The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria Montessori
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It really was the worst option for a kid like me. They let my ADD run loose and there was no real organization or dicipline at all. I remember i could spend weeks just walking around in the school and do "montissori tasks" every now and then. For regular school work they asked me every other week what i wanted to learn and let me write it down in a schedule and expected me to just learn it on my own and if i needed help i could ask a teacher for help. This led me to do the absolute minimum or pretty much nothing.
I was so behind on everything in school that i had to repeat school years several times and then before finishing cram everything i was behind on during the last year in a separate summer school.
For the kids with natural dicipline and organization it was really benefitial. But for a kid like me that needed to learn dicipline and organization it was truly the worst.
My parents insisted on keeping me there because they really beleived in the montissori way and thought i would do worse in a traditional school.
(1) Was it an accredited Montesorri school? There is a wide range of quality within the Montesorri programs and the quality of the teachers is a real difference marker (in terms of them helping guide childrens desire to learn).
(2) What is your comparative benchmark (ie how do you know you would have done better at another school?) and what is your metric for success (how you performed for tests at school or how you developed as a human? Do you find you have a natural curiosity in the world/learn?)
(3) What type of school did you transition into and at what age?
2. I have a guess that i would perform a bit better in a regular and more disciplined school, since i did much better when i moved to "gymnasiet"(late highschool). This school had a much more traditional way of teaching.
3. When i was 16 i moved on to gymnasiet(later highschool) and did okay there. After that i tried to get into university but i did not have good enough grades to get accepted. So i went to a diploma school, much like a coding boot-camp, which i dropped out of to start my company which is what i do now.
I went to a Montessori school K-8 and also have ADD. It made some things harder but because of the flexible nature of things the teachers could spend more time with me on planning and organizing and less time on that with the kids who didn’t need it. Looking back I think they also made sure to pair me with kids who had better executive function.
Once I graduated and went to a traditional high school I found the rigid structure made everything harder for me.
We ended up opting for the French immersion school again for kindergarten over free public school just because he was doing well there and we didn't want to "rock the boat" any further. He's definitely not the best student in the class but I'm just happy that he likes it and is participating for the most part.
I don't think the Montessori system is bad or anything as I noticed the more organized and independently-minded kids in the class seemed to be really thriving - as you mentioned above. Just not for everyone
There's not a lot of research on the outcomes for students who go to montessori, but what is available is mildly positive.
There is a survey of the literature published in Nature that concluded that the effects are somewhat positive, but since different schools apply the Montessori method in different ways, it's hard to say:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7
There's also a study from last year that says Montessori education is associated with positive well-being in later life. They control for a bunch of factors, but it's just association (not claiming causal):
Ultimately, the entire way schooling is set up towards particular philosophies and particular structures is just an ideological battle that ignores the needs of individual children. Montessori is no different in this regard.
Ask HN: Anyone go through Montessori education until age 12 (end of grade 6)? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33622295
Not discounting your experience but adding in other perspectives.
[15 years later]
> I remember i could spend weeks just walking around in the office and do "action items" every now and then. For regular user stories they asked me every other week what I could finish and let me write it down in a schedule and expected me to just learn it on my own and if i needed help i could ask around for help. This led me to do the absolute minimum or pretty much nothing.
'We must awaken the child's social conscience. I know that it is a complicated educational question, but the child who will become the man must be able to understand life and its needs, the fundamental reason for all existence, the search for happiness . .. He must know exactly what he must do and what he must not do for the good of humanity ... To reach these ends, we must prepare the child to understand the meaning and necessity of the entente among the nations. The organization of the peace devolves more on education than on politics. To secure peace practically, we must envision a humane education, psychopedagogy, which affects not one nation but all men on earth . . . Education must become a truly humane science to guide all men to judge the present situation correctly.'
https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci... (page 346)
Its all in the eyes of the beholder, but I felt it almost as the education in brave new world, it was kind of strange, especially because my daughter goes to a Montessori school. I feel it will be much harder for her to reject it than it would've been in a normal school.
A bit like Zizek's take on the modern Boss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQlJE7ABNu4
I’m also not sure where you see the parallel to Brave New World, what I remember is that there weren’t a lot of truth-seeking change agents around? Quite the contrary, no?
I would appreciate any clarifications for personal reasons.
In the end, it is still a system for producing workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs, and I think there should be some space for "i dont want to be a part of this, there must be some other way to live"
The first few pages of brave new world gave me this vibe, thats why I said its in the eye of the beholder, you read as much into a book as out of it.
In the same time, my daughter is growing up to be critically thinking and self aware and independent and is enjoying the school very much.
Edit: a nice concise explanation of his view on pedagogy and montessori: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvpVXdhCQg
https://www.youtube.com/c/ForestAnon
you might be interested in this dude. he just walked away from society and built a hovel in the woods.
This is an important idea of course, but I don't think that a 5 year old is really equipped to make a principled and informed decision about whether to withdraw from society--the authority they will challenge is really just trying to get them to brush their teeth and learn the fundamentals of reading; the kid is not going to think up alternatives to capitalism.
I don’t understand what you are saying here. Montessori education focuses on developing independence from a young age.
> In the same time, my daughter is growing up to be critically thinking and self aware and independent and is enjoying the school very much.
Sounds like a Montessori education after all.
I guess I don't see the connection between acknowledging that children begin to learn from birth and you need to be aware of that in order to educate them, as well as understanding that education affects the end result on both a mental and emotional level and the jump to it being a system that produces workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs.
[...]
EDIT : > We note first of all that this technique must be implemented by the state, which alone has the means and the breadth to carry it through. But the rigorous application of the psychopedagogic technique means the end of private instruction — and therefore of a traditional freedom.
[...]
EDIT 2 : > despite all the pretentious talk about the aims of education — it is not the child in and for himself who is being educated, but the child in and for society. And the society, moreover, is not an ideal one, with full justice and truth, but society as it is.
ORIGINAL : > When a society becomes increasingly totalitarian (and I say "society,” not “state”), it creates more and more difficulties of adaptation and requires its citizens to be conformist in the same degree. Thus, this technique becomes all the more necessary. I have no doubt that it makes men better balanced and “happier.” And there is the danger. It makes men happy in a milieu which normally would have made them unhappy, if they had not been worked on, molded, and formed for just that milieu. What looks like the apex of humanism is in fact the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them. They must have social consciences that allow them to strive for the same ends as society sets for itself. Clearly, when modern youth are fully educated in the new psychopedagogic technique, many social and political difficulties will disappear. Any form of government or social transformation becomes possible with individuals who have experienced this never-ending process of adaptation. The key word of the new human techniques is, therefore, adaptation, and we shall come upon it repeatedly as we consider each of these techniques separately.
P.S.: One of main gists of Ellul's thought is that the technoscientific progress results in an increasingly totalitarian society.
If you are reading them, make sure you take your time.
If Montessori is skilled guides redirecting children to a constrained set of works until those kids do it themselves, Waldorf is a magical fairy godmother cuing children by song and felted puppets to engage their imagination in story and play.
Both seem to have value. I believe Montessori’s methods feel so robotic in America because America is not early 20th century Europe, where so much magic, song, and fantasy was already an omnipresent part of the culture.
> She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy.
[...]
> She especially disliked the fantastic lies told to children – the tooth fairy and Father Christmas and stories with talking animals. She saw them as an indulgence on the part of adults:
> > We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance and the errors of the immature mind, just as at a not very remote date we were amused to see an infant laugh when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme. In short, it is we who are amused by the Christmas festivities and the credulity of the child.
And on the other hand the hypocritical way in how many Christians classified Christian magic as "not magic" and then decreed magic to be evil (partially as a way to compete with paganism I guess ?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf_education
> Steiner considered children's cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development to be interlinked.[81] When students in a Waldorf school are grouped, it is generally not by a focus on academic abilities.[54]: 89 Instead, Steiner adapted the pseudoscientific proto-psychological concept of the classic four temperaments – melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, and choleric.[82]
[snip]
> Today, Waldorf teachers may work with these pseudoscientific "temperaments" to design instruction for each student. Seating arrangements and class activities may take into account the supposed temperaments of students but this is often not described to parents, students, or observers.[90][91]
Do kids have different personalities? Yes. Should education take that into account, in some fashion? Possibly. Is a Medieval conception of "personality" linked to "fluids" the way to do that? I'm pretty sure we can do better with the benefit of centuries of hindsight and actual research.
> Experts have called into question the quality of this phenomenological approach if it fails to educate Waldorf students on basic tenets of scientific fact.[111] The Waldorf approach is said to cultivate students with "high motivation" but "average achievement" in the sciences.[112] One study conducted by California State University at Sacramento researchers outlined numerous theories and ideas prevalent throughout Waldorf curricula that were patently pseudoscientific and steeped in magical thinking. These included the idea that animals evolved from humans, that human spirits are physically incarnated into "soul qualities that manifested themselves into various animal forms", that the current geological formations on Earth have evolved through so-called "Lemurian" and "Atlantiean" epochs, and that the four kingdoms of nature are "mineral, plant, animal, and man". All of these are directly contradicted by mainstream scientific knowledge and have no basis in any form of conventional scientific study. Contradictory notions found in Waldorf textbooks are distinct from factual inaccuracies occasionally found in modern public school textbooks, as the inaccuracies in the latter are of a specific and minute nature that results from the progress of science. The inaccuracies present in Waldorf textbooks, however, are the result of a mode of thinking that has no valid basis in reason or logic.[113] This unscientific foundation has been blamed for the scarcity of systematic empirical research on Waldorf education as academic researchers hesitate in getting involved in studies of Waldorf schools lest it hamper their future career.[114]
There is a difference between a philosophy of how to teach kids actual material and a so-called "philosophy" which results in teaching kids nonsense. It also leads to a question: If you remove the pseudoscience, is it still Waldorf?
Are they pseudoscientific? Maybe. They predate science in origin, and so far afaik science hasn’t demonstrably improved on them in a way that can be reliably reproduced.
Yes, they are. If you think they're scientific, do the work to demonstrate it to modern levels of rigor.
Anything else is hand-waving, special pleading, and appeals to tradition, all of which can justify racism just as easily.
I’m not sure what racism has to do with this, but let’s see where it goes. With scientists not that many years ago, the “modern levels of rigor” similarly went off the rails in evolutionary theory and our present understanding does not match theirs at all. It was twisted at the time by some fundamental misunderstandings, which appeared to support racism.
There is truth in indigenous science that modern science has not caught up to, yet.
Racism is traditional wisdom, too, and it's a lot older than any of the traditional wisdom you're peddling. Should we say it's indigenous science that modern science hasn't caught up to yet? Why not? If it's traditional, how can we possibly say it's wrong?
Yes, we've been wrong before. However, science is how we know how to correct ourselves, as opposed to wallowing in ignorance.
> There is truth in indigenous science that modern science has not caught up to, yet.
And how do you know this? What evidence do you have?
I mean, off the cuff, this: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-science-ta...
and this: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00029-2
and this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259033222...
and this: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200903195934.h...
But these are only recent examples that I’ve chosen haphazardly, I’m not an expert, and this movement has been going on for 50 years or so.
You could read someone like: Hallam, Sylvia (1975), Fire and hearth: A study of Aboriginal usage and European usurpation in south-western Australia, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, ISBN 978-0-85575-036-7
and from there contrast it with colonial descriptions of the superiority of western methods that destroyed these people (and their methods of forest management in the interceding 150 years).
Arthur C Clarke’s third law works in both directions, as it turns out: you can have Cargo Cults, and you can have Westerners who have lost the concept that sometimes you do know when the seals will return because a flower blooms. Indigenous people were experts at meeting complexity with complexity.
It is also a whole (fairly humbling) movement around archaeology at the moment. It’s unfortunate westerners destroyed so much before waking up.
It also partakes of the racist trope of labeling some knowledge "Western" when, in fact, all knowledge belongs to all, and all knowledge has been improved by all. Saying that some knowledge is "Western" devalues the contributions non-Western people have made, and essentializes cultures in a harmful fashion.
You are misreading my commentary on Western knowledge, and your absolutes about knowledge mixing, while apparently well-intended, are not very accurate.
I am using Western in a quasi-derogatory cultural sense to describe instances of a self-styled global discovery that is in actuality often just a recent culturally-local understanding. See Hume rediscovering Vedic principles.
You are straw-manning an opponent who doesn’t exist.
Dystopian fiction is outlined by an author's attempt to take notable societal patterns in their own time and extend them to their most extreme conclusions (sometimes modulo an interesting plot); one shouldn't be surprised when the most compelling works do a good job of capturing and explicating one aspect or another of the author's society.
The question comes ultimately to: Is Rousseau correct that adults are correcting and that children in nature are pure, or are humans naturally selfish and children must be taught goodness and culture for them to live good and well. I believe in the second mode; the first one end in disaster for parents and society.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_model_of_education
How will culture change if everyone has exactly the same culture and goodness?
- Not all Montessori schools are the same. Not all are accredited by a Montessori body.
- Children may benefit from varying methods, and Montessori seems capable of absorbing or accommodating them to by having the teacher adjust to each child's individual needs.
- Individual needs do highlight the oddness of modern education, of how impersonal and bizarrely artificial it is. In a natural setting, children grow up in a family in which they learn from their parents and siblings, through the interactions with friends, and so on. Our social interactions, especially those that take place in the family, are all about responding to each other's individual and particular needs. Learning and what is needed to learn falls under this category of human needs. Learning is fully integral and self-same with life itself, not some thing to be artificially set apart into some separated, alienated thing, a factory that thinks of students as units.
- As Montessori was Catholic, and Catholicism accepts the doctrine of original sin, it is more sensible to presume that she did not accept a Rousseauian anthropology. However, a rejection of Rousseauian anthropology doesn't automatically construe children as little monsters or reject the notion that we may become corrupted by others later in life. As a Catholic, Montessori would also be familiar with the age of reason before which children maintain innocence of any personal sin (sin entails culpability, culpability entails assent, assent entails understanding, and children still lack understanding). Of course, children can be said to be selfish in the sense that early in life, they have a good many basic needs that need to be met by others, etc. The effects of original sin concern the greater or lesser insubordination of both the corporeal faculties and the will to reason (the tendency to sin is a tendency to act, with greater or lesser awareness, against reason and what reason informs us is the good).
- I doubt the encyclical criticizing "scholastic innovators" was criticizing Montessori specifically or all educational reform. Papal encyclicals are not some kind of grumpy, curmudgeonly grunt of the pope in which he complains about things young people are doing that he doesn't like. They're often quite pithy and contain a good deal of foresight and depth (Pius X's predictions w.r.t. "modernism" have played out, for example). Note that at the time, the modern system of schooling was not that old (some say it was inspired by Prussian methods). What he was likely criticizing were strange fads in education rooted in really bogus philosophical anthropologies. All education systems make tacit assumptions about human nature, and if they are wrong, they will misshape educational methods and possible misshape the child. There is no way Montessori held the do-what-thou-wilt view of children or would have opposed punishment categorically. She may have only objected to the prevailing educational paradigm, and in it, the way punishment was used.
This is a false dilemma. The fact that humans are capable of many different behaviors means that we are biologically prepared to exhibit all of them... in certain circumstances. Actually, the difference between nature and learning is also a false dilemma. The nature of homo sapiens is to learn. Some apes are born smarter than human babies, but the human babies dramatically exceed them at capacity to learn.
For example, it is natural to be nice to your family and friends, and hostile to strangers. The culture tries to overcome this. Less hostility to strangers, and less nepotism, so that a large civilization can be built. The civilization brings many good things (food, safety, comfort), but also lot of frustration, as we constantly need to overcome our instincts. Sometimes we find out that we were suppressing our instincts more than was necessary, and can relax a bit.
The main thing we teach children is self-control. Children can be super nice, when they are in the right mood. We teach them not to hit or bite their potential friends, when they happen to be in the opposite mood. Does this make friendliness natural or learned? The question is false. We learn how not to ruin the thing that we naturally want.
In education, kids are better at learning by observing than by listening. Teachers often err by talking too much. Instead, they should talk less, and let the kids observe each other as they succeed. Still, the teachers should teach; it is not reasonable to assume that kids will reinvent the entire civilization in 10 years.
I am the parent of such a kid, 4 years in Montessori, 2 separate Montessori schools, both with the same problems, teachers tend to just “nope” out at will, and since these teachers are scarce, the schools back them and keep them employed. Since they’re private, oversight is very lax and when questions to arise, they know what documents to “create” to show they’re doing everything.
If you’re a parent and you go this route, stay on the school like a hawk and make sure they deliver what they promise and not just pretty words, at the end of the day, it’s the kid that suffers. If your gut starts to sense they’re not doing what’s advertised, move on, they’re not delivering.
If my wife didn’t teach our child during COVID at home, we wouldn’t be as acutely aware of these issues as he regressed dramatically after return to classroom.
My child is in public school now, actually thriving in a structured environment.
Somewhat out of desperation they put me in a Montessori school. By the end of Kindergarten I was reading at a 3rd grade level and understood the basics of multiplication.
We ended up moving by 1st grade and I went back to "normal school", where I did ok since I already knew everything.
The internal conflict I have over this is intense. On one hand, I firmly believe most education in America serves to keep children stupid -- and most public schools are more like prisons. Pink Floyd and such.
On the other hand, I also resist the notion that if you just let children be and investigate what they want, they'll naturally grow up to be healthy well rounded members of society.
Perhaps this is too simple an understanding of Maria's method, but I've had few people explain it well to me.
Our state does require a certain number of hours of instruction in core subjects, so there is a requirement for a certain amount of math, reading, etc. You could argue that what we have isn’t “pure” Montessori as a result, but to operate legally, it is what the school has to do.
I don’t think Montessori is for everyone — I know families at our school where some of their kids attend, and some are in public school because it works better for that particular kid. For us, it has been great for our daughter.
I think though, what made her such an effective educator wasn't her method. Teaching seems to be more of an art form than a science. There are certainly fundamental principles of education, just like in art.
The art seems to be knowing when to use "one size fits all", and when to use "know the rules so you can break them".
Edit: And ultimately, I think the largest factor overlooked is the presence of the parents in their children's education.
A friend of mine is sending their kids to a Montessori school, and they're thriving there. But before that, he and his wife read and sang with their children every night. That does, in my mind, more than any other teacher could possibly do.
1) this is directed at young children.
2) “what they want” is really “what they want [in the context of the environment you’ve created for them]”. So the kids can’t do whatever they want.
Note that while today Montessori is most commonly used in preschools, there are Montessori schools for much older children, and that was the original vision.
> In 1936, all the Montessori schools in Italy were forced to shut. With the help of one of her students, Ada Pierson, Montessori settled in the Netherlands, where she lived until her death in 1952. Pierson gave her a big house in Laren, near Amsterdam, where she dreamed of expanding her method from young children to adolescents, ‘a delicate age, full of surprises’.
Most of the anecdotes in the article are about children younger than 6.
Imagine putting a scientist in an excellent lab, with all the machines their domain required, fully stocked with reagents etc. Then in the morning, asking if three different tasks, which they'd like to do today. At the end of the day, asking what still needed to completed, and adding it to the three tasks for tomorrow. This is obviously a massive simplification, but hopefully it conveys the idea.
- create an environment for the child that encourages focused play (everything's in reach, nothing is too loud or flashy, etc.)
- intently observe the child (like, literally take notes), figure out what they're into, and give them more of it
People definitely feel different ways about this, similar to you, but not just about Montessori. Lots of places in the EU have reformatted their educational systems to be less rigid, and the results are pretty good [0]. I admit that if I had a kid unable to read by ~9 years old I'd be concerned, but it looks like generally things still go OK.
[0]: https://archive.ph/wLw5E (BBC)
Kids learn to do things like cut apples, with a regular knife. At age 3. I will never forget one parent’s reaction. She was horrified and asked us “won’t they cut themselves?” My partner: “yeah, usually.” You could see her mentally nope out. That is a great viewpoint into Montesorri’s philosophy: that small kids are way more capable in many regards than adults assume.
There is also almost no need for a traditional gifted program because as kids finish materials nee ones are available. Grades are very fluid in a Montesorri classroom and kids have the freedom to explore everything. I think it works well for most children. Better by a lot for most kids compared to the traditional systems of public school.
So you give them a specialized environment and let them loose and then follow their interests, “follow the child” as Montesorri said. Then you guide them. The materials are designed to make it easier for kids to do on their own, but they also get plenty of help.
It is a very uncomfortable notion for many parents, but my daughter is a great example. She is 10 and easily doing work several grades ahead in topics that she excels at. No need for a gifted program really, the materials and support system is there to let all kids work at their own pace.
Not dissimilar to what you'd do at home, except supervised closely with peers and integrated into the classroom.
Edit: I should mention that gross and fine motor control is a really big focal point in general. Like how writing things down has been shown to improve memory, other forms of tactile interaction increase engagement and learning.
In my experience Americans seem to have a very negative view of knives in general. So I would phrase that as "for many American parents"
A lot seem to only eat with a fork, treating it like a spoon and leaving their knife to one side. My MIL has had to learn that my children use knives to eat, and if she doesn't give them one then they will ask.
Even with the European habits, using a fork spoon-style is inevitable to an extent. Some things are too small or soft to skewer.
I'm thinking along the lines of getting all students a baseline level of maths even if their passions lie in words and language. Or perhaps vice-versa for the majority of this crowd.
Our school is a charter school, publicly funded, but still fully Montesorri. It has a functional farm even.
I would trust 5-7 year olds with knives unsupervised or semi-supervised more than 8-11 year olds and definitely more than 13-15 year olds!
You notice it by how more expensive are things (schools, books, toys) with the brand “montessori”. Lots of it is marketing and signaling, but lots of it is just more preparation going into it.
This goes for the schools too! There are "accredited Montessori schools", but any school can call itself Montessori with no penalty.
It's become a marketing term for any toy that's educational and made of wood.
> [Charlotte Mason's teaching style] is not unschooling, nor is it delight-directed. To illustrate the difference, imagine that you had a son who was interested in knights and wanted to learn more about them. With unschooling, you wouldn't plan any lessons but you would let your son read all the books he could find about knights, play knights games, look up knights on the internet. Then, you'd count those hours as school time. With delight-directed, you would note his interest in knights, and ditch your plans to teach about ancient cultures and US History, and instead plan a semester of lessons about knights. With CM, you would allow your son to learn all he wanted about knights in his spare time, but during school hours, you would continue to assign readings from chronological history and literature so he'd still be learning about ancient Egypt, Rome, US History, etc. because, as Charlotte Mason said, you never know what will ignite a passion in a child, so exposure to many topics is necessary. However, you would keep school hours short to give him plenty of time (and inclination) to learn about knights after school. [1]
Sounds like you might like Charlotte Mason's approach.
This weaponizes hedonism for education -- and it's good for children to learn that education can be gratifying. But there are many things in education that are not pleasing for some time.
If the child is not led to discipline themselves to learn things they don't necessarily enjoy... It's like trying to teach them to eat only things they enjoy.
To circle back, I really think these pop education methods are boiling down to fad diets. You can lose weight with the Paleo diet, or Jenny Craig, or avoiding carbs... But what do they all have in common? Caloric intake rules the day.
Charlotte Mason's answer is, let's say, 70%. Both unschooling and delight-driven learning answer this question with 100%. Keep in mind, with the Charlotte Mason method you still have to follow a planned curriculum 30% of the time, with all the accompanying test-taking, homework, etc.
I think it's a question of balance, like you said children need to learn self-discipline but they also need to learn that education can be gratifying. I don't think the answer to that question should be 0% or 100%, I think it should be somewhere in the middle.
"We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance and the errors of the immature mind, just as at a not very remote date we were amused to see an infant laugh when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme. In short, it is we who are amused by the Christmas festivities and the credulity of the child."
I mean it's pretty strong viewpoint to have but there is some validity to it. As a parent I have this low-level guilt to the day when we have to explain that or that they discover on their own Santa is a well intentioned fictitious character. It does feel like this Santa / Tooth-fairy thing is created for the benefit of adults with children getting some value out of the exchange (and some cost as well).
In any case - one would think if the illusion of Santa Claus did cause some trauma in kids, they themselves wouldn’t generally grow up to fully embrace the experience with their own kids.
A Catholic professor's view[0] on just this.
[0] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/11/there-is-no-santa-cl...
My kids enjoy the elf on the shelf sort of thing, and they were always fully aware the elf is not actually getting up to shenanigans at night. Nevertheless it's fun for the entire family, because it stretches us parents to be creative a little bit every night as well. Most recently the elf was starring as Batman in a three-night, three-act structure in which he menanced Joker, then the tables were turned with the Joker having hijacked the Batmobile and running over Bat-Elf, then there was a climactic showdown involving the Lego train tracks the next night. Nobody needed to think these adventures are actually real to enjoy them.
I come in in between; the stories are important for other reasons, but it is in no way mandatory to tell them they're real. Maybe in the 19th century it was less of a big deal, reality was more real in a lot of ways. But in a world of deep fakes, CGI, incredibly organized special interest groups comparable to the size of entire powerful medieval cities a few centuries ago, etc. etc. I need all the trust I can get if I'm going to train them to survive in the unbelievably hostile environment they're trying to grow up in now. Recently I was showing my kids how they're being targeted by video game gambling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g and I was musing on the fact my parents had basically zero need to be concerned about this. I couldn't have screwed my life up that way if I had set out with the explicit goal of doing so. I need all the trust from my kids I can marshal in this century.
At least at our kids' current age (8, 5 & 5), other kids alone telling them won't convince them about it. We do leprechaun pranks, which we tell them are just us, which their classmates don't believe in (they've discussed this), and they still believe it's real.
They also think faeries are real despite us saying they aren't - their older cousin likes to play "faerie" pranks when she visits. They think we think they aren't real because, since we don't think faeries are real, they never interact with us.
In fact, we explicitly include our 3 year old daughter in playing santa for our 1 year old.
And the three year old, despite my wife and my insistence that Santa is not actually real, fully believes in it. I tell her almost every day that Santa is just pretend and she looks at me and says 'no he's not'.
Pretend and real don't really have any distinction in the minds of most children.
>In general, Montessori preschools cost between $10,000 and $15,000 per year. Elementary school prices are about the same, although those costs could be as much as $35,000 a year, depending on your location.
School, teachers, parents and children themselves are the difference maker. That said - thats the difference maker on all educational programs.
* Are reading this thread
* Live in the same (smallish) town in Tennessee that I do
* Have children of the age my daughter’s school serves
* Are interested in a Montessori education for them
What would be the point of my naming the school?
The child I mention got back on track once enrolled in a conventional school.
I went to Montessori preschool & kindergarten, and came out doing math at a 2nd grade level. I went to public school, where I spent two years zoning out during math I already knew. It killed my interest for life.
I've worked in computer graphics, and math would have been helpful.
My mother and mother-in-law were professional teachers (elementary/middle school) with graduate educations (masters-level for my mom and specialist with most work complete for her Ph.D for my MIL) and both approved of the school and my daughter’s progress. So, I guess, I’m personally not very worried about the horror story you described.
- pre-k + kindergarten - grades 1-3 - grades 4-6 - grades 7-8
I can see how moving 1st grade into the first bucket would help even things out. I think pre-K was often 2 years, though, so the first bucket still covered 3 ages or grade-levels.
Eventually, kids figure out how to use a knife, or not crap their pants.
Early education is about social and emotional development.
I opted to stick my kids in a foreign language immersion program instead.
Do you remember how they measured "success" ?
If you want a child to be better at school, conditioning them early to choose from a constrained set of tasks with natural progression seems like a good way to make it comfortable for them.
If it's helpful, this is a more recent one: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13575 which shows that Montessori preschoolers performed comparably to non-Montessori preschoolers in Kindergarten, though "disadvantaged kids" who attended Montessori schools performed better than "disadvantaged kids" who did not. (My interpretation being the correlation to performance is that the parents got their kids into a Montessori preschool despite economic disadvantages--biased because of what I learned in Freakanomics).
And a tangential analysis: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7 that concludes that most studies around Montessori are not sufficient to draw any meaningful conclusions, however adapting Montessori methods into traditional classrooms appears to be beneficial.
Regarding your upcoming decision--if I can offer my advice: find a preschool that best meets your families needs, and not worry too much about academics (at their age). If your children enters grade school with the abilities to succeed in the classroom that's great. If not, it's a great opportunity for them to learn early age how to overcome challenges--which will serve them well when they are adults.
I really think so too. People are falling over themselves about Early Childhood Education (ECE), thinking they need to start their kids' education as soon as possible or they'll fall behind. It's even in the nomenclature, gotta get them started as early as possible.
Our kid is nearing three. My wife takes her to parks, playdates, mommy and me classes where they do arts and crafts, sing songs, read stories, free play, etc and when she's home she just has free play time. Zero screen policy.
Let kids be kids when they're little and enjoy their childhood a little. They'll grow up and suffer along with the rest of us in due time.
Free play is learning for a child. Those are the right things to be doing.
But otherwise we're on the same route as you. ATM the kid is heavily into doing jigsaw puzzles on his own (60 pc is about his limit for DIY), and he likes to read to himself now and then.
However, it's not for every kid. My son did basically nothing and they wanted to have him repeat 2nd grade. My daughter, on the other hand, thrived in the same school.
There is no single fix for education except for choice (in my opinion). Parent's should be free to choose the school for their children and line up the unique characteristics of their child with the different education options available.
In middle school they had a weird blend of Montessori and regular school structure which was probably a good transition idea but wasn’t executed well.
I think if the teachers are good it’s a nice environment for kids to learn and explore what they are interested in.
I highly doubt the commenters who think that Montessori kids are dumber. But some kids prefer different kinds of structure. The idea is supposed to be that the teachers tailor your experience for each kid.
After long awkward silences some child volunteers an answer which is completely wrong and the adults act like this is pure gold.
It bugs me on many levels, but I think children want to know that the adults around them are in control and that they are in a safe environment and that's not what is happening here necessarily.
It means we equip children to teach themselves in a well prepared environment. That might mean just putting a child in a room with a book or it might mean spending a lot of time with the kid and helping them slowly learn vowel sounds.
We tune the methodology to the child so they can become self sufficient life learners.
"The prepared environment" is a critical concept. It means a safe environment that the child can explore that has activities intentionally chosen for that child to learn from. That means age appropriate, developmentally appropriate and so on.
We chose it because it worked well for his personality type and learning style but also because we could afford it. It cost only about 1/4 of what the nearby Montessori school was charging. Our preschool did require about 6-8 hours a week of parental involvement, so didn't work for everyone. In exchange, I think we paid something like $300 a month for 3 days a week about 15 years ago.
The school is absolutely regulated by the state department of education. In order to operate as any kind of private school, they have to meet certain requirements and agree to oversight by the state. While I’m sure the details vary by state, and I’m only familiar with the requirements in my state, I think is probably pretty common across all 50 states.
For the Montessori aspect, yes, there are a bunch of “Montessori” schools that don’t really follow Montessori principles (at least there are in my area.) If you want to find a school that does actually implement Montessori principles, you have to do research (looking for membership in an association like the American Montessori Society is a good first-pass filter) and interview the school. There’s no substitute for due diligence for this.
My wife, a Montessori preschool teacher for 30 years, calls these unaccredited schools Monte-sort-of.
The other category is called "church exempt." Quite simply these are exempt from education regulations. They only need to show that they are operated by a church organization. A large number of the schools are in this category.
For every legitimate school there seems to be another which is just a cash grab.
Once you become a teenager does this style of learning not work out? I'd think if you are in this system by the time you are in Grade 8 and then have to go into a new system it would be more jarring and actually hurt your education
[1] - https://ibb.co/zmxXYhs
I don’t think of either of those concepts as mapping particularly well to any left-wing ideology I’m familiar with except, perhaps, the back-to-the-land hippie movement.
Contrary to some of the BS in this thread, the kids do, in fact, learn to read and do math.
- the kids may not be "just walking around"
- may not be reading a sticker book
- may not be yelling at each other
- may not be finger painting
Why is any of that good? Do you need to see a neat line of kids quietly sitting in desks before you can assume any learning or anything valuable is taking place? Even if the students were being forced to drill their times tables, you can be sure that not all kids are going to figure it out. But probably the kid who might have learned 7th grade math will not actually learn 7th grade math---if anything, they'll likely get bored because things are moving too slow for them and they're forced to spend time doing something that they perceive to be a waste of time. I don't think there's anything inherently better about this situation.
I think you are biased by your notion of what school should look like.
Here are two famous people that went to Montessori schools: Sergei Brin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHzj3LrXruY Jeff Bezos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox49EB1tNW4