A common critique of the Montessori approach is that it pushes kids to grow up too fast. People see infants drinking from open glass cups, toddlers dressing themselves and sweeping the floor, preschoolers reading independently or multiplying and dividing large numbers, and they fear that we’re rushing child development—that we’re pushing children to do things too early, earlier than they otherwise would.
But is this really true? Do we rush child development?
To untangle this issue, it’s helpful to separate out three questions:
- Do Montessori children achieve things earlier than they would with conventional support?
- Do Montessori children achieve things earlier than is healthy?
- Are Montessori children pressured into making advanced achievements?
Let’s look at them one at a time.
1. Do Montessori children achieve things earlier than they would with conventional support?
Unequivocally, yes. One of the most striking aspects of a Montessori classroom is that you see young children participating in activities and performing work that you wouldn’t typically expect from someone their age.
I’ll never forget the first time I visited a cycle one classroom and how I watched as a group of children served themselves a snack, ate with their own little silverware, threw away their scraps, and stacked their dirty dishes—all independently and without a word of reminder from their guide.
This achievement is obviously not something that toddlers naturally know how to do; they had to learn. But the same can be said for any skill. Children learn from their environment, from taking actions, achieving goals, and receiving feedback, and from the support adults provide in showing them how to navigate and operate within that environment.
Without a child-sized table, serving spoons, and dishes, and a child-accessible cart that this classroom provided, those toddlers would not have been able to prepare, enjoy, or clean up from their snack on their own. And without intentional opportunities to build up their fine and gross motor control, or the consistent modeling of the mealtime routine from their guides, they wouldn’t have had the skill or the knowledge they needed to do to be successful.
Montessori does empower children to do and learn things earlier than they would otherwise, but in the same way that a car empowers you to travel farther in a shorter amount of time than you could by horse and buggy. The support of a Montessori classroom is an engineering achievement, not one that acts upon the child, propelling her forward against her will, but one that provides more freedom and a wider field of action for her to act in the world.
2. Do Montessori children achieve things earlier than is healthy?
Emphatically, no. Time and again, Montessori discovered that when you give children a carefully designed environment, as well as thoughtful guidance from adults, and significant freedom of choice and pace, children are naturally drawn to perfecting their abilities.
Think of how persistently a baby reaches, stretches, and inches toward a toy that he wants to grab, or how eagerly a toddler goes from taking his first uncertain steps to crawling all over the furniture, or how an older child plans and schemes to build the best lego tower or treehouse he can imagine.
There is nothing that a healthy child wants more than to stretch his abilities to their limits; to repeat new skills again and again until they become second nature; to know with complete certainty that he can do, think, and achieve things all on his own, from zipping his jacket as a toddler to walking to the store alone as an primary school age child.
Without ample opportunity for children to do this work, they don’t just learn things later or more slowly. They often learn things in a way that is far less enjoyable or even downright painful.
A toddler can learn how to fold laundry while finding the process captivating and enriching. Through performing all the physical actions required, his experience of life and of himself becomes elevated. He sees life as more rewarding and himself as more capable. The activity, his efforts at it, and his success all redound on and amplify his sense of self-confidence.
But an older child or teenager learning to fold laundry? Often, they will find the process mundane and aggravating, even degrading to their sense of capability and to their conviction that life can be meaningful and rewarding.
What is true for learning to fold the laundry is true for all knowledge and skills. There is a developmental window, a time when it is just right, for a child to learn. It doesn’t mean that those skills are impossible to be learned later on, just that it will be more difficult, cause more friction, or require more adult intervention to provide bribes or threats for progress to occur.
The Montessori approach doesn’t unhealthily rush a child’s development; it removes the unhealthy and unnecessary obstacles and barriers that would otherwise hamper it. Instead of waiting for chance opportunities to learn skills that will elevate their life, or making do in an environment that provides limited affordances to do the most developmentally engaging and intellectually stimulating work, children in a Montessori environment are given all the tools they need now, today to learn and make the most of their life.
3. Are Montessori children pressured into making advanced achievements?
Here, again, the answer is no. At every stage of a child’s development, Montessori was dedicated to designing a way to give the child access to the work they would find most developmentally rewarding. The educator’s primary responsibility in this process is to observe the child closely, understand their needs, and to watch for the right time or find the right entry point to introduce the materials and activities that will entice children to focus and apply themselves.
But, just as important as the materials and the guidance an educator provides, the child is given freedom to pursue the materials and the work she most desires at any given time, to focus for as long as she wants, and to practice until she achieves mastery.
Once the child finds work that ignites her, she grows to love applying effort to achieve new knowledge and skills across every domain. She goes to her guide for new work like a moth to a flame. Every success, new piece of knowledge gained, or new skill mastered is the child’s achievement in a Montessori classroom, not the result of outside pressure, bribes, or shame.
If there is any “rush” to the child’s development in a Montessori classroom, therefore, it is the rush of the child herself, on fire with the love of life, to discover new knowledge, hone new abilities, and craft a character to achieve anything she sets out to achieve.
Article Source: Does Montessori rush child development?
