I really, really like it.
I think it reinforces the kids natural curiosity.
In middle school, my first year out of Montessori, I was shocked at how little other kids cared about learning. I remember the teacher discussing something about astronomy, and I raised my hand to comment on some fact I had read, and what followed was mockery by my peers and antipathy by the teacher. I learned quickly to never again show that I cared about learning.
This was a huge contrast with Montessori where most us were eager to learn and share what we had learned. I had friends that had built the solar system to scale out of their own initiative (in hindsight they may have taken some liberties, nonetheless).
I kept tabs more or less my classmates that came out of the Montessori, and I think they overall overperformed the non Montessori people in middle school and high school. Harder to gauge adulthood success.
I also liked that they had children of various years in the same classroom. I think it promoted knowledge sharing from the older kids to the younger ones, and it removed barriers for friendships. Some of my best friends back then where older than I was. That would never happen in middle or high school.
Finally, I don't think it's perfect. Because we were all expected to join a traditional school after grade 6, the school made some effort to make sure that the outgoing class had covered all the basic requirements (a not necessarily a simple thing since we had great liberty of pursuing what was interesting to us).
All in all, I would strongly recommend it.
The universal education system we have today was never meant to "inspire learning" or anything similar. It was designed as a vaccine for illiteracy across a handful of subjects. I would argue it continues to deliver on that goal quite well (all things considered).
As someone who never attended, what Montessori offers is more the University-style inspiration and idea of learning for the sake of learning. This sounds amazing for the right people but I find it unlikely it could ever be universal.
Students who go to Montessori will have parent who believe in education in one way or another. The students will learn these values from their parents and so there's an inherent selection bias in the attendees and the positive outcomes.
However, education is not universally valued across our society. Public school exists for everyone to hit that minimum literacy bar.
What would be great is something like Montessori for every student who wants it. A different style of school universally available for the families that value it.
There are also some exciting things happening in the unschooled and regenerative education space. The main thing though, is kids who develop into adults with intrinsic motivation and capable of determining the wise choices for themselves, their children, and community.
"We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions -- if they have any -- and helping them explore the things they are most interested in."
It turned out that the kids who want to do well within their high school had a better chance of doing well in college, even if they had to take catch-up courses or get peer tutoring.
Absolutely not, because being put in the remedial class was "tracking" so there could be no separating kids by ability. My daughter was sent to the library about every other day because she got her work done the first day and it was supposed to take two or three.
I am sympathetic to the idea that when a student is a little behind at one point doesn't mean that they always will be. Maybe things are going on at home, maybe they don't have a home, etc.
But our local school system insists on treating them all the same, regardless of their abilities.
My advice to my kids was to take any AP class that you could. It would be harder but you'd be in a class where the other students wanted to learn and almost always the teacher wanted to teach.
I had no negative experiences other than being a bit out of touch with the culture of my area, which isn't necessarily a bad thing either.
I had mostly ok teachers and no problems learning or making friends. I recall there actually being a lot of free time to just study whatever we wanted most days. We never struggled on the mandatory standardized tests, so the system left us alone. It was very uneventful and boring.
I took some AP classes and some regular classes. The AP classes were probably better or at least on par with my private school Mexican high school.
The regular classes were a grim perspective into the US education system.
It felt mostly like a daycare for young adults. The way they treated us was closer to how you treat infants than 17 year olds. There was little to no hope for learning from the teachers, and no expectation from the students. Cheating was rampant.
When I told my English teacher I had been admitted to UT Austin, his reaction was "no you weren't".
The US takes good care of university bound students, but does a pretend job for for those that are not on that track.
America’s not special. Schools are very similarly run in every government school system I know of and almost all the others. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=11375
> How did our communities let it get so bad...
If schools provide childcare and sort and rank the children a large majority of parents are satisfied.
Perhaps future societies will go back to the drawing board and recognize communal, multi-generational living, where one was tightly integrated with some form of community provides everyone the greatest benefit and happiness, not being dual income wage slaves who leave mostly strangers and the state to raise their children.
I recall once in 6th grade we were talking about marine sponges and the teacher had brought in one of those loofah sponges, passed it around and said that it was a sponge from the ocean. I raised my hand and said "no, that's a loofah. It's from a plant that's in the cucumber family. I know because my grandmother grows them." And he was like "No, this is a sponge from the ocean. Your grandmother can't grow these." There was no changing his mind and he didn't appreciate being contradicted.
I don't understand why teachers are so often threatened by thoughtful children, but it's awfully sad.
I did three years in education before switching to software development. I would have done a lot more if the pay was better and the schools provided more support to the teaching staff. Sometimes I feel like I'm wasting my time working on a bunch of worthless marketing websites instead of educating people but at least I can provide for my family and live a rich and fulfilling life outside of work.
To us, it was impressive how simple tests and exams were, I saw ridiculous things like professors uploading test exams which contained like 90% of the questions.
To me it was absurd.
There are some professors who make it hard. Generally those who have tenure don’t care and put down a shitload of work on students. Also, if you have a well funded lab that pays well you will have a lot more students willing to deal with a harder course.
Normal students want to zip thru and get to living. It’s sad - but its a tragedy of college being so expensive. It’s hard to take a risk on academic (mis)adventures that can crater your financial standing for life (yup for life - student loans cannot be written off during bankruptcy).
I think that despite it being less obvious these days, it's still true: actually learning for the sake of knowing and understanding is a nerd thing. Even at universities, students who care are considered weird.
For a teenager with bursting hormones this becomes a trivial choice
American universities definitely have their great courses, but the fact that so much depends on money, makes teachers focus on funding first, publications second and teaching is very low on the priority and so is actually making sure students "understand", rather than "know".
Actually I always thought most Americans share what they know, even if they aren't experts. Usually people from other cultures are more reserved and dont do this.
One of my children started public from 1-5 in Montessori and found the same (and at a somewhat selective public school).
Eventually they moved again so they could put her back in montessori school.
In my own experience multi-year/grade classrooms seemed more fun and interesting, and I think there were social and educational benefits as well.
My perception is that in the US multi-year tends to be largely limited to elective courses, clubs, sports, and extracurricular activities.
(Unfortunately a typical "college preparatory" track in secondary school can interfere with elective courses such as arts courses or practical courses, both of which seem to be viewed as less important by many schools and college admissions departments. I wonder whether California proposition 28 will expand access to arts courses and activities?)
For students who finished high school courses, some teachers were certified by the local college to teach college level courses (all teachers at this school had at least a Master's degree) and there were arrangements to students to the college, or bring faculty from the college to the school, depending on the number of students taking a given class.
Many students when graduating from high school were simultaneously awarded college degrees.
...
I kept tabs more or less my classmates that came out of the Montessori, and I think they overall overperformed the non Montessori people in middle school and high school. Harder to gauge adulthood success.
Isn't this just as likely to be a selection effect? The kids who go to Montessori schools are not selected from the population at random. But public school kids are.
But still I can see that parents that place kids in Montessori schools are a different population than those that place them in private schools.
As a former parent and former board president of a small catholic PK-8 school, I'd say that parental involvement is the key differentiator, uniforms/behavior, faith teaching and teacher motivation are other big drivers there. The Montessori methods are a different path that works well as well. End of the day, we're all clever apes and will learn in a supportive environment.
Our kids in that school had access to fewer educational/enrichment resources, but tended to outperform their peers when they transitioned (mostly) to public high school. about 40% of the kids were scholarship funded, and those scholarships did not require religious affiliation. These were kids who would have significantly worse outcomes in public school, but they had parents committed to their success.
There are several key disadvantages.
- Parental involvement can transition into meddling.
- A kid who needs an IEP and services may not get it because the school doesn't offer the services and won't tell the family to leave OR the parent is in denial and the school isn't prepared to deal with it.
- Kids may be boxed out of sports as suburban schools usually have (corrupt) pay-to-play feeder programs.
As a parent, my goal is to get my child the best education that I have the ability to provide. Montessori and other private schools are a great way to do that. However, I don't think taxpayers should be paying for those options beyond core services (school nurses, etc)
There was a non-verbal autistic kid there, too. I played "clap-hands" with them every day, apparently the only human interaction (apart from their parents) that they had.
We moved when I was 5, and I went to a normal school after that. I don't remember much about it (all the above is stories my parents told me later). Luckily we moved to a small village where the teacher had enough time to continue giving me the personalised attention I clearly needed. Then I got shipped off to boarding school and the rest of my schooling is a dark, terrible mess of anger and violence.
It totally worked for me. I hated school, except that one.
I say this as the parent of a kid who is right on the verge of being kicked out of preschool over that issue. I totally get it. I wish I knew how to help him. He has some great qualities, but he also requires constant attention and mentally draining correction from everyone that's involved in his life.
You got this!
One of the Montessori practices I'm a big fan of is observation. Quiet almost secret observation of the child. Ideally the child isn't aware you're there and you merely observe them act freely (in a safe environment for the child).
On the one hand, I think students in small classes can really become more confident and enthusiastic about learning in the long-term. But on the other, a shift to larger classes can be alienating (e.g. feedback from educators is less frequent). This could be mitigated by going to office hours, but there are plenty of minority experiences that stick where teaching assistants and professors are unwelcoming. The change could be less of a shock for students who went to large high schools, as they're more used to large classes.
Perhaps students who have the chance to grow up with individualized learning can opt for universities that have smaller classes, though it's not always possible when large public universities can often be much more affordable. I wonder if there is a way to prepare students from smaller schools with personalized education to do well at much larger educational institutions.
So many kids (myself included) hit university not knowing what they should be doing (or what they've been learning actually requires at the 'next leve') because you're guided to broad and narrow learning curriculum and not following their specific interests intensely.
We see the chaotic, political, competitive and ranked corporate world as 'normal' instead of a terrible, poorly organised and dysfunctional system. It's not 'the real world,' it's a bubble that reinforces itself because we train kids to fit into it throughout their education.
As most Montessori schools are private, my impression is that the variance in the quality of Montessori implementation varies considerably, but at a high level I have positive views of many of the same method characteristics as other comments:
- mixed-age classes
- learner-driven scheduling/work
- non-test-centric evaluation
- etc.
- independence in both learning/working and life in general
- love of learning
- kindness towards others
- are you accredited by AMS, AMI and/or SAIS?
- are your teachers trained primarily through AMS or AMI?
- how long have your teachers been with the school, on average?
- where do students go after this school, and what are their outcomes (what colleges, high school honor graduates, etc.)?
- does the school do standardized testing that is accepted by the local school district or otherwise make it easy to transition to other schools after they age out?Having gone to a different kind of "alternative" school (Waldorf / Steiner), I agree 100%.
Variance in quality among teachers was pretty high, higher than my children's public schools.
Sadly my school was also used a bit as dumping ground for children who failed in the public school system, so at least in the later classes most of the newer students were below-average in performance, making progress slower and classes more boring.
Switching from an "alternative" to a public school (after 9 years for me) was a pretty big culture shock.
In the US, AMS vs AMI is a salient difference that is worth understanding... it's a bit of a which-linux-distro-is-best type holy war.
Thinking about which program to put my children in has opened a whole host of other questions such as one of your last one about what are their outcomes - which is how do I want to define the outcomes/expectations from the program aka my children going through the education system.
I would like to emphasize the check for AMS or AMI. Any school can all themselves a Montessori school, so I'd make sure it's at least certified in one of those two (not familiar with SAIS so cannot comment on that).
- mixed aged group classrooms. So in one year of the 3 year cycle, he is the younger child (and receives mentorship from his older buddies), and in year 3 of each cycle, he is the older buddie mentoring younger pupils. Since he has no siblings, this is a benefit to his development.
- Montessori follow the state curriculum, however they allow children to manage their own time. So if he wants to do math all day, he can, and the teacher is there more for project management and giving him assistance than to drive him by a strict 45 minute schedule. At the end of the week, he is supposed to accomplish the assigned work (regardless of which order he wants to do it in). This will help him in the future with his own project management and prioritising work loads (we hope).
- the parents sending their kids to Montessori are not of the Elitist breed. I wont explain what I mean by that here. Its better than Steiner type schools (my personal opinion).
Other than the above, there wasn't anything particular about Montessori compared regular State run schools.
I think that will depend on the school. My daughter went to two, on opposite sides of the country: one was filled with super nice parents, the other had a lot more pretension.
As others have pointed out, the Montessori program is strong, but the execution is everything.
FWIW my wife, who is in her 40s, regularly visits her Montessori campus when visiting her hometown, and is friends with several of her classmates from the time, all of whom might give you the impression that Montessori is some sort of MLM thing to judge by their unbridled enthusiasm.
EDIT - we plan to start our child in public kindergarten, because money. Tough choice, but that $12k isn't peanuts to us.
+ Love of learning and self-driven discovery
+ Top of class in pretty much all subjects
+ Comfortable giving presentations
+ Comfortable working in groups
+ At ease working with younger students/children and essentially mentoring them
+ Excellent handwriting
+ Respect for teachers
- Difficulty with testing that involves framing the questions in an intentionally deceptive manner
- Difficult transition to the cliques and more aggressive social dynamics of public school
- Tough for them to deal with the way many students treat their teachers and behave in general in public school
I would recommend, that a year or 2 before the kids transition they start doing standardized tests and worksheets to get acclimated to that. It's a big shock otherwise.
Overall my kids loved their time in Montessori and wish the program had gone through high school.
In math the kids definitely leveraged the binomial/trinomial tools, beads and other tactile methods to have a better understanding of the concepts of mult/div/exponentials/roots long before they would have approached in the standard US arithmetic methods. They were also doing algebra and geometry by the end of Montessori.
Montessori also spends a lot of time working on holistic views with regards to science and history and then give the kids the freedom to do their own research and projects on the topics. The normal school models tend to take more of a cause-effect + memorize the dates method as that's what tracks the testing. It's not generally till university that they then go back to something that usually requires critical thinking.
On critical thinking there's an emphasis there in Montessori on involving the kids in asking more questions and then building a model to analyze and defend their position. Public school is optimizing for learn by rote and it's a culture shock going to Uni where they back to something that's utilizing critical analysis.
My older child is in IB at the moment and they're using much of this as it's taught in more of Uni style.
I also like that philosophy is compulsory, I feel that the humanities are under served in our current school systems.
While the atmosphere wasn't toxic like I hear people say about public school, few of my peers were interested in learning, excelled academically, etc.
A non-negligible portion of the kids in my school were the ones kicked out of the public school for grades or troublemaking. I think they did better at my school, but that population affected the academic experience. My brother went to another nearby religious school and it was the same.
My school was caught in a loop of poor funding -> sub-par teachers -> less enrollment -> less funding.
I expect a school focused specifically on self-actualization and skill-building to have better results than an arbitrary private school.
If you just throw kids together and expect the syllabus/curriculum to prevail, you'll quickly find the Lord of the Flies elements of public school social dynamics come into play and for a child often are more important than academics. At that point, simply being "private" has no advantage.
Based on the experience given above as well as my own experience, I'm going to guess the poster was talking about Catholic parochial schools. Catholic parochial schools were the original public schools in North America and still operate as such today, except obviously no public funding in the United States (they do in some provinces of Canada).
Either way, they'll accept basically anyone. However, they do consistently give better results anyway, even adjusting for income and social status. Actually, the effect is most pronounced in the lowest incomes. The richer you are, the less difference parochial v public makes (of course going to super cushy private schools puts you at an advantage).
Am I naive in thinking that the aggressive social dynamics of public school adds no value whatsoever to a child's or teenager's development?
Like, _why_ would anyone want to put their children through that? Is it _really_ integral to a person's social development to understand how to interact with bullies (worst case)?
I admit that I am rather nihilistic about public schooling, but I'm open to changing my mind.
I am genuinely questioning whether public school makes children socially mature rather than only being a traumatic experience for many pupils, for no other reason than that public schooling is the default choice.
It's the choice that everyone goes through. So unless you want your children to be unable to adapt to the people that were shaped through that horrible system, you will need to introduce them to that system in some capacity. Sports are not really enough. School is like day job for kids until they're 18. Everyone goes through the same standardized garbage, and they will have to live their lives with other people who went through the same standardized garbage.
Your only choice is to pay exorbitantly so they don't go through that garbage, but will face adulthood with 99% of the population that did, which can have mixed results.
But I don't think school is what makes them mature as much as it's the adults that they look up to and emulate that shape that. And whether it traumatic can depend on how they're able to internalize it.
Kids are cruel to each other because they do not yet know any better. They are still developing empathy and have not yet learned social skills. Kids in mixed-age environments can (and do) take their cues from older children and adults; kids who are isolated into the bizarre, historically nonexistent single-age environments found in the modern school system do not have that advantage, and accordingly tend to brutalize each other. Outside of prison there is nothing like it in adult life.
I do not see that kindness at the airport or the grocery store, or most other instances that are closer to a random sampling of the US adult population.
No, you learn maladaptive patterns. Your options are artificially constrained. Most of the ways a grown adult would deal with e.g. bullies are just not available to you.
Take physical violence for example. As an adult, if you're threatened with physical violence you have the options to:
- Get out of there. But kids can't do this because they're physically confined to the same classroom with the same people, every day. And obviously you're not allowed to just leave the school when you want to.
- Fight back. Risky, but you at least won't be punished by the courts if you can argue self-defense. But kids can't do this because "zero tolerance" policies punish both the aggressor and victim, by design, if the victim fights back
- Call the police. Kids can't do this, police don't care about schoolyard disputes. Snitching to a teacher just gets you bullied even more.
- Talk the person down. Maybe this works, but in a school they'll be back again the next day, and you'll have to do it again, and again, and again. Adult interactions are not so predictably repeated, unless in some other highly institutionalized setting like the military or a prison (guess which places also have problems with violent bullying).
Adults can, well, solve their problems like adults. Schoolkids literally aren't allowed to solve their problems like adults. Fuck, they're not even allowed to go to the toilet without asking someone first.
Is there any wonder they develop behavioral pathologies to cope: passivity, social withdrawal, self-harm, proactive aggression, self-sabotage, etc etc.
And I wonder how much of adult suffering comes down from not un-learning bad behavioral patterns learned in school? How many people have put up with being treated like garbage for years (at work, in a relationship, etc), because they haven't internalized that they don't need to ask an authority figure to be allowed to leave?
At some point I had to defend myself from a bully (that probably had a awful home life, since that guy managed to come home to school 7:00 in the morning already drunk, multiple times) by bashing the guy with a metal table and then threatening to kill him with a knife. Only then, he stopped bothering me.
Also I knew more than one guy that admired Columbine guys, their reason is that it was a good way (in their minds of course) of both getting out of their shitty life and taking revenge at same time.
Thankfully, now that I am adult, all problems so far I could solve by just talking to people, no tables, knives, planks or chains necessary.
Note: I went to "good" private schools, thus nobody died or got seriously injured, but I have friends that went to public schools, and one of them for example was forced to cause serious injury when 3 older students ambushed him right outside the school, and the only thing he had to defend himself was his skateboard, so he proceeded to hit them with the metal axis where you attach the wheels, broke half of the teeth of one guy, caved in one of the temples of another, and broke the shoulder and one knee of the third, after that the school started to have the police patrol near the school to prevent a repeat of this. Also that school banned skateboards, yoyos, long rulers (specially a particular metal ruler distributed as souvenir during a political campaign, that people found out you could sharpen and use as a decent machete) and spinning tops (specially those with metal tip, one kid made a hole in another kid head with one).
I went to a rough inner-city school and there was literally nothing like this. The fights were all between people who were already involved.
I went to a pretty rough school (repeated fights, people I went to school with murdering people, etc.) and I basically was never even once threatened with violence. All the bullying is through words and making fun of people, etc.
Is physical bullying of this sort actually that common or more media depiction?
- work-life balance. we expect kids to do "homework", but we don't expect adults to do work outside of actual working hours. we call those places "toxic working environments" and avoid them if we have any sense. I actually have more time to myself as an adult than I did as a kid.
- doing things only so that they can be graded for the approval of some authority figure, rather than because they are intrinsically worthwhile or enjoyable
- a peer group artificially constrained to be only of kids within a year of your age. interacting with kids a few years older or younger is out of the norm, friendships between year groups are rare. that's not how adult life works. I have a pet theory that so much bad behavior in schools is caused by this age stratification.
Lack of exposure is a massive factor and even with good intentions it does not really make up for it.
Most of the kids I went to school with were oblivious about poverty or even just being mindful of different socieconomic circumstances. stuff like
"yeah, let's just have all of our friends go out to a fancy restaurant and split the bill for every single one of our birthdays"
The problem is when the degree of conflict escalates past that safe, low-stakes level (which it does for some people, in some schools). We don't have everyone spend a month in prison, as part of their education, for instance, because it wouldn't be safe, or low-stakes, and would permanently damage people.
Kids who go through Montessori, Waldorf, etc, have a much better foundation for dealing with damaged people. If you start from a place of self-respect and expect the same of others, you can recognize when others aren't going to reciprocate and you can cope with that.
I'll throw in a side of "Americans are often 'stuck' in high school on some developmental level." I couldn't necessarily say the same about people in Europe or anywhere else.
Except in the most generic sense that there are lots of people and occasionally there are petty disputes.
I suspect transitioning out may be slightly different depending on a large variety of factors but maybe how children are raised to socialize in a traditional sense. To be fair its been many years since I've been in school but there's probably still a bit of a lean for activity based socializing for boys vs girls but hopefully that's changed.
I agree that it did well to set my up academically. I ended up going to middle/high schools that were relatively average academically, so I was pretty strong in all subjects in comparison to my peers. Ultimately I went to a very prestigious college and now work in a wonderful finance job I love. However in the many years of therapy I’ve had as an adult, I continue to identify Montessori school as a foundational contributor to my social anxiety, and ultimately my ensuing clinical depression over a lack of social life which haunted most of my college years.
My Montessori school had about 15-25 kids / class year. Some of the larger years were split into two groups with separate teachers. Every year, maybe one or two kids left to go to other schools and one or two new kids joined, but for the most part I grew up with the same core set of children for seven years. I honestly believe this had a permanent negative effect on my ability to socialize and form new friendships that I am only barely beginning to correct over a decade later. Admittedly I did not participate in any extracurricular outside of Montessori school (particularly because it had its own after-school programs). So when I transitioned to a public school for middle/high school, it was a sharp culture shock and I definitely struggled to fit in.
I think Montessori schools are worthwhile academically, but you should be careful to keep your children in contact with other kids outside the Montessori bubble.
> school had about 15-25 kids / class year. Some of the larger years were split into two groups with separate teachers. Every year, maybe one or two kids left to go to other schools and one or two new kids joined, but for the most part I grew up with the same core set of children for several years.
seems perfectly normal from a UK primary school perspective (up to age 11 or 12 depending on the area). I'm surprised to hear that kids younger than that age would be expected to have larger peer groups in the US.
For context, in the US many public middle/high schools are like two orders of magnitude larger per class year. Many schools have like 1000 kids / class year.
Secondary school (11-16) is more commonly around 30 per class, 7-12 classes per year, 5 year groups in the school - so 1000-1500 kids. 16-18 can either be at the school (which would then be a smaller cohort than the 15-16 year group due to some people going elsewhere), or an external college which is highly variable in size.
1000 kids / class year is unheard of. That seems huge to me to the point I can’t understand how it would work. I knew mostly everyone in my class year up to high school and even then I probably knew more than half. Might explain why the social scene is far less brutal here than in the US.
1000 kids / class year is quite unusual!
https://highschoolguide.org/624/top-100-largest-high-schools...
Could it be that the social life at the 'prestigious college' was just rubbish, e.g. geared towards extraverted mba-types with 'default' social activities being clubbing and drinking?
So I think this varies quite a lot across the US. I tend to feel that large cities have more crowded classes than rural areas, but I have no data for that.
The local public school seems to be fine (this is elementary/middle grades). Thinking about going from there to a more elite private high school though, biggest downside being that it will require a bit of a commute.
I wish you could load this all up into a world simulator and see which option worked out best 10 years into the future :-)
but most of all, i do not believe that children can not learn to get along over time. so any issue with kids not getting along is going to be temporary.
even if your child makes friends easily, large classes allow the class to split into multiple subgroups, cliques that stick together. the smaller the class, the less likely this should happen. at least that is what my intuition suggests. i would put the limit for that to 10-15 kids though. any more than that is an invitation to form subgroups.
but we also must not forget the montessori aspect here, which has a strong influence on the group dynamics and individual childrens behavior.
for one, i believe that the montessori approach is driving and motivating children in a way that they simply don't show as much negative behavior as they would exhibit in a traditional class.
Edit to add: the whole school would have significantly more people, typically around 5-10 30-pupil classes for each of the 8-9 years. So perhaps the difference is the total number of children in the same school - though typically interaction between different classes, even of the same year, was far less than within-class.
I appreciated that change of social dynamics every time.
Sports was usually one thing that was more inter-class, but that was it.
uuh this is how regular school is in Sweden...
You have a class of people in grade 1-6, then grade 7-9 is a new school, then high school is a new school.
But I guess we all have anxiety so ur right xD
While I believe your experience to be entirely legitimate, what you are describing is the norm throughout most of Europe and I can assure you that most of us are socially adjusted (or at least somewhat socially adjusted).
The main difference was how much more challenging Montessori education was. The teachers really observed me and how I performed on assignments, and they could tell when I needed more of a challenge, and assign something to me that was just at the edge of what I was able to do. In the traditional education, if I consistently just did the bare minimum expected of everyone, I was a double-plus A plus student.
I was also allowed to explore subjects that interested me in greater depth, as long as it didn't come at the expense of subjects I found less interesting. I learned a lot of English and maths in the first few years!
If I had a disagreement with a Montessori teacher, we would sit down together and have a mature conversation about it and reach some sort of mutually beneficial solution (yes, even when I was under the age of 10!) In the more traditional education, there was the assumption that if I disagreed with the teacher, I was wrong and should shut up. (I ended up not passing a few classes in the traditional school because of disagreements with the teacher – I simply stopped attending the class at that point. Didn't seem productive to go on.)
I also had a lot more spare time in the Montessori school. As long as I did well on the work assigned to me and didn't bother my classmates, the teachers didn't really care how I spent my time. I could sit in a corner and read or do long multiplication, or go out and kick around a soccer ball. I would like to think this helped me learn independence.
On the other hand, I also have a notable lack of respect for authority figures. I like to think this is good, but it has also gotten me into trouble for disagreeing with hardline managers, refusing to do things I think are unethical, etc. I think some of this can be attributed to the Montessori school, where respect was based on fact, rational argument, and patient listening, rather than who should be commanding whom.
I went through "classical" education system (with lots of aggression, as somebody else already mentioned in another thread here) - and can tell I also obtained no respect for authority figures. School taught me to survive school by tricking those teachers who had no respect to pupils. Give them what they want and you'r going to be fine - even if you don't learn anything useful. Same when it comes with relationships with other pupils, especially those aggressive ones. I observe my kids who I send to Montessori and can definitely tell they are not easy when it comes to disagreements - and I like it that way, it keeps reminding me that I have no right not to treat them with respect even when I'm tired or in hurry. I see teachers putting lots of attention to mutual respect as well.
Notice the use of quotes.
Is anyone here talking about this other educational system you're referencing? Have there been any mentions of it?
However, transitioning back to traditional schooling was extremely painful, and sadly it never got easier. I hated the rest of my school experience, from 9th grade until basically the end of college.
In Montessori, when it was time to learn a new subject, I'd have a brief, one-on-one conversation with the teacher to get oriented, and then after 10-20 minutes, they'd set me loose to apply the ideas on my own until I mastered the material.
Compared to that freedom, ordinary classrooms were miserable. Trapped, listening to lectures for 45+ minutes at a time before I was able to get my hands dirty and try anything out. And if I caught on early in a lecture, that made things even worse! Now I had to sit there for a half hour and listen to a teacher explain something I already understood—to no one's benefit. I'm getting worked up just thinking of it. Suffice it to say that moving at the pace of the slowest person in the class was torture for my ADHD brain. Montessori spoiled me and I never really reacclimatized.
I don't have any advice except that for some people (like me) Montessori works extremely well, and for many others, it doesn't work well at all. But if it works well, then transitioning back to regular schooling can be tough.
I loved it. The teachers let me teach an art and drawing class in 2nd grade. Another student taught an algebra class (he's a brilliant cancer researcher now). I co-wrote, illustrated, and sold a comic book with another classmate in 4th grade during class time.
It allowed me to complete the curriculum on my own time and held me accountable.
Montessori was something I made my own, not something that was happening to me.
The transition out wasn't that bad. I did 5th grade again (June baby) at a standard private school. The biggest things: - I had never written a formal essay, or an essay outline. - I had never taken nor prepared for a real test
Like others here, I never really enjoyed school as much after Montessori.
For the right kid, it can cultivate curiosity, independence, collaboration, and a love for self managed learning. For the wrong kid, it can be an unstructured nightmare.
I went to public school. Im pretty sure grade 4/5 is around where tests and formal essay writing started anyways, so that doesn't sound that terrible.
"Like others here, I never really enjoyed school as much after Montessori."
It's almost like school peaked as a child and then it was just disappointing after that. Not that I would say don't do the program because everything afterwards is less good but I am a bit split on it.
It also speaks to how powerful the program is to elicit such responses. And it seems from the small subsection of commenters on this HN thread (which is already a specific subsection of society) that there is a transition afterwards but people seem to be well adjusted for the most part.
From my own experience I can say I don't really think I enjoyed school (not Montessori) - and I'm realizing as I type this that in itself is unfortunate.
I'm considering both Montessori and non-Montessori for my own child right now too. FWIW the standard school looks fun too, albeit with more structure. I'm touring my old Montessori school in January. Curious to see how it's evolved in the last 20+ years.
It's likely that school just becomes more unenjoyable as "academic performance" takes the place of "child development".
One thing we learned is that Montessori isn't for every child. My oldest did OK but he much prefers traditional schools and is thriving at his middle school (a public magnet). My youngest, on the other hand, loves the self-guided learning and pace. He's more organized and self-motivates better than my oldest which makes a big difference. He reads like crazy and finishes books in a week that would take me a month at least, not sure where that came from but he gets a lot of free time at school when his "works" are finished. Both kids are diagnosed with ADHD and so am I (my poor wife heh).
Another thing, the Montessori we attend is public so it still has to meet district and state testing requirements. That put it in an awkward spot where it could never be pure Montessori because of the district and state mandated testing. It also puts the teachers in an awkward spot because they're rated on testing results which contradicts the Montessori method. My wife got fed up and left last year and no teaches at a traditional public high school.
I live in DFW and the Montessori i'm referring to Mata Elementary. DISD is a notorious hellhole of a district but Mata is hanging in there. It's not perfect by any stretch but they're hanging in there and doing their best with what they have. https://www.dallasisd.org/mata
FWIW, my daughter also struggled with math coming into 2nd grade out of Montessori, but it being second grade math, it wasn't hard for her to catch up.
Also, something to watch out for: Montessori is not a registered trademark, so any school can call itself a Montessori school, without offering a Montessori education.
Your kids will probably be able to socialize with people outside their age range better, but will not be as socially adept with kids their age. I'd recommend some outside activities with strictly people in their age group.
However, as others have said, the individual school can have a huge influence on the quality. We moved interstate a year ago and sadly the new Montessori school doesn’t even have a Montessori teacher in my kids class, so we are leaving.
So make sure you go to an established school where the teachers are Montessori trained and have been in the school a long time. That’s the #1 metric of a Montessori school if you ask me.
There were two notable challenges for me, though not everyone in my class experienced these. Some of it will also be limited if you only have them there through 6th grade.
The first was figuring out how to socially transition from a small private school that effectively functioned like a big family, to a large public school. I didn’t really learn how to meet people being at the same small school for so long, and the culture shock of leaving of leaving Montessori was pretty bad. (Both with the way people my age approached learning and the way the public school system operated, i.e. everything is for a grade nothing else matters).
The second is because of some combination of the curiosity driven learning and the particular sequence of teachers I had, I managed to avoid getting a good foundation in algebra because I didn’t really feel like it. This turned out to be a big problem for me for many years, partially because no one realized so I kept being put in higher math classes, doing well through brute force, and being very frustrated and confused about all of it. I’m now getting an advanced degree in math, so everything worked itself out, but I do think math specifically wants a little more structure at those early steps than what I got.
Overall it was still absolutely worth it for me. Sometimes I wonder who I would be now if my curiosity hadn’t been so strongly reinforced when I was young. Happy to answer any specific questions! Hope this helps.
One of the things you mentioned (and i've seen in many comments) is the transition from Montessori to another system (an aside: usually while implying saying how poor the structure/goals of the other system is).
My product development part of my brain points to this as as systemic problem that could try to be addressed by the school/parents - though that is such a holistic change that the best you could do is minimize impacts but maybe that should be considered.
The other part is that it seems that most people have very positive memories of their Montessori days.
As I see it the big family, highly personalized, explore at your own pace, keep children curious, unstructured but guided combination is very attractive but the concern is really that transition after the fact to a larger more structured institution & smaller amount of emphasis on athletics are the sticky points.
Without going into a larger debate about education - I kind of wish the state system was less results oriented and exploratory in the early years for all children and then the program changed as they got older. I recognize there are inherent challenges.
I'm curious if the two challenges that you had (which would probably be different challenges for other children) could have been identified at an early time and given some support - or if you think that struggling through both of them help develop your internal strength without sacrificing too much?
The math learning was fine for me until about 7th grade, so you might not even encounter this. If you’re mathematically inclined and and have the resources to support, I think it’s fairly straightforward to keep an eye on how math is progressing and boost. My parents did identify that I wasn’t prepared for high school math, but didn’t follow through in ways that actually fixed the situation. They both went through pretty rigorous traditional math education, and so probably didn’t even realize this was something that could slip through. I probably would have been back on track with either of my of them sitting down to teach me algebra, or an after school program, or such. Instead what happened is I was handed an algebra textbook to work through over the summer, which honestly I half succeeded at after being in Montessori for so long, but I really needed more guidance/pacing/accountability. It kind of sucked going through high school and early college math without that foundation, I’m not sure I learned much from that struggle other than the usual “I must be naturally bad at math”.
The social transition is a harder one, and bound to happen given how differently Montessori and the generals public school system operates. I echo what the other people here are saying of making sure your kids get to socialize outside of the Montessori environment, especially practicing meeting new peers. Many of my classmates had a hard time at first and then figured it out, it took me a bit longer. I am grateful though that I managed to hold onto the “weirdness” of being curious and passionate about learning, even if it made high school hard at times.
I also don’t think being excited about learning and being well socialized are mutually exclusive! Generally my friends who did better transitioning had more social parents to model off of, or other previously Montessori students at their high school. Something that probably would have helped me is staying in regular contact with the people I went to Montessori with. Then we could navigate the change it together, even if we were all at different schools, and the social switch over wouldn’t have been so total and isolating. My younger sister had a few friends switch to the same high school together and they adapted much much faster. I wonder if parents/kids of parents who move around a lot have any advice on this?
On math, my early elementary teacher and my father (also a teacher) combined Montessori math, which spoke to (or influenced) my visual/tangible style of thinking, and lots of classic drills to internalize math facts. Or maybe it worked out in contrast to your experience because something clicked and I loved learning math early. (High school beat that out of me.)
I feel pretty lucky that I finally found math that I enjoyed and made sense after hating it for so long. I didn’t do a ton of memorization/drilling and I never really got into the world of fun math puzzles, so in high school I was both underprepared and never got to do the cool stuff. It’s much easier to convince myself as an adult that fluency in algebraic computation is useful because I now have examples that I care about being able to work through.
I do sometimes worry that the freedom might not work well for my kids; maybe they need a bit more guidance. The youngest (7) simply refuses to do his work, and while the oldest (now 13) skipped a grade when he was 7, he failed last year because he was not doing any homework and not turning in his assignments. Stricter guidance might help them both. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell.
My parents apparently did consider Montessori for me, but I've only gone to regular schools, never did my homework, always passed, and in university discovered I had no work discipline at all, so it seems like everybody in our family is going to run into that problem at some point. Maybe it's better to learn it early.
Of course being part of the Dutch educational system, they have to follow the same rules, meet the same criteria and receive the same funding as other schools. I've been told that their approach is somewhere halfway between true Montessori and a regular school.
What is slightly different than other experiences here is that the school is a Charter school which poses some challenges but does offer Montessori beyond the normal tuition based model.
As for my daughter, her transition has been fairly smooth. The high school she goes to has more than 10x the students as her old school so is much larger. On the other hand, her grades are good, and she is involved in a number of clubs too.
Montessori is not for everyone but I definitely recommend checking it out.
40 years later, the self-driven learning informs my work, ceeative practice, and ongoing learning. Montessori taught me to look for the next challenge and embrace it.
Dyslexia / dysgraphia / learning differences were not diagnosed in Montessori school, where I excelled at mathematics. When the pressures of prep school ran into the reading writing differences problems ensued.
The bottom line is Montessori taught me to challenge myself and gave me a lifelong love of learning and independent study.
My Montessori school day by grade 6 was a lot of unstructured time, often outdoors, sometimes doing math in the bathroom because that's where it was quiet, very often project based learning with other kids rather than the teacher. Never any "homework" assigned, but often doing school work at home because I wanted to keep working on something.
My prep school was eight periods a day, sitting in desks, learning whatever the day's lesson plan was, getting fixed breaks for lunch and recess, and getting several hours of homework assigned a day.
The two environments were very different. But I adjusted and moved on. The biggest annoyance I had with the prep school was that they controlled my movements so much. In 6th grade, we'd leave the school and go down to the center of town for lunch, getting something at the sub shop or eating our bagged lunch by the town's waterfalls, and returning to school on our own when it was time. In 7th grade, I needed a hall pass to even be out of the classroom during a period, and would definitely get suspended if I left campus during the day.
But from most of the local Montessori schools I toured when I was looking for my son, the freedom we had at my Montessori school in the early 1980's seems to be very much more restricted these days, simply because the larger culture doesn't allow it any longer. The one that actually offered the most freedom for the kids was still the school that I had gone to. But I live too far away from it now for it to have been a real choice.
As it turns out, my son failed spectacularly at his Montessori school because of some learning disabilities he has that they were unable to handle, and he actually is much more happy now in a more traditional school which helped him overcome his disabilities and be successful (not specifically because they are more traditional, but because they are a school well-versed in handling learning disabilities).
The first, and biggest, is constant parental pressure to move away from Montessori and more toward traditional education. This is typically because parents don't actually understand or value Montessori, they either want to brag about sending their kid there, or they're simply using it as a preschool with no intention of keeping their kid there after public school options begin. A school without a strong leader at the top will get kicked around by the parents and start to implement weird and non-useful policies and educational choices. The end failure state here is parents on the board, and a school which moves away from Montessori and ends up a middling small private school with nothing to guide its direction.
The second, as you're alluding to, is just poor teachers. It's very obvious when you walk into a Montessori classroom if the teacher has control of the class. A good Montessori classroom will have the kids engaged in group projects or quiet individual work, some kids helping other kids or giving lessons, and the teacher simply watching ready to step in if a child needs a lesson or some help moving forward. A poor Montessori classroom will have kids scattered about, chatting with each other, running around or being inappropriately loud, and a teacher haggardly running from problem to problem trying to fix it. The best Montessori teachers know how to give constant joy and encouragement, but also come down like a ton of bricks for misbehavior. But they also need to be able to know each child well. If you don't know the kid, you cannot keep them pointed in the right direction, because each kid is different, and you'll lose them to idleness and lack of motivation.
That being said, I would not hesitate to put my kids in one, especially over public schools which are a disaster.
But doesn’t the same variety apply for public schools? They’re not all a disaster. My kid goes to a good dual language immersion public school where in addition to academics, they’re learning collaboration and empathy with people from all walks of life, not just the ones whose parents drop them off in a Tesla. The school is underfunded, doesn’t have the resources to market itself, and teachers are burning out, but if some of the hyper-enthusiastic Montessori parents I know applied their energy to a public school, it’d kick ass. That’s the choice I made—I’m on the PTA and am building their makerspace. Others are leading gardening or composting programs. Not everyone has the time to do that, but we shouldn’t be mere consumers of education, as every parent who helps their kids do homework knows.
Just be sure you know the difference between AMS and AMI. They're pretty different in their approach to Montessori. AMI is strictly traditional Montessori, whereas AMS is a more progressive model. My mother founded an AMS school, so you can guess which one I think is better. But you have to decide which style makes more sense to you.
Montessori worked really well for me. I have always been 'ahead' and I could explore my own interests. I was never bored in school which is something that changed later on in life. I have very fond memories of that school and my own kids (currently 5 and 3) are in a Montessori school and day care as well.
My son specifically is also doing awesome in Montessori and loves going to school. They have themed shelves with 'tasks' (this is translated, not sure about the common English terminology). Every day they have to do at least one task from the 'language' shelf and one from the 'math' shelf. They also have geography, practical life skills and 'cosmology' (basically anything else) shelves.
Teachers keep track of their skills and accomplished tasks and basically sweep behind if they are lacking in one or more areas by encouraging them to pick up more tasks from those areas.
According to the school on average Montessori kids are more independent, great at critical thinking, more self-confident and tend to pick up leadership roles later in life (I do feel like this applies to me, but I've only had a couple of Montessori years so hard to judge).
I am a big fan.
Is there anything specific you are worried about/interested in?
Look OP, if you think school is about your kids learning you've got it very wrong. Wikipedia and arvix are for learning. School is state subsidized daycare, and social conditioning. Industrial society requires discipline, structure and obedience. Those values are not driven into a child's head in the Montessori, model. Do your kids a favor and get these things drilled into their heads early, before you have a bunch of intellectual bums laying around your house. Don't send your kids to Montessori school.
You have to put in the effort yourself to teach them those values (if you can even call them that...) and that life is not all fun and games. That said, Montessori model schools are great for your children, even if they're just "glorified daycares" instead of school. Children need to play, it's how they learn everything, including how to enjoy life. Do not immediately throw them into a life of "discipline, structure and obedience". That's not what life is about.
There’s a pretty consistent underlying structure to the day, and the kids are taught to eg sit quietly for the class gathering (“circle time”), so I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the kids are taught no discipline. The periods that they’re asked to sit for aren’t very long, it’s preschool. But if you go an observe a class, they’re actually extremely well behaved. During their work cycles, they go and get their work, they sit individually to complete their work for a bit, then they return it to the shelf as they found it. And they’re learning relatively advanced reading, spelling, and math at 4.
One thing to be aware of is that many Montessori schools, especially nowadays, are “Montessori-inspired”, they don’t actually go through the effort (and the hiring requirements) it takes to be accredited by AMS. It’s more expensive to hire actual Montessori teachers, but the difference can be pretty incredible.
Public school taught me physics, calculus, history and a smattering of other topics I wouldn’t have delved into on my own (for example, reverse polish notation.) It did not teach me discipline, structure or obedience (I was actually spanked by a grade school teacher, which seems unfathomable now.) As such, I was wholly unprepared for higher education. Some of this stuff might require direct intervention from the parent instead of simply relying on a school to take care of it.
It worked out well up until my 6th grade (8th grade if you count kindergarten) The higher education part (Montessori Lyceum) never worked out for me as lack of structure and wealth of time freedom killed my effort and work ethos.
The difference between how primary and higher education was structured on a Montessori based education is to far apart of each other.
Primary Montessori education was more about getting the kids curious about the world and make them ask questions and get knowledge that way into the kid. Higher Montessori education was more like standard pumping knowledge that you have to remember for terms and tests.
I was never prepared for that higher education part in my primary education period so I went from bad to worse in my higher education before giving up totally and went to work instead. Later I did catch up when I was grown up.
Still, I am thankful for getting Montessori education as it formed my worldview and kept me curious and inquisitive the rest of my life and even now.
I do wish that in the last 3 years of my primary schooling I had more support for conquering the higher education years.
My oldest daughter attended private Montessori until age 12 when she transitioned to an exurb public Middle school in an extremely high income area.
Transition was easy because the Montessori middle school she was going to was new and hadn't gotten their legs yet, so had a pretty lackluster program. Adding to that the lack of extracurricular and club/team opportunities, and small class sizes, Montessori method starts be become a hindrance to learning the complex social dynamics you need to survive IRL.
My other kids transitioned to US public education at 8 and 10 respectively with no issues
The most difficult transition was for the 8 year old, simply because her personality fits the more loosely structured method of Montessori better, however this faded pretty quickly
Should be noted also that my kids are extremely naturally gifted and generally live in the "AP/Honors" world, so would most likely flourish anywhere. YMMV
All children are extremely naturally gifted, it’s the world around that always manages to grind it out of most of them. I think that also represents what Montessori was aiming for when re-thinking education.
What a load of horseshit. Say that in the special education class with 8th graders that can't read or use the bathroom on their own, despite the best efforts and attention of their teachers.
Worth recognizing however that natural variability means there's going to be people with harder times in certain areas.
Our job (collectively) as educators is to make it easy to integrate the wide range of human diversity into regular life, so as to make life easier for everyone in total.
https://www.masslive.com/pioneerparent/2007/09/a_tale_of_two...
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It was designed for children after ww2 to reintegrate with their neighborhoods and communities after being shut ins and isolated from other children. It has turned out to have especially meaningful parallels in the past few years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reggio_Emilia_approach
I have heard a lot about Montessori and how it’s relative to the practitioner. One thing that comes up is how reintegrating into society can be harder.
Regarding the Montessori experience, I have fond memories of the 7 or so years I spent there. Although it's impossible to tease out causation, I generally attribute my love of learning and personal autonomy to my years there and very much think it was worth it for me.
Overall I felt it was very restrictive on my education. My day consisted of a few required activities (copy down a few sentences by hand, do 5 addition problems, etc.) followed by doing whatever I wanted. My favorite one was putting together a cube out of these colored blocks, but there’s only so many times you can put that together. The rest of the day was basically spent in boredom as I’d exhausted all the activities that interested me. I spent a fair amount of time reading.
The restrictive part however was the complete lack of preparation on the part of the teachers to teach anything. I remember after doing addition for a while, I asked my teacher to teach me how to multiply. She said “no, that’s for third graders” and left. I basically pieced together that “two times three” meant 2+2+2 just from the way it sounded in English. What a way to shut down a child’s education.
I’m sure I had an abnormally bad experience, and my sample size isn’t enough to discredit the Montessori methodology as a whole. However, I was much happier and felt I learned a lot more from public school. My conclusion is thus that the quality of teachers is vastly more important than the methodology. If you have well-funded public schools in your area, I would definitely suggest them over a poorer private Montessori school.
One thing that may also be a factor is any learning differences in the child. Montessori teaching is rigid in its own way and not the best for children with dyslexia/dysgraphia (though neither are standard public school curricula). Although early Montessori math is friendlier for dyscalculia with all the use of physical objects. Depending on the school and individual guides, things like ADHD, autism may also lead to issues with the school. Thought that could be said of any private school.
The biggest thing we saw with people pulling their children out of Montessori schools were fears about academic progress and measuring their children against their neighbors' kids in public school. That's on the parent though: some needed constant feedback and validation via grades to feel like their kids were competitive with public schools.
i didn't mention this in my comment but this point is true in my experience as well. My oldest has both dyslexia and dysgraphia and really struggled with reading the way Montessori teaches it. We had to get outside specialists and basically do a very intense summer school to get him up to speed and things figured out. Once we understood what was happening we were able to get state required accommodations at his Montessori which really helped. He's now at a public middle school magnet and doing pretty well. His reading and writing are, by far, his hardest subjects because he's basically got one hand tied behind his back because of the dyslexia/dysgraphia but the kid knows how to work and he gets through it.
edit: If i may brag, i've seen that kid of mine do things grown adults would run from. That summer school was 4 hrs a day of intense work and an absolute struggle many days ended in tears/frustration but he did it and beat dyslexia down to something he could manage. I've never seen anyone work like he did, when i'm getting lazy and phoning it in I think about him and pick up the pace.
- Self paced learning and choosing how to spend your time
- Need to collaborate with your peers on scarce resources (everyone can't read the same book / solve the same challenge at the same time)
- Small classes, no one could get away with anything/bullying
- Responsibility for completing the weekly plan yourself and being rewarded for hard work ("the diligence light is well lit" sticker you got when sharing your weekly progress - sry poorly translated Swedish"
I put my kid in a Montessori Preschool. The school was one giant 25-kid classroom with about 5 teachers. He absolutely loved a specific and was learning from her. He was starting to learn to read at the age of 4, super interested in everything she brought him. Then his favorite teacher left the school and it was never the same thing again. Even though he already knew the others, they could never actually get him interested in reading again or simply learning. It seems to me he didn't like the "focus time" (I forgot the name they use!) and doing activities all by himself. School as mostly boring to him, I ever wonder what the heck he was doing there all that time, 99% of the stories he shared with us happened during the little outside play time they had.
Then we put him in Public School for Kindergarten and he absolutely loved it. He loved doing the same activity as everybody else, he loved the teacher, he loved the more energetic environment. He immediately got interested in learning again.
So my conclusion is that it has much more to do with the teacher and the environment than with the method. Choose well, and trust your feelings when you see and talk to the teachers.
Monstessori is definitely not for everyone, I really enjoyed my time there (not counting the traumatic experiences caused by classmates). I definitely feel like the teachers there can give you a more personalized way of learning which just isn't possible on standard schools. The national curriculum did not challenge me enough and had me really struggling to do any work, eventually my teachers allowed me more time on the computer if I did my work and that worked really well for me.
For transitioning to high school, at first I quite enjoyed it as it was all new but after a while I just lost all motivation. Every meeting with my parents and the school basically came down to "We really think monkeyguy can do better, but he just doesn't seem interested". It sucked, I barely did anything and I barely passed each year. Eventually I graduated and the same thing happened with college/uni. Work life has been great however.
I'm not going to recommend anything however, I do not know your children as well as you do.
Montessori education allows children freedom to explore and follow their own interests, and this lack of structure can be problematic. I was a bright kid and many things came easily to me, so when I encountered something that didn't, I would get frustrated and quit.
Unfortunately there are many topics that require pure grinding to master: multiplication tables, musical scales, foreign vocabulary[0], etc. Not only was there nobody to force me to focus on repeating difficult, unpleasant work, I also failed to learn the meta-skill of how to make myself stick at doing things I suck at.
This eventually came to hamstring me later in my education, and even in my adult career I struggle to make myself do necessary yak-shaving.[1]
[0] maybe less so for young children
[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/3880...
The gap did provide a bit of a buffer, but I nonetheless did not care for the transition. While the systems were quite different, I believe it was more the difference in the teacher quality that had the largest impact. I was fortunate to go to a small, exceptional Montessori school before such things became ridiculously expensive, while the public school, although it had a few very good teachers, also had some very marginal ones (basically, tenured and terrible).
If the quality of teaching is similar, then I expect the transition would have been much easier. As others have noted, shop around since the teaching quality, rather than the teaching structure, is ultimately what was the starkest change for me.
Or is your critique more along the lines of the bigger driver for montessori outcomes isn't the montessori methods, but the affluence of the families?
According to this article [0], it's pretty vague (Montessori isn't trademarked and tough to enforce) and not all schools stick to the "classic" Montessori methods, which, I guess there's a handful of certification bodies (in the US).
To this point,
> Out of more than 4,000 so-called Montessori schools across the country, only 1,250 are affiliated with the American Montessori Society (and only 204 are AMS-accredited) and about 220 are recognized by AMI.
[0] https://hechingerreport.org/will-the-real-montessori-please-...
edits: re-vamped text
In retrospect, I am really glad I moved a bit earlier, because I think going straight from Montessori to 7th grade (junior high there) would have been a big jump. Moving over while still in elementary school eased that. But that was me and my situation.
I went through something similar through the end of high school. I did, however, go through public school for elementary.
My experiences mirror a lot of what others on here have already written. The transition to back to traditional education (university) wasn't an issue.
If you are already motivated, going from a low to moderately more rigorous style of learning is easy.
The issue is going in the other direction, which is why so many first year university students fail.
The montessori was probably a great fit for me because I couldn't sit in a desk all day after moving to regular school and got in a little trouble for being unable to do so until I was about 16.
The oldest one loved it and thrived in Montessori and stayed in it until we started a Charter school to avoid the local Middle School.
The second one HATED Montessori and we had to move him out to the local elementary school.
In the end it came down to personality. The second kid had a personality that just wouldn't work in a Montessori environment. He would do what he wanted to when he wanted to and would refuse to be redirected in any way, shape or form. Same school, mostly the same teachers, but totally opposite outcomes.
In what way did a kid with this disposition like traditional school more?
Did your kid respond better to a more rigid structure?
Or was it something else?
Until he was a junior in HS he refused most guidance and advice about school and learing. Then, one day, the light came on and he did a 180 on his schoolwork and life planning.
Now studying for the MCAT to become a neurosurgeon with a minor in CS where before he was a C student.
I loved it!!
Montessori is a style of learning, the implementation will vary according to the school though.
I went to a Montesorri school from 1st through 4th grade. I enjoyed the atmosphere. In recent years I've read about Montessori and found that my Montessori experience was different, but much the same wrt a gentle focus on practical individual learning.
Non Montessori school was a process of checking boxes and actual thinking inbetween, while Montessori was a cycle of thinking through problems for yourself, sometimes as a group.
One thing I didn't appreciate until later school years is that Montessori blends different ages and skill levels together. I neither felt the need to keep up nor to excel, just to figure stuff out. For example, I remember a a classmate writing an essay using movable letters on a mat, but he didn't space them out so it was hard to read. I asked why he was doing it like that and the teacher responded that he had chosen to do it that way, I felt it was wrong, but instead of letting me get on a high horse, the teacher drew my attention to what I was already on my way to do. He continued to write without spaces, and I continued to think someone should correct him. Lo and behold, he learned to use spaces, all without someone, teacher nor child, scolding him, with words or with red marks. That's hard to do in typical bureaucratized classroom.
If I were pressed to find fault in Montessori itself, I'd say, it cannot succeed at all without good teachers/emotion/energy conductors, while a common classroom can get ok enough outcomes with an authority figure and good textbooks.
Most of the other students had done kindergarten at my new school and already knew each other. I did eventually make friends, but I always felt like a bit of an outsider since I didn't have that shared kindergarten experience with my peers.
I imagine this would only get worse the longer a child stays out of the conventional schooling system.
What I've enjoyed is watching how lessons are very "touch" oriented. Seems every lesson has a visual or touch oriented wood tool.
The students are dividing 6 digit numbers in 2nd/3rd (!).
There were several young people who I later transferred in HS back into their district and remembered.
Lots of little learning puzzles and nap time. LOTS Of stories. In fact I would say the curriculum, and this is a long time ago, was primarily fables besides what was self-directed and puzzles. The teachers were mostly kind.
You probably need both to be well adapted because the public system teaches you to defend yourself, which us necessary IRL. Montessori teaches you collaboration and thinking outside of zero sum mindset.
She largely outperformed all her peers later in life.
hippie school teaches you how to love the world, state school teaches you how to live in it.
I need to find out where it was (and how old I was - I would guess 5 or 6), but the situation is that I was not ready (or perhaps not the right type of kid) for Montessori.
I was painfully shy, and I'd avoid attention.
The teachers (there were 2 I believe) must have been happy to ignore me. How else do you spend an entire year not paying attention to a student? Perhaps they were overworked.
I'd spend a lot of time in the bathroom, or ... I'm not even sure what. Playing with something, but generally not learning.
The strong theme of these comments here are how Montessori really allowed some to thrive, but I cannot imagine that - it was very much not my experience. Perhaps that was me, or perhaps it was that particular school. Likely both.
I have a distinct memory of another student (a friend) learning the alphabet. A teacher was spending time with him, letting him draw the letters out. For whatever reason, I wanted to be included in that. Even at that young age, I suspect I knew that something was off. I wanted that attention as well.
I expressed interest in doing what my friend was doing (I'm not sure what - writing out the alphabet perhaps), but was told no. I don't remember why, this was some 30+ years ago now - but I recall that rejection.
I eventually went to public school, but was very nearly held back. I didn't know anything!
My mother interceded and I was allowed to stay in that grade (which is good, I'm still on the older side for my grade - holding me back could have been even more awkward).
She helped me learn what I needed to know at home - I imagine it was quite the effort.
I still wonder why I was put in that position to begin with! You think they would know that I wasn't learning anything, but I'll bet it was easy to hide.
Kids born in the 80's and 90's tended to have parents who were very hands-off it seems (certainly my case, and anecdotally, that seems to the trend of those times). I've asked what was going on before, but answering specifics from decisions from 30 years ago is a tough question for a parent in their 70's now. They were probably struggling with money at the time and had their own worries.
I'm not sure I'll send my kids to Montessori, although I suspect they would thrive where I did not. Parents now a days (me!) are much more involved in their kids lives (for better or worse) and I imagine between internet reviews and us being top of it, my own issue wouldn't be repeated for my kids.
Assuming this _wasn't_ the case when you were at Montessori - which goes against one of the core principles of "school is an extension of home". It's understandable, of course (you said it yourself, especially with the 'hands off' nature of that time), but kids generally thrive when education is a life thing, and not a 'school' thing.
> You think they would know that I wasn't learning anything
Teachers in any ecosystem can fail (intentional or not) with specific kids. Perhaps they knew, perhaps they didn't, but again, if school is an extension of home, as a parent it should be very, very easy to pick up on. It's not uncommon in any stream to have parents say "my kid isn't advancing like i thought" or "my kid is struggling with their reading, how are you helping?".
> I was painfully shy, and I'd avoid attention.
This is my son. These days we call the behaviour mostly being "an observer" because at the end of the day that's what he does if he's not engaged with himself, and I hate the term 'shy' as it's generally pretty negative (that's me, too, even as an adult).
Montessori school has been fantastic for him - he's really flourished and his development has well and truely exceeded my expectations (both academically and socially). Being 'shy' hasn't caused his teachers, or 'Montessori' as a framework to fail him this far.
Again - it could be any teacher, any student in any school that fails. I'm sorry your initial environment failed you and I'm happy you saw success elsewhere! My daughter is the polar opposite of my son in every way, and I'm very excited to see her start school.
I do think my parents must have been checked out for a spell there - overworked and under payed. As kids you don’t necessarily notice but looking back I’ll bet that was the case.
Rishi Valley's teachning style is, honestly, what I wish my education had been. I remember being a kid and asking my teacher for "more", questions about what happens _beyond_ what we had just learned, and them saying "don't worry about it, you'll learn next year". Rishi Valley's approach is "why don't you come later and I'll show you? is anyone else interested?". They really try to emphasize learning for the sake of learning, and kids can choose from multiple subjects.
The teachers are often PhDs who have decided that they care a lot about education. Since it's a not for profit school, they're not paid a lot, but they live on campus, and get to interact with kids all day everyday. Most of the money the school gets is put back into rural education.
Now, the transition back to the "standard" system when the kids have to go to college is not smooth. Most of the ones I've talked to mention that they were extremely overwhelmed with the "rat-race" and the fact that everyone was so competitive, where they had been focusing on learning for the sake of learning. Everyone I've met from this school is very good at critical-thinking, and they don't accept a conclusion just because "someone said so", they will fact-check, do their own research, debate, ... Which I think should be the goal of education.
My anecdotal experience is that they overperform their non-weird-school peers though. But is that due to the teaching itself? Or is it maybe because the kind of parents who would put their kids in this school already did some sort of ground-work? I'm not sure!