Whilst there are many highlights during a child’s Montessori journey with us, the highlight is often the graduation ceremony, a celebration to honour the children leaving us & moving on to primary school. In the lead up, final parent teacher meetings are held, the child’s progress is reviewed & transition reports prepared. It’s wonderful receiving feedback from families about their experience with us, especially where a child has overcome a greater than usual challange.
Unbeknownst them, many families echo a similar sentiment: the Montessori approach, and Northwest specifically, had given their children the strength to overcome their challenges and rise up as better, stronger individuals.
How does Montessori’s approach and, by extension, the work we do in our schools help children develop this strength? A strength that enables one not just to grit one’s teeth and endure hardships, but to transform struggles into fuel for growth and to emerge with a spirit emboldened and unscathed.
Echoing the Spartans and other ancients, it was a common refrain in Montessori’s time that grit and valor are the results of habitually suffering through pain. Today also, similar themes abound and there’s no shortage of the claim that, in a child’s case, she must be made to do things she dislikes, study things she finds boring, and partake of a contrived moderation of the things she enjoys in order for her to become an adult who doesn’t act impulsively, who has the discipline to withstand short-term pain for the sake of a long-range goal, and who can courageously stare down a disaster and surmount it.
However, Montessori disagreed, saying:
“To be ready for a struggle, it is not necessary to have struggled from one’s birth, but it is necessary to be strong. He who is strong is ready; no hero was a hero before he had performed his heroic deed. The trials life has in store for us are unforeseen, unexpected; no one can prepare us directly to meet them; it is only a vigorous soul that can be prepared for everything.”
For Montessori, the same thing that prepares a child to make good choices, concentrate, and persist in effortful work is the same thing that prepares her to heroically prevail over misfortune: a lack of strain, a fullness of life.
Montessori’s basic insight was that it is not pain and deprivation that prepares a child to face adversity, but joy and abundance. Just as a child is not made physically stronger through a lack of food and water, she is not made mentally stronger by being deprived of the spiritual, or psychological, nourishment necessary for her development.
It’s the child that experiences the resonant joy of developing her faculties who then feels herself to be capable. It’s the child that loses track of time, immersed in the acute delights of discovery and creation, who then sees the world as a treasure chest to be unearthed. It’s the child that continually makes meaningful choices who then swells with confidence when presented with a diverging path.
In short, it’s the child that’s given everything she needs to feel triumphant, to relish life, and to see all that’s possible in it, who can look past hardships, who can view them as the exception, not the rule, of life, and who can face them with an unbent spine, eager to flourish once more.
The toddler who is transported by her methodical washing of a table can then become a stalwart like Rosie. A little girl whose commitment to learning and working with her classmates—her commitment to the joy she has in living his life—not only carries her through a formidable illness, but reinvigorates and inspires her to make the most of every single moment, and whose radiance forcefully reminds me of Kipling’s apt description:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
When we help children develop this kind of strength and passion for life, it’s true we help them prepare for calamity. But it’s important to also remember that preparation for disaster was not central to Montessori’s thinking. Instead, the child’s strength is primarily needed to seize all that life has to offer. The child needs strength to set her sights high, to not falter when faced with complex decisions, to make confident choices and then persist in her commitments, to reach her aspirations.
When the child builds a “vigorous soul,” when she is strong and ready, then what she’s ready for is everything life has to offer—the bad, yes, but far more importantly, the good!
Welcome to the 2023 school year.
