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Comment by jayski | Hacker News Reader

My son was in a standard non-montessori private kindergarten.

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.

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I had a similar experience as a child. I cried every day morning before school. This continued until I was switched to another school.

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.

Hm, if you don't remember the problem causing the switch, how do you know it was the switch itself that improved the situation?

I wish no one would doubt children intuition about people and environment they are in ever again.

Naming the 'why' behind the emotions is a job for 12+ year old, not for the kindergartener.

Most adults can't even do it reliably. The things we expect from kids that we don't even ask of ourselves....

The developing brain of a child may be experiencing the emotions associated with having a negative intuition, without having any of the negative stimulus that normally causes negative intuition about something.

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.

Right, it might not even be the switch. My daughter used to scream her head off when being left in childcare. After 3 months she learned it was actually fun and looked forward to it.

> My son was in a standard non-montessori private kindergarten.

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.

he's in the US, you know that by the fact that he didn't mention it. people from anywhere else would have

"What counts as 'standard' is wildly different around the world."

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.

Have a similar (n=1, usual caveats apply) experience with one of my partner's nephews. Incredible kid, very creative, very excited about all kinds of things. Then he gets enrolled in primary school, within 3 months all the joy is sucked out of this kid, loathes going to school, doing homework is a daily struggle. His parents moved him to a Waldorf/Rudolf Steiner school for the next year, and within a few months the old personality is back, excited to go to school, etc. Two years in, he's among the best in his class according to his teachers, has become class president, etc. Now, I'm not a huge fan of the whole Waldorf/Steiner anthroposophy shtick, but the results in this individual case have me convinced that their approach has some merit.

My kids go to a Waldorf school. Around half of the kids in my oldest son's class came in later grades, with a story like this.

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.

I think the success is partly accidental - when these schools started, traditional schools were often militaristic in style and with a focus on obedience and listening in silence.

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.

Public Schooling is explicitly about conditioning obedience. It’s more like that today than when it was first created.

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.

I went to a Waldorf school that was incredible for me. The same school today is a disturbing little cult with a few roads on campus named for my former teachers and administrators. I love the potential of Waldorf (and Montessori, too!) but some of those parent communities are a toxic mess.

> Then he gets enrolled in primary school, within 3 months all the joy is sucked out of this kid, loathes going to school, doing homework is a daily struggle

Kids have homework in their first year of primary school???

Yes, same here in Austria (if that isn't were OP is based). I would imagine it's the same in Germany, since the school system is quite similar. Of course it's possible that some schools handle it differently, but this is the "standard" way as far as I am aware.

AFAIK none of the primary schools here in the Netherlands give kids any homework until the last 2 or 3 years of primary school, when the kids are 9 or 10 at least.

Don't forget that primary school starts later in Germany than in the Netherlands where children go to primary school from the day of their fourth birthday. In contrast, German primary school starts around the age of 6 (not exactly because all children regardless of birth date start in summer).

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)

Primary school in the Netherlands lasts 8 years, typically from age 4 to 12. The first 2 years used to be to be separate and non-mandatory until the 1980s, when they were merged into a single 8 year track. Homework typically doesn't start until the 5th or 6th year, so when the kids are age 9 or 10. They certainly don't get any homework before they're 8 years old.

That is yet another difference, indeed: Primary school is only until grade 4 in most states, i.e. from around 6 to 10 years old.

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.

Sure, why not?

Why have homework at all for anyone? Can’t the school do its job of educating within the four walls? If the school day isn’t long enough by all means let’s make it longer.

The problem in education is that it's very hard to separate what works and what doesn't because there are too many subjective factors.

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).

OR we can just say that it probably doesn't make a difference and that it's ok to give back to the kids the few free hours they get at home everyday by not making them do the same thing they did all the day.

Different students are... different.

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.

> by all means let’s make it longer.

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.

It’s a failure on the part of the education system to specify what they need to succeed. If schools are going to outsource their work back to parents and guardians maybe they should pay them.

I don't understand this point of view at all. Parents aren't expected to do homework. Furthermore, I consider it to be fundamentally the responsibility of parents and guardians to educate their children. The outsourcing goes in the opposite direction. If that education is insufficient, the ultimate responsibility lies with the parents, not the school. Maybe the parent can engage with the school to improve the situation, but that's not always a given.

Around here the public schools give homework starting in 1st grade. Very little, but it increases pretty fast after that.

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.

I remember I did here in Italy. Seems normal to practice reading or writing.

By definition only 1 kid can be class president, so the kid you're talking about is definitely an outlier.

maybe they have a rotation system in that school

I think yours is a great example of how one size fits all programs are not necessarily what we need. Some children just respond differently to different things.

I despise the middle paths fallacy however well intentioned it might be.

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.

Totally depends on where you are.

Eg from what I can tell, traditional German Kindergartens are just fine and most kids love them. (German schools are a different beast.)

In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay. There are old disilusioned teachers that has quit school and started homework help instead, making more money and actually helping the kids.

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?

This is utter nonsense. Yes there are homework help businesses (and NGOs, council-run offers, etc) in Germany or Sweden but this is a fringe business and the vast majority of students never use it. If you have evidence for the contrary please provide it.

Its not like e.g. Korea where this is basically obligatory to use.

"Utter nonsens" is such a non-startar in conversations you know...

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.

> "Utter nonsens" is such a non-startar in conversations you know...

> 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.

> 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

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.

> In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay.

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.

Living in Germany, I have the opposite observation: Good grades these days seem to be handed out (too) freely - the other day I again had a college-entry-level student who did not know essential stuff (in this case: no idea about basic history), even though he had an A- average (13/15 points) in his Abitur diploma.

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.

It might also depend largely on where you are in Germany. My contacts are mainly in NRW.

> In Germany there is a big after school business with homework help that parents have to pay. There are old disilusioned teachers that has quit school and started homework help instead, making more money and actually helping the kids.

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.

Netherland actually has a very diverse educational system. With common standards, obviously, but there's a lot of freedom to found schools based on different educational, philosophical or religious ideas.

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.

It's more than just students. Testing also helps to control the effectiveness of each school's teaching method which is especially important in such a diverse system.

Since German schools are a federal thing, there is no sucj thing as a "German" school. Ezperience in Bavaria is vastly different from, say, Bremen. Just to pick two extremes.

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.

Language suggestion: "federal X" usually means "it belongs to the federal government". What you wanted to say it that it is subject to Bundesland ("state") control.

You are right about education being run by the individual states. However, when looked at from the outside there are still many similarities between Bavarian and Bremen.

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).

This is just not true. Even in the original story, the boy who cried every day was outlier. It was not story about most of the kids being super scared.

The fact your K12 system is a dumpster fire, doesn't mean that there is a single way to educate all children which is the best for all and where all will thrive. The method needs to incorporate the differences between the children and that's hard to do in large groups.

"Anyone who attended public schooling can tell you that our K-12 education system is a dumpster fire."

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.

This is so timely -- Arlington is on our short list of cities to move to within Boston and we've heard the exact same thing about the schools.

Cool. Feel free to DM me if you have questions about the Boston area. (Contact info's in my HN profile; I saw you're into dataviz and would be stoked to connect on twitter if you like.)

Followed you on Twitter, but can't seem to DM hmm!

Same. I grew up in suburban-to-rural Pennsylvania, and I think my K-12 schooling was excellent, with the possible exception of year-12 calculus, where our teacher just didn't seem that knowledgeable. Consequently I had to re-take a year of college calculus, not a huge deal.

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.

There is no "our K-12 education system" for any "our" comprising more than one school district. In states where the school district goes by county or county equivalent (Maryland, Virginia, and Colorado come to mind), a school district is likely to have three education systems: one for the poor, one from the less poor, one for the upper middle class.

I had a similar case but the change was just between one normal kindergarten and another. It turned out the biggest difference was in people, not really the method. YMMV.

My ex had entire elementary in montessorri school and she had fond memories. she was also brilliant.

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