when grades go from vaguely mattering in some abstract moral sense, to mattering in a very concrete, important sense, i.e. college admissions. I wonder how Montessori would have fared in that environment.
Indeed I have the fun distinction of having experienced private school, homeschooling, and public school. All have their benefits and all have their downsides.
Private school teaches you that anything can be changed if you make a big enough fuss, and that you are really special. It also puts you in an environment where everybody's paying 40k a year[1] or they're a scholarship kid. That gives kids a very warped worldview. You can get a really great education though and college admissions is a breeze if you charm your college councilor.
Homeschooling, contrary to what people may think, is not sitting at home while your religious parents teach you the earth is 4000 years old. In large cities it's often closer to freelance school. Homeschoolers pool together and pay a teacher to teach a specific class. In some cases this works really well. Students get to develop specific interests and can take some classes that would be totally unavailable even to private school kids. If you're a child prodigy, homeschooling is almost essential. However, it is extremely isolating socially unless the kid is able to seek out friends on their own. It can also create kids who don't fully integrate into society. Pejoratively, they're weirdos. That's okay though! They'll find other weirdos in college and adulthood. A lot of successful people are weirdos. And one could argue I've got the correlation backwards and the kids are homeschooled because their weirdos. But if you want your kid to be comfortable within the mainstream of society, I wouldn't homeschool them.
Finally, there's public school. It teaches the exact opposite of private school, namely that you are not special, you do not deserve special treatment and that you should put your head down and work. There's pros and cons to that lesson. For one, it does teach you how to get shit done with minimal self pity. On the flip side, if you do have any genuine differences, good luck surviving lol. I shudder to think about kids with learning differences like dyslexia or ADHD. I probably have a minor case of ADHD and it was certainly difficult for me. You also get no guidance whatsoever with college and life. I see that effect on my classmates, many of whom are following the same track of trying to get into the most prestigious college, followed by the most prestigious job, followed by idk, home ownership and death? It's a bleak path.
With all this done, I've thought about what I'd want my kids to do for school. Truthfully, I have no idea. They all seem awful in their own ways. Fortunately that decision is quite a way's off.
[1]: Yes, yes, these are absurd NYC prices but private schools are still pretty expensive everywhere.
Maybe not all homeschooling, but that precisely describes how four of my cousins have "educated" their children.
I read the story and not sure I understand the point. Yes, Montessori teaching is nearly always a private school education. Just like church schools, the parents pay for it and it isn't cheap. We were lucky and went to a public school system that had a Montessori program as a magnet school. Our daughter did go to private Montessori for two years because she wasn't old enough to go to the public school. She did go to the public school version when she was old enough.
I say all this because both the private and public Montessori versions worked just fine. Much of it was the quality of the teacher - it means everything. The author of the article talks of how she bought the counting beads and blocks when she decided the Montessori program was unaffordable. The materials went unused. Well, they don't work in the hands of those that aren't trained as Montessori teachers. The materials are important, but the teaching methodologies to use those materials are more important.
The biggest problem with Montessori teaching is that it doesn't mix well with public school methods. Most Montessori schools are ages 3-11 (5th grade or so). Some go to eighth grade. Very few secondary schools. So, at some point, the Montessori student must become a traditional school student. There will be some period of adjustment because the approach is so different. It is manageable, but it will create some frustrations.
Is Montessori school worth it? I lean yes, but I'm not one of those that says traditional schools are trash. Montessori leverages the student to make their own education path with the guidance of the teacher. In the end, Montessori students are better at goal oriented learning and self-reliance through self teaching. I think most students in traditional schools are spoon-fed more because the learning standards are set up that way. To be fair, it is done that way to make sure there are no holes in the education. Montessori students can have some specific standards gaps.
I don't see the Montessori schools becoming more populist just because it is difficult to set up a broad-based education system for it except possibly in a very small school system (which, is actually, the best alternative for small town schools given how grouping age ranges in single classrooms is a normal part of the Montessori system.) But public systems tend to agglomerate. Large schools are done to maximize tax dollar efficiencies. A niche school system like Montessori schools just don't fit with the public realm.
Why would this person go check out a school before even doing basic research like finding out how much it costs?
I just checked the 5 Montessori/Waldorf schools near me (Boulder) and all of them list their tuition very clearly.