Montessori is a radically different approach to education, and thinking it through means that it’s natural, even necessary, to ask tough questions and grapple with critiques.
Here are four common objections:
-
- Does Montessori ignore the need for adults to be authorities?This could be true of the teacher as a knowledge expert, or of the teacher as an exemplar and source of moral and behavioral order. Why shouldn’t teachers correct children and accelerate their learning? Why shouldn’t they enforce more consequences?
- Is there actually scientific research that shows that Montessori is better?Even if there is some favorable research here and there, is it really the case that research convincingly shows Montessori to be better than traditional (or other alternative) approaches to education?
- Is Montessori antiquated in certain respects?
We spend a lot of time teaching children how to polish silver and little or no time teaching them how to, say, interface with technology. Why hasn’t there been more updating of the practical life and cultural curricula in the 7 decades since her death? - Is Montessori actually right for every child?
This is the most common critique by far. Does it really work for children with special needs? What about children who are ready for tremendous acceleration? What about children who need more structure? What about children who are especially imaginative? Are there sociocultural or socioeconomic limitations—is that part of the reason why Montessori seems to have trended more towards the private and the expensive over time?
For each of the above four objections, I’m going to briefly sketch out what I see as a fruitful line of response. The point here is not to definitively answer the objections. That would require a whole essay for each, one really spelling out the objection and then defending it at length. The point is to indicate one productive way to continue grappling with these questions.
- Does Montessori ignore the need for adults to be authorities?Children indeed need guidance, structure, and expertise from adults. They also need the space to try things, to fail and succeed on their own efforts, to figure things out for themselves.
The question in education is whether or not there is a way to solve for both of these things 100%. The default assumption is that there is not, and that some sort of balance or tradeoff is required, such that they are each somewhat but not completely addressed.
Our approach, following Montessori, is two-fold: First, see how much guidance, structure, and expertise one can offload into a specially prepared environment. The Montessori prepared environment is an environment synthesized by adults. This includes independently accessible curricular materials, physical spaces, and more abstract structures like scopes and sequences, the allocation of time, and cultural norms and rules. All of these require expertise and judgment by adult educators.
Second, it’s to change, not eliminate the role of the educator. There is a lot of rhetoric from Montessori along the lines of “the greatest sign of success for a teacher…is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist’” (The Absorbent Mind). Montessori valorized the child’s independent capabilities and saw an endemic of well-meaning adults diminishing the child’s capacities. But at the end of the day she believed (and certainly we believe) that the adult is directive in an authoritative way. This includes, amongst many other things, both limit-setting and maintaining elevated standards for a child’s education.
(Sometimes Montessorians take the ethos of non-interference in a more strictly hands-off, progressive direction, one where limits are not set, standards are not maintained, and the job of inspiring a child to engage with valuable programming is abnegated. But this is a failure mode of progressive education generally, not a feature of the Montessori approach.)
- Is there actually scientific research that shows that Montessori is better?I would reframe this question: is there actually scientific research that shows that any broad pedagogical approach is better than any other?
The first thing to note is that there is indeed scientific research on Montessori and practices adjacent to Montessori, that there is more of this research being produced every year, and that this research is generally quite favorable. (See Angeline Lillard’s very useful book, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius.)
But, honestly, I don’t think that anyone is really convinced of a pedagogical approach mainly because of randomized control trials in the social sciences. The empirical research tools we have aren’t equipped to provide straightforward comparisons of philosophically-opposed approaches to education. One quickly runs into ambiguities in measurement and assessment, major issues of selection bias, and questions about the suitability of both the control and experimental conditions. Oh, and it doesn’t help that the testing cycle for human developmental outcomes is (at least) 18 years.
What education needs is a different approach to research, one more similar to the sorts of intervention/observation engineering loop that Montessori herself engaged in when developing her system. It should be more ethnographic, more favorable to director educator participation, and more tightly connected to the development of practices and curricula as very specific, integrated products.
But this need isn’t unique to Montessori. Education research is just overall a very young science.
- Is Montessori antiquated in certain respects?Yes. And where it is, the “Montessori” thing to do is to update it.
We have, for example, replaced mops with Swiffers. Or, for older students, replaced outdated lessons on the geosyncline theory of mountain formation with modern ones on the plate tectonic theory. We’ve created a new Montessori math material designed to teach students facility with equations, and are exploring various ways to connect students, both conceptually and practically, with information technology.
Some of the specific things that some of you asked about, such as the purpose of wood polishing, do have answers. The point of a practical life exercise is not always to be practical in a specific way; it’s to allow the child to accomplish something real—something that the child can see and feel is accomplishing something real—in a way that builds certain skills (e.g. fine motor control skills) and values (e.g. an appreciation of and care for beautiful artifacts). But it’s good to ask these questions and to refresh the different aspects of the curriculum when it becomes outmoded or when better options are available.
I think there’s more to be done in terms of modernizing the Montessori curriculum. But I also don’t think this is a major objection to the approach. Montessori shouldn’t be understood as an unchanging list of exercises. It should be understood as an integrated set of exceptionally well-designed exercises. It can be updated by the same principles and with the same maniacal care that it was originally created.
- Is Montessori actually right for every child?
As I mentioned, this was the most common question. My view is that it is, but that this is more of an ongoing aspiration and achievement than an automatic reality.Montessori is not a rote template. It is, at root, a method for individualization. It is a method for observing a child, for relating one’s observations to a set of profound developmental needs—such as the capacities for thought, action, and love—, and then for acting to meet those needs on a child-by-child basis.Part of that method is a set of educational power tools, a set of materials and practices designed to address fundamental aspects of human learning. These tools have a perhaps unmatched degree of cross-cultural and cross-demographic validation, due to Montessori’s global work and the ongoing growth of Montessori over more than a century. But generalizations across human beings—really, across any living being—often fall short of being as uniformly and straightforwardly universal as the generalizations of physics. If we had, say, a 97% match rate, which would be remarkably high in a field like education, that would lead to millions of exceptions across the world’s billions of children.
And that’s where the individualization comes in. Where the specific tools of Montessori cannot be straightforwardly applied, what the Montessori method itself says is not to keep doing the same thing anyway. What the method says is: fall back to deeper principles of the method. Observe the individual, reassess according to fundamental needs, and come up with a new strategy: create or integrate new specific tools, or use existing ones in novel ways. We’ve codified this kind of design thinking into a Child Study process. Child Study brings the power of the Montessori approach to bear on the most challenging cases that an educator might confront.
That’s my general answer. To answer variants of this question, like whether Montessori is only for the wealthy, or whether Montessori can serve an unusually creative child, I think we would need to ask about other factors. What tends to make private education, Montessori or otherwise, so expensive, and why is Montessori mainly (not exclusively) private education? Is there something inherently more expensive about Montessori than other approaches? (I think the opposite is true, and that a good argument can be made that Montessori is inherently cheaper.)
Or: What generally fuels the healthy, ambitious development of a child’s imagination? How is this specific child exercising her imagination, and how can we further help it along? Are classroom materials for the development of a child’s imagination generally missing in Montessori? (I don’t think so, but it’s a good question!) If so, is there a good, deep reason for that? If not, how can we start adding materials to correct the problem?
One last note on the question of whether Montessori is right for every child. We live in an age where there is a general skepticism of system, a skepticism about universal solutions to complex problems. When a path gets difficult, there’s a default tendency to consider that there are many paths up the mountain—to change the educational approach, to drop or add major chunks of curriculum, to totally change the structure of the day, to change the pedagogical delivery, to change teachers or even schools.
There is truth to the idea that there are many paths up the mountain. But I think it’s often underestimated how hard it is to discover and/or blaze those trails. What Montessori offers is one very good, very widely usable path up the mountain. We can be, should be, and are engineering that path to be even better and even more widely usable. Part of the premise of the Montessori approach—of any educational approach—is that it’s possible to create broadly relevant systems that have value across tremendous individual human variation. I think that premise is true, but it’s also natural and good to question it, even as one explores how this might work in particular cases.
I hope you found this exercise as valuable as I did.
Article Source: https://higherground.substack.com/p/friday-note-defending-montessori
