Last Saturday, Slate's Emily Bazelon, the mother of a child in an Montessori pre-school wrote an article titled "The Cult of the Pink Tower: Montessori turns 100—what the hell is it?" She stated that "In many ways, Montessori education remains a cult: No one outside the fold (and lots of families inside it) really knows what exactly it is." So I will now reveal the secret; there's much to explain, in terms of pedagogical technique, but here's the deep philosophy of Montessori education. Montessori is not for everyone, but I believe that the world would be a much better and kinder place if every family had the opportunity to choose a Montessori school....
Montessori is a superb method for children to achieve a high degree of proficiency at many important academic skills. But Montessori is also something much more profound than a high-quality type of learning.
If you talked with someone who jogged several miles every day, and you asked her "Why do you spend all that time on road work?" it's possible that she might answer "Because it helps me run faster over longer distances." It’s true that the direct benefit of running a lot is that the runner gets better and better at running. But it's more likely that the runner might answer something like this: "Running strengthens my heart, my lungs, my legs and the rest of my body. Running builds concentration and focus that stay with me even when I'm not running. Running clears my head, and so when I'm running, I sometimes have insights into lots of different things in my life. Running helps me get the rest of my life under control." Notably, the main direct benefit of running--building speed and stamina for running--wasn't even mentioned.
All these same points can be made about Montessori education. Yes, Montessori does help children grow much more proficient at reading, writing, research, and mathematics. (And these skills have a great deal more practical application in modern society than does the ability to run fast.)
Yet the most important benefits of Montessori education lie beyond the direct academic skills that are acquired by mastering the Montessori materials. As with running, the academic skill-building is what the children actually do, but what they achieve is much more than just academic enrichment.
Responsibility, Self-Control, and Independence
Although most students need to do language and math work every day, students are generally free to choose the works that interest them, and to stay with them as long as they want. ("Works" can include Montessori manipulatives, such as "the pink tower" of blocks, or written work such as math problems or writing in a science journal, or other projects.) The major part of the day consists of long blocks of time in which children have the freedom to totally engross themselves in activities, with deep concentration. These large blocks of time are one of the ways in which Montessori differs from most other educational approaches.
One of the important premises of Montessori is that children have a natural love for learning. When given the opportunity to engage in meaningful, interesting, self-directed work, children show that they can achieve high levels of focus. It is relatively rare for a Jarrow classroom to become disorderly or excessively loud, or to need repeated orders from the teacher for quiet.
The quiet (not silence, since conversation is perfectly legitimate while work is being done) and the order do not come from external control imposed by the teacher. They come as a natural result of the children exploring a fascinating environment of learning opportunities. Interacting with others, while not disturbing the concentration of other parties, is one of the many social skills taught by Montessori schools, and research suggests that Montessori children tend to develop greater social competence. (M.M. Boehnlein, "Montessori Research," The NAMTA Journal 13(3), 1988.)
The Teacher is not the Center of Attention
Another way in which Montessori cultivates responsibility, self-control, and independence is that teachers take the focus off themselves. The point is not for the students to passively absorb knowledge from the teacher, but for the students to teach themselves, with the teacher providing guidance when appropriate. A student works for the satisfaction of learning, not for the teacher's praise. "This helps develop his will and helps him be present to the work for its own sake," explains one Montessori scholar.
After introducing a material, teachers generally leave the child to work it our herself, intervening only when the child needs guidance to move on to a higher level.
"Help the Child to Help Himself"
Maria Montessori explained that her method aimed to help the child "to act, will, and think for himself," and so many of the Montessori materials foster independence. The "Practical Life" tools in the Toddler and Primary classroom help children build autonomy in their daily lives--as by learning how to use buttons or zippers. Other Practical Life tools--such as pitchers of water to be poured back and forth--help the child learn to use her body as she directs. During the first months of school, Toddlers show their parents the "up and over" way to put on a jacket—so that a 21-month-old can put on a jacket by herself, rather than needing someone to hold it for her. "Help the child to help himself" is a core element of Montessori.
More generally, the curriculum always keeps practical application in mind. For example, Upper Elementary (grades 4-6) math work with percentages frequently uses percentage skills to solve real-life problems--such as calculating discounts on a product, or figuring the rate of return on an investment.
The Montessori materials also foster independence through the principle of "control of error." That is, the materials allow the child to discover whether he has made a mistake, rather than needing to go to the teacher to see if the work is done properly.
For example, the "cylinder block," used in the Primary (ages 3-6) classrooms, is a block of wood with ten cylinders cut out from it. Each cylinder has a knob on the top. The cylinders are all the same height, while their diameter increases from narrow to fat. The object of the work is to learn about size relationships, by putting each cylinder into its proper hole, increasing order of size. If a child puts a thin cylinder in a wide hole, by the end of the work he will have a fat cylinder left over, which doesn't fit in the remaining hole. Thus, the child can see that he has made a mistake, and use his intelligence to discover the proper places for each cylinder. He does not need to go to the teacher to ask for assistance.
Responsibility for One's Education
In the elementary grades, students conduct long-term research and writing projects. Not only do they take responsibility for seeing a major task through to its completion, they also learn how to uncover information for themselves, rather than having it fed to them.
When Montessori children move on to other schools, their new teachers usually applaud the ability of Montessori children to complete assignments, including long-term projects, without monitoring, and to take responsibility for their learning--whether by remembering to bring pencils to class every day, or by getting themselves to the library when they need to conduct research.
Helping and Teaching Others
To foster the development of the child's will does not mean that the child becomes willful. To promote independence is not to promote isolation. To be inner-directed is not to be self-indulgent. To the contrary, responsibility, self-control, and independence lay the foundation for a wide variety of cooperative interaction and friendship. A pair of four-year-old boys who have developed some self-control can play together longer and more happily than a pair of boys whose only controls are externally imposed. An Upper Elementary classroom filled with students who can concentrate and who can persevere on long-term projects can decide to perform Romeo and Juliet.
All students are also teachers. All classrooms are multi-age, so that, for example, Lower Elementary includes first, second, and third graders. The older children often help the younger ones learn how to do works, and also act as role models. At some schools, older students (e.g., Upper Elementary) may spend time each week reading to one or a few younger students.
So while there is nothing in Montessori formally called "character education," the whole Montessori experience is integrated to cultivate responsible, self-reliant, caring people.
Respect
The true heart of Montessori is profound respect for the fundamental dignity of every individual. While Montessori is used in a wide variety of secular and religious schools, Dr. Montessori's philosophy is very profoundly influenced by Catholic teaching of "the inherent dignity of the human person."
Again, the classroom materials play an important role. For example, works are usually done on a small cloth mat laid out on the floor; the mat sets the boundaries of the work, and guides the other children in moving so as not to disturb others at work.
This is one of the ways that Montessori education teaches respect for the environment. This includes respect for the classroom environment--putting works away properly so that next person can use them, and working with others in constructive ways. It also includes respect for the macro environment, as children learn about ways to care constructively for the global and community environment--and to respect individual differences, and the different choices that individuals make.
The attitude of respect toward children enabled Maria Montessori to develop the insight that children learn and think very differently from adults. Adults may start their learning with abstraction--as when college students listen to a chemistry professor lecture about principles of chemistry, even when the students have never observed the chemical reaction that is being described. Doctor Montessori (the first woman to graduate from an Italian medical school) began looking at education from the child's point of view, and recognized that children do not learn the same way that adults do. She also saw that adults often greatly underestimate the intellectual capacity of children, because the children are not able to express themselves fully in adult-style communication.
Respect for the child, therefore, opened the way for the insight that children learn best from sensory approaches to knowledge before attempting abstraction. The first step in learning to read is to trace one's fingers over sandpaper cutouts of the letters of the alphabet. "From hands to mind" is the practical foundation of the Montessori Method.
"Respect" in Montessori is not a code word for hierarchy, in the sense of "students must respect the teacher." Certainly students must respect the teacher. And the teacher must respect the students. And the students must respect each other. Of course since nobody is perfect, nobody at in a Montessori school achieves this high standard of respect every single moment during the school year.
Respect is why students are allowed to choose their works, why they are guided to independence, and why they are motivated by their own joy of learning rather than the need for external validation.
Respect does not mean that everybody is supposed to pretend to like everybody else all the time. Respect does mean that conflicts are to be resolved with consideration for the dignity of everyone involved. Respect is the foundation for access to the highest possibilities of learning.
Tim Seldin, president of the Montessori Foundation, explains that "Montessori is a way of life. It is a philosophy about how human beings ought to live their lives and treat one another. It is an attitude of respect for each human being, no matter how young or how old. It is a sense of partnership, rather than power and authority." ("Montessori in the Home," Tomorrow's Child, Spring 2000, p. 5.)
Once one enters into an attitude of respect for the child, then one can begin to understand how much teachers and parents (and also the students in their roles as teachers for other students) have to learn from the child. As Kathy O'Brien, the head of a Montessori school in Maryland writes:
Dr. Montessori believes that the child has lost much of his natural grace and charm because often his only value is seen in that some day he will be an adult. Montessori says the child has its own value, "the child and the adult are in fact two different and separate parts of humanity which should interpenetrate and work together in the harmony of mutual aid...having reciprocal influence." It is easy for us to accept that we adults aid the child, but the child is also an aid to the adult and should be a formative influence on the adult world. A child can change the hearts of adults. In the presence of a child hardness disappears. Dr. Montessori says: "The child can annihilate selfishness and awaken the spirit of sacrifice," tenderness and affectionate care. "The love which then begins is like a revelation of the moral greatness of which man is capable when his child obliges him to feel as a parent. In this way does God move and form the adult through the child."
[DK: An excellent idea. Thank you for suggesting it. I had never used the hidden text feature before. But you empowered me to try it, and figure it out myself. Very Montessori of you!]
For ourselves, we never relied on schools to be the mainstay of educating our daughter. She began reading at age 3 because she wanted to. We bought (and later built) a telescope so she could see what is in the skies, then took her to the Lowell Observatory to use the same telescope that was used to discover Pluto. When she was in fourth grade and learned of California history, we drove around the state visiting the sites she learned about, panning for gold, exploring old forts, settlements, and even a ghost town or two. We took her to the Four Corners region to see the Anasazi ruins. She learned to shoot, to sew, to debate, to discuss the classics, to grow things, to draw and to photograph. You get the picture, right? And it didn't take a Montessori program for her to know she was valued, talented, capable.
Educators today have largely adopted the practice -respect -for -the -child -and -the -child -will -learn -and -live -respect and the promote self-esteem elements of Montessori into most public school curriculae. But is this the role of the schools? Wouldn't it be better if the parents were responsible for shaping the character (inclusive of self-esteem, manners, and respect for themselves and others) of their kids? Wouldn't the world be a much better place, kinder and gentler notwithstanding, if the schools were seen as an adjunct tool to assist parents in raising their own kids? If parents all took the responsibility to produce the next generation of valued, talented, inspired kids, we wouldn't need schools to stand in loco parentus, would we?
It seems tragic that these excellent preschools exist in the country with the world's lowest birthrate; there are fewer and fewer young Italians to take advantage of these opportunities!
Schools taught Montessori-style. All-girl schools. All-boy schools. Schools organized by independent groups of professional teachers. Schools taught by actual subject matter experts (retired mathematicians, former chemists, authors, etc). Schools that focus on vocational preparation. Schools that focus on astronomy. Schools for juvenile delinquents. Schools taught entirely in Portuguese.
Ah well. I can dream, can't I?
- Alaska Jack
This seems like an overreaction to me. (In theory; in practice it seems like yall have done wonderfully for your daughter.)
To begin with, the non-competitive aspect is not a huge thing when you are talking about four and five and six year olds. Their world is make-believe half the time anyway. With my kids, they were seven or eight before they would bother to compete within a set of rules.
Second, they're going to get a huge dose of competition anyhow. They're Americans. They're going to get it on TV, in movies, at home, on the playground at recess and everywhere.
Third, this is not Soviet-style "we emphasize cooperation, not individualism" education. The child is encouraged to work independently, toward goals and against measuring sticks. They are, at the very least, competing against themselves.
Fourth, you say "... Being competitive does not necessarily mean to raise oneself up at the expense of another or others..." I would argue that it does. That is the brutal reality of life, as you point out, and the kids do have to learn it, but at age four in an academic setting seems like the wrong time and place. They'll play sports and learn it. They'll play board games and learn it. They'll aim for good schools and grades later on and learn it.
You say competition can as easily mean "an ability to set a goal, assess what is needed to meet the goal, be it an individual effort or a group effort, and to be able to evaluate and problem-solve the attempts used to meet that goal." All that is vital to their education. All of it is part of Montessori and none of it is taken out to be non-competitive. In fact, when it comes to the "hone your skills and hunt your elephant ... you can do it" part of education, you get more of it out of Montessori than traditional education.
All just theory, as I said, but I did want to answer.
If parents all took the responsibility to produce the next generation of valued, talented, inspired kids, we wouldn't need schools to stand in loco parentus, would we?
I doubt there is a teacher out there, union, public school, Montessori or whatever, who wouldn't see that as ideal. There are practical realities not arising out of education theory that get in the way.
But one of the cool things is that they don't study math, or history, or art. They will study the Renaissance, and in that period, they will learn the math, science, history and art as it was then. Then they move on to another time period. So they get the math and science, but they also see how and why it arose or advanced.
Another good thing is that each year, they study one religion in depth, so they read the Bible, the Koran, Buddhist texts and so on.
It's really a terrific program, but I also understand it's not for everyone.
Internal contradiction?
That's the point of Montessori. There are room full of fun things to do that the kids want to do on their own. They are challenging (for a kid) and they teach. The "competition" is self-competition.
I should know - I went to Montessori and it gave me a huge jump on life. I still remember being fascinated by blocks they let us play with. There was sets of single small blocks, then ten small blocks tied in a line, and then a big 10x10 solid cube. It was fun, and multiplication was that much easier when it came time.
I don't want my kids going there unless I can be sure the teachers can have guns to be able to protect the students. Or, does this depend on whether and when the kids as the teachers to start packing?
Chris Bell: No contradiction at all. In fact, it was Montessori-like in that she picked up a book one day and blew me away when she turned the pages and read it to me, after I'd read it to her. No pressure on her; she was ready, so she read. As I said, there was a lot I liked about what they said.
Andrew Okun: We didn't have TV in our home; in fact, we still don't and we don't miss it. We had videos, but no TV programming, commercials, infomercials, "news" teasers, etc. One time when my daughter was about 3 or 4, she pointed to an item on the grocery shelf and told me "I heard the news about that at Grammy's on TV" -- she thought commercials were news. My daugher is 23 now and still doesn't watch TV. She thinks it's inane and she doesn't like the (what she calls) "mindwash" she perceives emanating from it. As to competitiveness in the age group, perhaps you are right that it is not much of an issue. If it is not, and if so much of the rest of the Montessori technique has been adopted into public school curriculum, to what do you attribute any difference in students?
1. Elementary-level kids aren't learning to fly a plane or remove a bursting appendix. They're not even learning long division. I don't remember what the hell I learned in elementary school, actually. Learning facts and specific skills is not the important thing for a child of that age: learning how to learn (the goal of the OLPC project, incidentally) and the general skills/curiosity involved in learning is the important thing.
2. Wouldn't you rather fly in a plane piloted by an airplane enthusiast and hobbyist, who spends his free time flying and reading flight journals and blogging about flying etc., or a competent but unimaginative pilot who just took the job because it pays well and has good perks? Again, much-maligned "touchy-feely" education does very well to inculcate such curiosity and joie d'etudie (to poorly coin a phrase).
2a. I would certainly prefer the first pilot at least in the situation where something goes Mysteriously Wrong: all the tests and rubrics in the world can't give you the ability to think on your feet, outside your experience, when the chips are down.
In traditional education (I can speak to this from personal experience) it is learned all too early that great academic rewards can be reaped from very little effort. The game of K-12 education, as an exercise in symbol-manipulation and simple rule-following, is very easily solved. It encourages lazy thought (see "teaching to tests"), and discourages innovative thinkers who have gotten tired of the game.
Teaching children to care about the things that pique their interest, and giving the tools (and confidence) to pursue them, gives them a much greater ability to think independently later in life.
Maureen001: I would echo Andrew and Chris that there is a great deal of (self-)competition even in Montessori-style environments, and further that such competition is much more valuable than external competitions (as far as education goes).
Again, I think this has to do with the static, simple nature of everyday education. I beat everyone on the Mad Minute multiplications by 10 seconds today, and yesterday, and the day before that... I skated by with an 'A' in this year, last year, the year before that... Well, that's nice, but a more satisfying (and more beneficial) accomplishment was when I figured out how to put my whole math homework onto a single sheet of paper using logic notation learned from Gödel, Escher, Bach. Or when a friend and I devised a secret cipher for passing gossipy messages in 4th grade. Or seeing how my partner and I could top ourselves on this week's sprawling, self-referential journal entries in the class-wide Gold Rush project.
Children are smart. Like, seriously smart. Education should be structured to allow and encourage their smarts, and not try to shoehorn it into the 19th century schoolmarm format or whatever new bullshit tests the ed.gov desk jockeys think is Crucial To The Future Of Our Great Nation this year. 12 year-olds can be polylingual and polymath, do conic sections, compose sonatas, investigate optics, write a novel... the problem today is that they must do this in spit of our educational system. And this fact is enough to stop most people from ever experiencing the genuine Socratic-style Goods of curiosity, collaboration, all the things that make up a genuine education.
Young children do not think independently because we don't expect (or, often, allow) them to. Young children who do not think independently grow up to be adults who do the same.
Who do you want flying your jet, again?
You must be kidding! In something like a one-room schoolhouse, these children learn Renaissance notions of science, only getting to 21st century understandings thereof after they have worked their way in this fashion through successive periods of history?! Does that mean they are taught such things as "spontaneous generation" of life (e.g., flies not from flies, but from manure) before they have advanced sufficiently in sequence to learn that nonsense was disapproved a very long time ago? Wow, there's an alternative to "creationism" or "intelligent design" that never would have occurred to me.
I must misunderstand what you are describing, because it strikes me as nothing short of absurd. The history of science is a fruitful area of intellectual endeavor, but only when one is reasonably well informed about our current scientific understandings. If indeed that Waldorf school faithfully sticks to such an approach where science is concerned, I would be fascinated to see a syllabus, course outline, teacher's manual, etc.
But I don't think anyone has commented on this: isn't Montessori basically like most homeschooling families' systems? The learning experience she described sounded almost precisely like my experience at home, where I was free to pursue my own interests while guided and limited a bit by my mother.
The "fill the house with books and the kids will read a lot" philosophy my parents had (it worked) sounds like this description of Montessori, as well.
The education was effective by a variety of standards, I think; I did well on standardized tests and did well both academically and in extracurricular activities in college.
Thanks for stating well what came to my mind when I read LTEC and Dan Simon's comments. What are the "skills and concepts necessary for life" if not learning how to learn? In our modern world, a subtle appreciation for symbols, logic, numbers, and other abstractions doesn't come automatically to kids.
My kids both went to Montessori. I didn't care that my kids knew how to count to a hundred by the time they started kindergarten so much as how exuberant they were when showing me that they could. I've seen many kids who, even by first grade, simply showed up and sat waiting to be taught.
Of course, it's impossible to parse out the degree to which my kids got their love of learning from Montessori versus from home, but they did gain that and it stayed with them through this day (the older guy is graduating HS this weekend!)
One thing I didn't much care as much for was their extreme de-emphasis of competition. I wasn't sure how much of that was really Montessori versus the Manhattan liberals who ran the place. In the end, my kids did learn to compete. For one of them, it came naturally as we began signing up for sport. The other guy seemed to have a bigger bariier that took time to overcome. I don't know how much of that was school versus temperament.
Re comment that Montessori is like home schooling, I suppose it is, but much like home remedies are like real medicine. The Montessori method is highly evolved, and it shows in their methods and training.
Learning how to learn is certainly important. But as with most activities, the skills involved in learning are best "learned by doing". Certainly trying to teach, say, generalized study skills to first-graders seems a little too abstract, compared to guiding them through a bunch of actual learning experiences.
Or was the stuff about "learning how to learn" and "skills" involved in learning just a way of disparaging the idea of children learning anything specific?
Wouldn't you rather fly in a plane piloted by an airplane enthusiast and hobbyist, who spends his free time flying and reading flight journals and blogging about flying etc., or a competent but unimaginative pilot who just took the job because it pays well and has good perks?
Actually, I'd prefer the more competent pilot, regardless of how much he or she loves to fly.
I would certainly prefer the first pilot at least in the situation where something goes Mysteriously Wrong: all the tests and rubrics in the world can't give you the ability to think on your feet, outside your experience, when the chips are down.
Neither can all the enthusiasm in the world. The point of flight school is to prevent all remotely likely scenarios from falling "outside your experience". Hobby flying rarely has that goal.
In traditional education (I can speak to this from personal experience) it is learned all too early that great academic rewards can be reaped from very little effort.
That's a result of low standards and politically correct aversion to grouping children by ability--not of rigorous educational methods. Any child can be rapidly raised to a level where learning the material is challenging, if he or she is allowed to learn it at the appropriate pace.
On the other hand, if a child is allowed to set his or her own curriculum, then reaping great academic rewards from very little effort would seem to be built into the system. Again, is this your way of pooh-poohing the very idea of children actually learning?
Teaching children to care about the things that pique their interest, and giving the tools (and confidence) to pursue them, gives them a much greater ability to think independently later in life.
It may or may not do that. But it certainly ill-prepares them to master things that do not paricularly pique their interest--as they will have to do many times in life.
Or are you saying that children don't need to learn anything that doesn't particularly pique their interest--or even anything that does, for that matter?
12 year-olds can be polylingual and polymath, do conic sections, compose sonatas, investigate optics, write a novel... the problem today is that they must do this in spit of our educational system. And this fact is enough to stop most people from ever experiencing the genuine Socratic-style Goods of curiosity, collaboration, all the things that make up a genuine education.
I guess I'm missing something--how does it foster children's "curiosity" to let them pursue whatever they want, however they want? Wouldn't that narrow their curiosity, teaching them that they needn't pay any attention to anything that doesn't captivate them at first glance?
Or is this emphasis on "Socratic-style Goods" over learning just another way of devaluing learning?
Young children do not think independently because we don't expect (or, often, allow) them to. Young children who do not think independently grow up to be adults who do the same.
Interesting--do young children who do not, say, fly airplanes grow up to be adults who do the same? Perhaps, given sufficient intellectual preparation, they can learn to pilot an airplane, or develop interesting original ideas, at the appropriate stage?
Or is this "thinking independently" business just one more higher value that you can use to deprecate learning?
Who do you want flying your jet, again?
No offense--but certainly not you....
Well, I went to a public high school, and I also learned all about spontaneous generation, and I recall even being tested about it. Sometimes it's important to learn about nonsense to teach people that trusting your senses doesn't always lead you to the truth, and that the scientific method is very rigorous.
But I of course didn't describe the full waldorf experience. There are plenty of resources on the web for you if you are seriously interested. Just search under Waldorf schools, and Rudolf Steiner, who was the German educator who started it all.
I know some folks on this site don't like the public school system, but surely a little harsh...
Sigh.
The problem I see is that this must take a highly intelligent and talented teacher, who intensely loves learning also. Too few such people go in for teaching to start with - and the typical program offered by a college department of education seems well designed to drive them out with boredom and bulls**t. Try to impart Montessori methods to the unintelligent timeservers that most often take up and education major, and you get much of the idiocy often seen in running our public schools - attempts to impart "self-esteem" by praising kids who know themselves they do not deserve it rather than by guiding them to accomplish praiseworthy goals, kids running wild until someone has to try to re-establish order by using excessively harsh "zero-tolerance" rules, kids discouraged from competing with themselves as well as each other, and vague statements about "developing the whole child" used as a cover for failing to teach. But that's not the Montessori method.
It seems tragic that these excellent preschools exist in the country with the world's lowest birthrate; there are fewer and fewer young Italians to take advantage of these opportunities! Maybe it's because of their low birthrate that they're able to find enough of the truly exceptional pre-school teachers needed to make Montessori methods work.
And now that I'm done with meaningless, but vaguely profoundesque, prose about education, let me just say one thing: if you find a good place for your child to learn, let them go there. Just don't assume it would be good for anyone else.
The attacks on Montessori here do seem to be attacks on straw men constructed from misunderstood or misinterpreted concepts. And as you pointed out, much of the straw man was built, sincerely or not, by others than those who attack Montessori here.
To extend the analogy of Montessori to home schooling, I'd liken Montessori to very dedicated and enlightened home schooling, only with lots of kids who aren't siblings and teachers who aren't their parents. That's somewhat like Einstein's fabled description of radio as telegraphy with no cat, but I think it addresses the point.
Based on my experience, I tend to agree. My two older children attended a Montessori school, the elder, a girl, for 3 yrs, the younger boy for 1 yr. The first teacher was awesome, and my daughter received an unbeatable education. That teacher had been a public HS Eng teacher and felt she'd been getting kids after it was too late to inspire them. My son, 3 yrs later wasn't as fortunate. He was an undiagnosed dyslexic which didn't help. Another teacher had begun teaching. It was not as successful, he tended to nag instead of guide. He did not have the maturity or enthusiasm of the first awesome teacher. Virginia schools in our area at that time did not have recess for children in the public schools (we're not paying schools to let our kids play!)This is why we decided on the Montessori school as an alternative. When the public school kids came over for after school day care, the contrast was striking. The Montessori kids were well behaved and good natured, the public school kids were wound up and could not settle into civilized play. As a military family, and with one child with a learning disability, we did public schools, private schools, a school specially for dyslexics, and later, for the dyslexic son, 3 years of home schooling/charter school after I retired from the military. The teacher is very important regardless of the setting. In all cases, my husband and I supplemented and extended opportunities for our kids as much as time permitted. The schools that encourage excellent teachers tend to attract them. I'm a firm believer in trying to let excellent teachers teach according to their strengths, whether it be at a charter, private, public, special needs or at home.
My understanding is that commercial pilots have to be re-tested periodically, to ensure that they didn't "promptly forget everything [they'd] learned".
Testing is a measurement tool--pretty much the only one we have. Sometimes it's designed and used well, and sometimes not. I would expect that commercial pilot testing is fairly good at gauging the competence of a pilot. I know of no test that's effective at gauging the enthusiasm of a pilot, and doubt that any such test could be designed. For that matter, even if it could be, I doubt it would shed much light on pilot competence.
Likewise, tests in other educational settings can be well or poorly designed and used, but when designed and used well, they can be clear and effective indicators of how much learning has taken place. Attempts to inculcate "enthusiasm" in students, on the other hand, are impossible to gauge the effectiveness of, and may or may not be of any value even when effective. Those who consider them more important than actual, measurable learning are, in my experience, inclined to consider pretty much anything more important than actual, measurable learning--that is, their underlying position is one of general hostility to learning, rather than affinity for any particular alternative.
I've met many people, including many highly intelligent ones, who display this kind of hostility to learning. I'm not sure exactly what causes it, but one possibility is that effective education reduces the relative value of native intelligence, allowing those of average intellectual talent to compete with the naturally gifted using diligently acquired skills. One can certainly imagine why the naturally intelligent might have reason to discourage this kind of competition.
The problem I see is that this must take a highly intelligent and talented teacher, who intensely loves learning also.
In my experience, a "highly intelligent and talented teacher, who intensely loves learning also", can make any teaching method work--by ignoring it if necessary. Hence saying a particular teaching method requires such a teacher is equivalent to saying that it's a useless method. Then again, embracing such methods is consistent with my hypothesis above that those who do so wish to protect the value of native intelligence and talent.
Most schools up through 12th grade really teach very little. The key thing is to excite students enough that they will learn on their own outside of school. If a school does nothing else but teach a student HOW to learn, along with the basics of reading, reading comprehension, math, critical thinking, logical thinking and so on, then the student will do all right.
This debate reminds of lectures from highly successful people. ONe will get up and say that the best experience you can possibly have is working as a waiter. Why? Because he was a waiter and he learned everything about life and business from being a waiter. Another person will argue that working on a farm is the best training because HE worked on a farm, and learned everything he needed to to run a business. And so on.
Now, the man who worked a farm might say that the farm experience is the most important, 'because if you need to birth a cow, or fix a tractor, who would you want doing it, someone who worked on a farm, or someone who worked as a waiter?" The answer is pretty clear.
But the question presents false options. If you develop a passion for learning, and can teach yourself, or continue your education, then you can learn anything. The best schools know how to do that.
Randy R. comment: It was typical in one-room school house situations to move the teachers to another school in the community every two or three years. The logic was that it was better for the children; it also was better for the teachers, who might want to strangle various children. And, in days of such schools, an individual school likely would have siblings and cousins. Chances are that most of the children would have been related one way or another. Best to get the teacher out of the soap opera every two or three years.
And, another general comment for all: It's a weak mind that cannot think of more than one way to spell a word. Complaining about spelling in an arena of discussing ideas might suggest few ideas.
The only thing worth discussing in this post is whether the Montessori teachers would be permitted to be armed. :-)
"Maria Montessori made her first visit to the United States in 1913, the same year that Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel founded the Montessori Educational Association at their Washington, DC, home. Among her other strong American supporters were Thomas Edison and Helen Keller.
In 1915, she attracted world attention with her "glass house" schoolroom exhibit at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco. On this second U.S. visit, she also conducted a teacher training course and addressed the annual conventions of both the National Education Association and the International Kindergarten Union. The committee that brought her to San Francisco included Margaret Wilson, daughter of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson."
If you run Google searches on her or Montessori, theres lot's of info. But for one page, the following site seems pretty good.
http://www.michaelolaf.net/1CW312MI.html (you'll have to cut and paste, I don't know how to link this)
There are many flavors of Montessori in the US, and teachers must go through the training offered by a particular branch to teach in their schools.
Essentially, this is true of all certificated pilots in the U.S. (here's the reg). As a practical matter, due to insurance and other requirements, every airline pilot you run into is getting a LOT of recurrent training. That's one of many reasons our air transportation system is astoundingly safe.