Hacker News Reader

Comment by blodkorv | Hacker News Reader

Montessori only works if you are a gifted or diciplined child from the start. For those that lack that in their personality its a really bad match.

View on HN

This is not true. My wife has taught in a Montessori classroom for over a decade, and the children who get the most out of it are the ones who would be labeled as "problematic" in other environments.

I went to a Montessori school in Sweden for 10years and while i never was a problem child. I have always had problems with learning things, taking long time and lack dicipline and organization. I never got the most from it, instead the school got the most of my will to do everything but learning school subjects.

There are bad Montessori schools and it sounds like the school you attended wasn't very good. It sucks that you never got the most from it.

On one hand, I've plenty of gifted children that thrived on a Montessori school just stop being gifted when they changed schools.

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 went to a montessori school for 10 years and i fail to see how a system where you except a "slow" child to want to learn subject that it find difficult and put in the time, dicipline and efforts into it. The method is all about children wanting to learn subjects that are difficult and challenging for them by them self with very little structure and minimal interferance.

Montessori originally designed her education for mentally disabled children[0]. One key aspect of her philosophy is to "let the child lead" and work with them at their own pace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori#1896%E2%80%93...

This is not true, and this mindset is sometimes referred to as ‘the bigotry of low expectations’

I have observed children one might believe as ‘stuck’ in an unruly category transition into one that seems ‘gifted-from-the-start’.

It is very much true, I am one of the children that got left behind in a montissori school. There where others like me at the school also but none as severe as me. It really only benefitted the ones who where smart from the beginning.

Unfortunately, it could lead to a tautological argument that is unprovable: only those that made it through were gifted from the start:)

I have a cousin with Down’s syndrome, and he thrived in a Montessori school. So there’s my anecdote.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com