The second of a two-part review of Montessori: the Science Behind the Genius, among others. Click here for part one.
If I were to ask you to think about objects that were most associated with babies, you might think of a crib, a stroller, and a high chair. Montessori rejects them all as well as pretty much every physical constraint on a child but legally required car seats.
Figure 1. Even car seats may be debatable for purists. Montessori started her work before even the Model T and died before they were legally mandated. And maybe there’s something to the objection: car seats have proven so inconvenient to parents that they probably reduce the American birth rate
With Montessori, babies sleep in a Moses basket and then on a floor bed. Rather than strapping in your toddler for your walk, you follow your toddler around his walk with a rule of thumb that a child can walk a mile for every year they are in age (though it may be quite meandering). Young children get their own furniture at their size, though eventually they can have a chair at the adult table that they can climb in and out of by themselves. All of this is to empower a child’s curiosity, autonomy, and exploration within the limits of (some) adult supervision and baby-proofed baby-enabling surroundings (“a prepared environment.”)
In our last correspondence, we talked about the thoughtfulness of the Montessori method in cultivating your very capable very young child to focus his attention, exercise self control, and figure things out. We’ve started with some but let’s talk more about the variety of intentional ideas that Montessori promotes that are to this day heresy to modern parenting.
Montessori rejects disposable diapers because they don’t do a good job of conveying wetness to the child, an important sense because potty training comes faster when children are uncomfortable. Montessori from the Start notes that in contrast to the ever increasing age of potty training for modern Americans, “in the 1950s… ninety-two percent of babies were using the toilet successfully during the daytime by eighteen months of age.”
Montessori rejects sippy cups and instead gives children breakable glass to prepare them for adult life and let kids know that their actions have consequences.
Montessori rejects single-age classrooms and small class sizes with low teacher:student ratios. Instead, the ideal Montessori classroom has a single teacher for about 35 children within a three year age range. Activities are supposed to be sufficiently engrossing that supervision is less necessary. Near-peers learning from and teaching each other is considered more powerful. A single teacher is also deemed valuable for making connections across subjects that an array of specialists might neglect. Dr. Angeline Stoll Lillard notes that “In terms of motor, cognitive, communication, and overall development, children in mixed-age classrooms (ranging from 2 to 6 years) showed quadratic improvements over the year, whereas those in single-age classrooms showed only linear improvements.”
Montessori rejects recess. Kids already have choice about what to do and they are engaged in deep work so any “break” at a prescribed time only breaks their concentration.
Montessori rejects fantasy (e.g. anthropomorphic animals) under age 6 because children have trouble differentiating truth and fiction before that age and it can thus slow down their development. I’ve written more about this take previously
Montessori rejects electrical entertainment, not just television but also anything battery powered. Children are encouraged to use their own imagination and not be overstimulated by someone else’s, especially if it is only passive consumption. Even books are deemphasized in the earliest years in favor of manipulatives. The classrooms themselves have zero purposeless toys (even things like geographic puzzles are pointedly not referred to as toys) and, where possible, Montessori prefers to give kids real materials to work with toward real ends (as in practical life) or specific pedagogical tools that must be used for their exact purpose (i.e. you are not allowed to make a fort out of the blocks from the Pink Tower). At home, beyond practical life, free play is encouraged with wooden blocks and realistic portrayals of animals and home life.
Montessori rejects grades, rewards, and even praise. Montessori herself said “A child does not need praise; praise breaks the enchantment” of concentration and then self-satisfaction upon completion. Montessori from the Start advises: “It is important to be matter-of-fact about the child’s accomplishments in self-care. After all, everyone in the world eventually dresses herself, goes to the toilet, feeds herself, and so forth.” In keeping with the growth mindset, adult encouragement should be about hard work and should only come if a child looks for it. Simultaneously, Montessori contends that children thrive when choosing among engaging activities on a schedule in a clean, ordered environment… and thus act out less and require less traditional discipline. Indeed, Montessori advises that before age 6, children can’t really reason and therefore they just need to have a reasonable routine.
Montessori rejects much decor, even educational decor, because they want no distractions. At most, what should permanently hang are natural scenes.
Figure 2. But what will happen to children underexposed to overcrowded flags?
All of these deviations from normalcy (and more) make Montessori a child-centric philosophy that often calls for adult sacrifice. In Montessori: the Science Behind the Genius, Dr. Lillard finds that a great deal - but not all - are backed by social science. The opening claims about child constriction don’t have much to back them (or reject them). And Montessori classrooms very probably offer children too many choices for anyone’s ideal cognitive load. But other differences seem on stronger footing. Of course, that doesn’t mean you need to accept them. If you liked what you read in our last correspondence but are horrified by what has been brought up so far in this one, take and reject what you will. There’s even an argument that Montessori was truly innovative in 1907, but her best stuff (like teaching kids through manipulatives) has been integrated into plenty of mainstream options.
If, despite or because of those differences, you want to send your kids to a Montessori school, you face a significant problem: “Montessori” is a popular brand to advertise but there’s no enforcer of what that means. The name is not copyrighted and anyone can claim to run a “Montessori” school. Maria founded an organization called the Association Montessori Internationale that certifies (expensive) materials from a handful of producers and certifies schools as pursuing Montessori originalism - but they don’t have schools everywhere (none in Tennessee, for example). Dr. Lillard, who has lectured around the world about Montessori, jokes about “Montessomething”:
“I saw schools that seemed like the ones described by Dr. Montessori, where the children were happy and peaceful, deeply engaged in work; children interacted naturally and kindly; the classrooms were neat and organized, with a full complement of Montessori materials and virtually no extraneous objects; and each classroom’s teacher was observing or giving a lesson to a child or a small group. At the other end of the spectrum, I saw classrooms that can best be described as mayhem, with children using the Red Rods as guns, not putting their work away, leaving chairs out, stuffing materials back on the shelves, and not seeming to concentrate or show kindness to others. In some, hordes of plastic toys were mixed in with Montessori materials; sometimes there were several adults hovering over children (and which was the teacher was unclear); and so on. All these schools were called Montessori schools, and those in charge believed they were implementing a Montessori program.”
Figure 3. “Like the great Maria Montessori, we make sure our kids have farfalle pasta every day like in the original Roman Casa de Bambini (in between daily Disney marathons)”
Even if you find a Montessori school that follows Maria’s pedagogical standards, you may have other concerns. While Maria herself was a deeply religious Christian, I do not get the sense that praying with children is a common, much less required, feature of even the schools most faithful to her philosophy. If your primary concern is raising your kids with good values, Montessori offers its own but the institutions officially associated with it probably strip them of religious content - and in many cases offer their own woke spin. Of course, some religious schools do claim inspiration from Montessori, but there again is the question of just how faithful they are to the original vision.
If, like our family, you’re interested in homeschooling, you face a different problem: Montessori was not designed for the home (remember, the ideal classroom has 35 kids, probably more than you have in your family, at least in a three year age range). Nevertheless, Montessori remains one of the more popular methods at home for all the reasons described in the last email. A major deterrent is expense: your individual family loses a school’s economies of scale that make the certified materials more affordable. Knock-offs abound, but you have to be careful that they achieve their intended end. Luckily, quite a few materials, especially in practical life around your home, are cheap or you may already have. But an even bigger deterrent is the learning curve. I’ve read more than six books on the method and it takes time and thought to figure out when to do what - if there’s an easy manual to follow, I haven’t found it. Indeed, reading Montessori’s original work, even what is called the “most accessible,” is not very accessible. Dr. Lillard comments generally:
“In addition to the use of each material being highly structured, the overarching Montessori curriculum is also tightly structured. Materials within a curriculum area are presented in a hierarchical sequence, and there is a complex web of interrelationships with materials in different areas of the curriculum. As far as I know, no other single educational curriculum comes close to the Montessori curriculum in terms of its levels of depth, breadth, and interrelationship across time and topic.”
Training on just the 0-3 age range can take two months of classroom time plus weekly check-ins for a year (not to mention the five-figure tuition). Inevitably, your home is going to be Montessomething rather than exactly what Maria intended. But that’s okay! Just recognize the trade-offs associated between the benefits of homeschooling and getting Montessori exactly right.
Ironically, Montessori is attacked both for being too strict (why can’t kids make a fort out of the Pink Tower?) and being too lenient (if kids can do whatever they want, will they fall behind on something important?).
Unschoolers find Montessori unnecessarily intense. Their strongest argument is the prospect that all of this early childhood education really doesn’t matter. The economist Bryan Caplan has surveyed the data and found that your biggest contribution as parents is your genetic load and that therefore you should be much less stressed about parenting: do more of what you want and take more time for yourself. Various unschoolers have found that the entire elementary school literacy and numeracy curriculum can be learned in about 100 hours if a child is interested. One friend also thinks that Montessori materials can be excessive for teaching a concept - why do you need sandpaper and cotton to teach rough and soft when you have dad’s stubble and mom’s cheek?
They may all be right and that should provide some relief against the stress you have in trying to get the perfect schooling for your kids. But if nature isn’t everything (and I can’t be sure), then Montessori strikes me as very promising nurture - and it isn’t simply teaching the standard curriculum: it aspires to teach self-control, which unschooling hopes will come naturally. Clearly though these two approaches are cousins that both remain attractive to those of a libertarian persuasion. And if your child grasps a concept easily with some ready example you have, great, but now may be time to increase the challenge and Montessori has ideas.
The more conventional concerns are that Montessori is too lax, that it’s difficult to ascertain children’s progress without grades (especially given the differences across Montessori self-branded schools), and that children may require more central adult direction than being able to just figure things out on their own. Related to the last point, there can also be concern that Montessori’s attempt to treat children with the dignity of being little humans (including, for example, asking a baby permission to pick him up) undermines a desirable hierarchy in which actual adults should be automatically obeyed.
In the best Montessori environment, Davies insists that “Children are not ‘free to do as they like’ they are free to ‘work’ - to engage in sustained and productive activity.” But, for better or worse, the approach is decidedly not coercive. Montessori from the Start suggests that “When the child says, ‘I don’t want to,’ you can respond, ‘Let’s do it together’” and that you should take a Tom Sawyer approach that makes whatever the activity is look as fun as possible. In a classroom, Montessori teachers try to ensure that their children work through all the materials over the course of a three year period. Dr. Lillard reports:
“Montessori Elementary teachers keep track of children’s progress in work via each child’s Work Journal. The child and teacher meet, usually weekly, to go over the Journal, in which the child records the week’s activities, including the time when each unit of work was done and how much was accomplished. If a child is not choosing to follow up on a lesson, the teacher can bring it up at this meeting as they examine the Work Journal together. The teacher might say, “I see you have not followed up on the Grammar Box lesson I gave you on Tuesday. When do you plan to do that?” The child makes a time commitment, but it comes from himself or herself. The child has a sense of control.”
Some Montessori schools have resorted to checklists and telling children that they have to do something they’ve resisted before they do something they want. Others say that undermines the purpose of the child-centric pedagogy. From what I’ve read, there’s fairly little comment on what the Montessori method resorts to when confronted with a child totally resistant to doing something over an indefinite period. One answer I’ve heard: expulsion. Which frankly works out for the classroom but certainly not the kid in question - though one successful adult I know who was expelled as a child nevertheless was sufficiently impressed that he had his kid do Montessori).
Figure 4. It’s also rather difficult (but not impossible) to expel a child from homeschool
Our family hasn’t gone the full Monty. Our son sleeps on the floor but in a tent, though not because we are trying to restrict his movement but because it blocks out all light and helps him sleep (an obsession of mine). We use disposable diapers to make it easier on ourselves (though we’ll see if delayed potty training causes any regrets). We prioritize reading to him over activities when Montessori would do the reverse. And yet at least so far, knowing Montessori’s approach to children has been incredibly helpful in understanding my boy and what he could be interested in. We default to the Montessori method and choose our deviations. We observe him, try to identify his interests, and consult a menu of Montessori suggestions, including involving him in our day to day chores. Our current plan is to stick with homeschooling Montessori for the next several years. But I confess: I’ve seen his progress so far, I’ve read all these books describing very capable children, seen YouTube videos of these youngins performing housework and visual-spatial tasks, even been over to a friend’s house whose Montessori preschooler fixed him a cup of coffee in front of me - and I’d still be amazed if our son wound up doing all these things. And that, of course, is part of the attraction.
I am less sure about Montessori after age 6. At that point, other approaches offer creative and interesting alternatives that provide serious competition. And to that end, I’ve heard from parents who find Montessori attractive for the very young but nevertheless rather reasonably want to get their children into their local great academic and/or value-aligned but competitive K-12 school. I’ll end by observing that Montessori never developed in depth her thoughts about high school and that while there may be some high schools that say they are inspired by her, none I know follow what she actually proposed: sending children to a farm. Dr. Lillard reports:
“The children would live together on the farm, establishing a social community… The application of one’s knowledge to the problems one faces in running a farm—building barns, growing vegetables, breeding pigs, selling eggs, and so on—is perfectly clear. She also mentioned that the farm school might include a hotel, which the children would run. The school could also establish a store in a nearby town, selling produce from the farm.”
Sounds about perfect for my father, a retailer who studied hotels and restaurants in college! Regardless of the decisions you make for your children, my biggest encouragement is not to be confined by what everyone else does, which itself is often just trying to signal to other adults that they’re doing the best for their kids. Think from first principles: what is best for your kids? Normalcy is overrated.
Figure 5. Click here to acquire Angeline Stoll Lillard’s Montessori: the Science Behind the Genius (8/10). Dr. Lillard earned her doctorate at Stanford and runs the Early Developmental Lab at the University of Virginia. This book is a great and serious look at the social science behind Montessori but you could not create your own curriculum out of it.
Figure 6. Click here to acquire Montessori from the Start by Paula Polk Lillard and Lynn Lillard Jessen (8/10). Yes, the Lillards are all part of the same family. No, my interest in Montessori is not just because Paula’s maiden name is Polk and she might have some distant relationship to America’s greatest president. This is a good, inspirational book about how to set up your home from birth for your child. It also includes some Montessori street cred: “both Mussolini and Hitler ordered all Montessori schools in their respective regimes closed in the 1930s. Montessori schools were the only secular educational institutions so designated.” But note it ends at age 3!
Figure 7. Click here to acquire Montessori Baby (7/10) and here to acquire Montessori Toddler (7.5/10), both by Simone Davies. Honestly, along with Montessori Home by Ashley Yeh, helpful because they lay out in sequence what you should be doing for the early years. In the same vein, even if you acquire knock-offs, checking out the recommended ages on officially certified Montessori materials can be a good guide. Montessori Toddler has an especially good opening about what to expect from a toddler (i.e. age 1-3) including “Toddlers are not giving us a hard time. They are having a hard time.”
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, forward it to a friend: know anyone who is thinking about having a child? Or grandchild? Or was once a child themselves?
For more, check out my archive of writings, including Why Homeschool?, where I answer that question in a review inspired by Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto.
If you’ve received this email from a friend and would like more, sign up atwww.grantreadsbooks.com or shoot me an email at grant@grantstarrett.com with the subject “Subscribe.” I read over 100 non-fiction books a year (history, business, self-management) and share a review (and terrible cartoons) every couple weeks with my friends. Really, it’s all about how to be a better American and how America can be better. Look forward to having you on board!