ESL-Chat Blog: Montessori Madness

ESL-Chat Blog

Montessori Madness

We know we need to improve our traditional school system, both public and private. But how? More homework? Better-qualified teachers? Longer school days or school years? More testing? More funding? No, no, no, no, and no. Montessori Madness! explains why the incremental steps politicians and administrators continue to propose are incremental steps in the wrong direction. The entire system must be turned on its head. This book asks parents to take a look one thirty-minute observation at a Montessori school. Your picture of what education should look like will never be the same.

Here is the full text of the book:

Montessori Madness by Trevor Eissler

Madness

I pooped in my pants in third grade.

I was eight years old. I remember sitting at my desk toward the back of one of the rows. It was a typical classroom. A chalkboard stretched across the front wall; an American flag hung beside the door; an imposing teacher’s desk squatted near the chalkboard. I can still picture the large chart on the wall used to keep track of each student’s math progress. Each name had a number of stars next to it that corresponded to the number of multiplication tables the student had memorized. A few wall-posters exhorted the class to do this or that—they demanded: “Read!” or “Math is fun!”. My teacher, short-tempered and humorless, stood in front of the class and fired questions at us. She called on one student here, another there. I was probably avoiding eye contact with her as usual, hoping she wouldn’t call on me. At some point I realized I had to go to the bathroom. No problem. I knew we’d take a scheduled bathroom break soon. But with growing dread, it dawned on me that I might not make it until then. The feeling steadily became unbearable.

I squirmed in my chair, trying frantically to pick from among three horribly embarrassing choices. Do I interrupt the teacher and beg, within earshot of a room full of my third-grade peers, to go to the bathroom? Mortifying. Do I go in my pants? Mortifying and disgusting. Do I run out the door and down the hall to the bathroom? Disaster. I feared that making a run for it would fire up the ultimate wrath of the teacher. I had certainly never seen another student leave the room without permission; students were punished for merely standing up without permission. Flush with embarrassment, the only thing I ran out of was time. Nature made the decision for me.

I spent the rest of the school day closely shadowing the unpopular kid who sat in front of me, so others might think the stench was coming from him and not from me. I followed him to lunch and sat beside him. I followed him to recess. I followed him around the playground. I followed him to the bus. Every time some kid joked and held his nose, I’d join in the fun, make faces, and point at the kid in front. Fortunately for my third-grade social standing, my friends fell for the trick. I chalked up the entire incident to bad luck, bad timing, and oh-so-clever cunning.

Years later, as I reevaluate the events of that day, I come to different conclusions. Cruelty, fear, tearing others down, lack of responsibility, lack of self-confidence: these qualities are not inevitable rite-of-passage characteristics of children. These qualities are taught—every day, in every classroom, in every state in the country. On the smileyfaced lunchbox-and-backpack surface, my third grade class was run perfectly. All of the children stayed in their seats, they raised their hands before speaking, and there were no disruptions. But under the surface, much more was being taught. I, a straight “A” student, was so fearful of the teacher and of being embarrassed in front of peers that I was powerless to make a decision. I was so conditioned to get the teacher’s permission, even regarding my own bodily functions, that I was virtually paralyzed. The only way to regain my pride, as I felt myself slip into third-grade ignominy, was to claw at my neighbor, dragging him down instead. Ouch.

This is madness. What are we really teaching our children? We adults are so familiar with traditional schooling (the system used in both public and private schools) that it is almost impossible to imagine anything different. We spent years being told what, when, and how much to learn, when to stand, when to sit, when to eat, when to go to the bathroom, and of course not to talk at any time. As a result, we think the best way to learn is to let others, the experts, tell us everything they know. We assume if we repeat back what they say, we’ll be smarter. However, the deeper we peer beneath the surface of the traditional classroom, the more evident it is our children are learning to parrot, not to think. What’s more, the lessons children are learning are not the lessons we thought we were teaching. Sure, most traditional school graduates are moderately literate and have a modicum of math, science, and history knowledge. But is that it? Is that all we expect from all those years? And at what social cost? What about the additional lessons traditional schools have accidentally taught—dysfunction, lack of discipline, lack of motivation, indecision, disrespect, passive learning?

I mention this pitiful third-grade incident not to humiliate myself yet again, but because it cuts straight to the heart of my argument: traditional schooling stinks. But there is an alternative. It is a surprising, delightful, profound alternative. It is found in Montessori schools.

Children in Montessori schools assume full responsibility for their lowest bodily functions as well as their highest intellectual functions. They learn to solve problems by solving them, not hiding them. Montessori children learn discipline by practicing discipline, not by having the teacher tell them to be disciplined. They are naturally self-motivated because they are free to choose their own lessons at the moment they are ready to learn those lessons, and to follow wherever the intellectual thread leads. These students are not trained to wait for a teacher to motivate them before acting. They have long attention spans because every day they practice concentrating on some type of work for extended periods of time, not just until the bell rings for the next class. These students are decisive because they make decisions for themselves—the teacher does not decide for them. These children learn to respect others because they in turn are respected, not dominated. They are active learners because instead of being lectured to as passive observers, they are active participants.

This seems crazy. It turns our entire system of education on its head. The Montessori model is contrary to the “traditional” model most of us grew up under. As I first read through Maria Montessori’s books, there was one description she gave of a child’s natural perspective of learning that seized my attention: “Help me to do it alone.”. That’s the key! That is where the lumbering bus that is our traditional school system missed the turn, flattened the guardrail, and settled into the mud, hopelessly stuck. Mistakenly, we have tried to build a student from the top down by telling him everything we think he should know. We have given administrators, curricula designers, and teachers complete responsibility for the intellectual, psychological, and physiological development of our children. We goofed. Children want and need to build themselves. It is that simple. From this new perspective, Montessori’s method makes sense. Yes, they need help, but only so far as to enable them to help themselves. This desire should not be squelched when they set foot in the classroom.

I am writing as one parent to another. This is not a book for philosophers or professional educators. In my opinion it is precisely because no one has convinced parents of the need for overwhelming change that not much changes. I want to convince you of that need. I am astonished that most young parents have never heard of Montessori (including myself until a few years ago). I am angry that most children are stuck with no options except the familiar traditional public and private schools. I am not a career educator. My degree is in history and my career is flying airplanes, and until my own kids were born, I had never even been all that interested in children! I was certainly never interested in children’s schooling—especially when I was a child in school. When I eventually had kids of my own, my priorities suddenly changed. My children’s growth and development continues to fascinate me, as all parents will understand. We all look for ways to improve our children’s lives and to better support their development. When we find those ways, we must act.

I want to pull the Montessori philosophy of education down into the dirt where it belongs. Montessori is about a kid with a stick, digging a hole in the mud—hands dirty, engaged, fascinated, uninterrupted. Montessori should not be the bastion of rich kids and snooty elites able to spend thousands of dollars per year, while the not-so-fortunate kids are herded toward mediocrity like standardized lemmings. It’s madness that we don’t offer free public Montessori schools everywhere. It’s madness that we stay stuck in the traditional way of schooling when it obviously has serious flaws. Yet, at first glance, the Montessori method is so different from what we are used to, we think this method is madness! Let me try to convince you otherwise.

The old saying, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” comes to mind. We think someone else’s job is better, car is faster, house is bigger, vacation is sunnier. When it comes to Montessori education, the grass is greener. It is better. The grass on the Montessori side of the fence is so verdant, lush, and full, I can barely make out my three kids in the overgrowth! It’s just not fair. It’s not fair that the vast majority of children will never get the chance to experience a Montessori school. It’s not fair that because of luck and enough money, my kids get the chance to go there, but others don’t.

The goal of this book is simple. I want to convince you, the parent of a young child, to closely observe a Montessori classroom in action and compare it with a more discerning look at your child’s current schooling or any traditional classroom. The difference is so startling and compelling that I hope it will prompt you to pull your child out of traditional school and enroll him or her in a Montessori school. I hope parents of preschool-age children will decide to choose Montessori from day one. If this choice is just not affordable, I hope you will demand a public Montessori school in your area.

Montessori Madness

Should We Homeschool?

Our kids reached preschool age, their abilities blossomed, and my drive to help them learn better and faster shifted into high gear. I wanted to show them how to read, ride a bike, pay a cashier, kick a ball, cook pancakes. It was new and exciting to be able to demonstrate to my children how to do something and to see rapid progress and mastery. Before children can speak, they’re almost in a different world. It is so difficult to get feedback on what they are thinking. The preschool years, however, are like living in a successful scientist’s laboratory—one major discovery after another. It was during this time that my wife and I started to kick around the idea of home schooling. I wanted to be a part of our children’s discovery process all day, not just for an hour or two in the evening after work. I didn’t want to relinquish my opportunity and my duty to see that our children were knowledgeable in all sorts of subjects. And I didn’t want to hand over specific “school subjects” to the responsibility of their school. I wanted to work with them on math and bike riding. Really, what’s the difference?

One day, riding in the car, my daughter piped up from her car seat in the back, “Is that the jail?”

We were driving by an imposing, small-windowed, fortress-like building.

“No, sweetie, that’s the high school,” I answered. It got me thinking. Why don’t schools look like homes? Why do we compartmentalize and institutionalize learning? Why are we taking home out of learning and learning out of home? What damage is being done to our homes by “outsourcing” the raising of our children and the passing along of human culture and knowledge to standardized vendors? We’ve built walls around what we now call “school subjects” by sequestering certain items of human interest—math, reading, history, writing, science—in school buildings, and forcing students to think about them at specific times. Not only does this remove the incentive for students to think about these things outside of school, but it also removes the responsibility of parents and other adults in the community for passing along our knowledge. Why don’t we talk to our kids at home about calculus and astronomy? Why don’t we learn it together? How can we make school more like home, and home more like school?

We got in touch with a neighborhood family from my childhood with which we had remained in intermittent contact over the years. This delightful and accomplished family was the only homeschooling family I had known. Coincidentally, the mother, Susan Cavitch, had just written and published The Deliberate Home, describing the pros and cons of homeschooling her children as well as the nuts and bolts of the process. Reading this book emboldened us to continue down this unusual path. She also pointed us toward the authors Charlotte Mason, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, and others.

After much reading, I narrowed down to three the general reasons that other families have decided to homeschool. The first is the desire to immerse the child in a particular religion throughout the day. This reason does not apply to our family. We prefer that schools remain secular, welcoming those of any religion. The second reason to home school is the belief that I-can-do-it-better-than-theschool-can. Whether it’s letting the kids progress at their own pace, or pushing them harder than they would be pushed, or devoting more time to extracurricular activities, or putting the time spent on a school bus to better use, or simply because the parent thinks he or she is smarter than the teachers, this reason appeals to a lot of different families. The third reason to home school is the conviction that the whole system of education in any traditional school is detrimental to the child from the moment he or she sets foot on the bus until stepping off eight hours later.

The second reason appealed to me initially. I really believed—and still do—that I could do a better job teaching my children than the teachers in my neighborhood school. First, just look at the time consideration. Think back to your own schooling and try to add up the astonishing waste of precious minutes every day. How much time was wasted while the teacher was telling everyone to be quiet, to sit down, to stop talking, to listen up? How much time was wasted lining up for lunch, for bathroom breaks, for recess, for assemblies? How much time was wasted while the teacher left the class in limbo while she tutored or scolded a single student? I figured, what an opportunity! I could teach my kids all the academics they learn in school in a fraction of the time. I would only need maybe two hours a day on school subjects to accomplish what was done in five or six at school, and we could play sports, music, relax, and take trips with the rest of the time.

Next, I simply care more. I care about my children’s education more than any teacher ever could. I do not mean to say that teachers are not dedicated. They are. However, there is a limit to one’s dedication when you have to be paid to do the job, and when you go home at the end of the day. The caring that I would bring to the task would translate into enthusiasm. I would also be able to maintain this enthusiasm, I thought, since burn-out would be a whole lot less likely teaching the same thing to three kids as opposed to thirty.

There is another kind of enthusiasm that working one-on-one can bring. It is shared wonder, sitting side by side with someone who is experiencing something for the first time. I worked as a flight instructor in small airplanes early in my aviation career and remember the most enjoyable flights being the ones with a brand new student in the pilot’s seat. Their wonder would always rekindle my own fantastic first memories of the sensation of flying. It allowed me to experience it again. I believed this sharing of experiences would be a wonderful part of both my own enjoyment as well as my children’s education. This would not be possible in a large class.

The third reason to home school—that the present school system itself is harmful to a child’s education—was completely new to me. This shocking idea rattled the foundation of my whole belief in the value of school. What could be more natural, and just plain right, than hearing, “Good morning, class. Open up your books to page 23. Today we’re going to learn about nouns”? Or what about bringing a report card home? Or having a student assigned as the classroom monitor (taking names of those who talk while the teacher is out of the room)? Could there really be anything all that wrong with any of this? Why would anyone want to overturn the system in which we all grew up? What is all the fuss about, I wondered?

Fuss however, there was. I soon became convinced that this radical third reason for home schooling, crazy as it initially sounded, had merit. Not only did it have merit, but it began to inspire me. It was a call for an education revolution. This was not just an argument for incremental reforms such as school vouchers, increased funding, updated textbooks, standardization, or smaller classes; no, this was a call for the complete annihilation of teaching methods as we know them. But why were the mini-reforms we hear so much about insufficient? Why was the entire school system being condemned? I felt there must be overwhelming reasons before I could support such complete change.

DON’T WE HAVE TO MEASURE EDUCATION TO FIX IT?

There have been many calls for school reform over the centuries. These range from Aristotle,

The citizens should be educated to obey when young and to rule when they are older. Rule is their ultimate and highest function. Since the good ruler is the same as the good man, our education must be so framed as to produce the good man. It should develop all man’s powers and fit him for all the activities of life; but the highest powers and the highest activities must be the supreme care of education…

to rock band Pink Floyd, “Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone!”3 and seemingly everyone in between.

But for any reform to have real value, it must have three elements. It must identify a specific problem. It must offer an effective solution. It must take steps to implement that solution. Although the above quotations seem reasonable enough, their usefulness is diminished because, in the first, no solutions are offered, and in the second, no problem to be solved is specified. Neither takes any steps towards implementation.

Aristotle and Pink Floyd are joined by a multitude of modern well-intentioned reformers offering various ideas to fix our schools. Every day we are faced with media reports advocating more standardized testing or less standardized testing; teacher incentives or not; smaller class sizes, more money, and so on. But these are vague reforms for ancillary problems: student scores are low, or one school is scoring lower than another school. Test scores are fun to look at for administrators. They can be averaged. One can find the mean, the median, and the mode. One can make pie charts and bar graphs, and depict trends. But, and here is the heartbreaker, raising test scores does little to help develop, or even measure, our students’ independence, competence, motivation, or concentration. Test scores do not even measure a student’s “insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, [or] originality,” argues John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing Us Down, the very “hallmarks of human excellence.”. Why do we not measure human excellence? Are we just measuring something to be measuring something? Were math and spelling the easiest to score, so that is the routine into which we fell?

Gatto, a winner of the New York State Teacher of the Year Award, takes a jack-hammer to the foundations of our traditional schools. He nails the first essential for reform: identify the problem. I slipped his words slightly out of context above, so I will quote him below in full. Gatto regretfully recalls his career as a teacher in the New York City schools:

The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence—insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality—that I became confused. They didn’t do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

The entire system of schooling is a general problem, and it is the cause of the specific problems Gatto lists:

The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world.

The children I teach have almost no curiosity…they cannot concentrate for very long…

The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today.

The children I teach are ahistorical; they have no sense of how the past has predestinated their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune; they laugh at weakness; they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor.

The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically “grade everything” and television mentors who offer everything in the world for sale.

The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This timidity is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness, but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.5

Gatto does not mention test scores or report cards, because none of the human qualities above are measured by school tests.

But let me come to the defense of school administrators. How would someone measure curiosity? What about dependence? Or cruelty? Intimacy!? How would an educator build these into a curriculum? How would the results be measured, compared, analyzed? How would funding be allocated and staff hired to achieve better results in these areas? It can’t be done, of course.

It is my belief that human excellence cannot be measured—only witnessed. That is why our measurement system falls flat. There are things that can be measured: the speed of a runner’s 100-yard dash; the number of poetry lines, state capitals, or mathematical formulas recalled; the correct spellings of words on a list. These are quite measurable, but they are peripheral. They do not measure human excellence or even child or school excellence. The traditional school system has it backwards. Human excellence is not achieved by obtaining high test scores. Excellent humans emerge as they become insightful, wise, just, resourceful, courageous, and original. They excel because their environment allowed them to develop these qualities by themselves. Frequently, these people do score well on tests; this is because they are interested in the world, motivated, curious, and therefore happen to acquire a lot of measurable knowledge along the way. But the single-minded focus on measurable results corrupts the development of both “good” students and “bad” students by substituting peripheral achievement for real achievement.

I recently read in my hometown newspaper, “Five area [school] districts would be deemed unacceptable if state hadn’t waived dropout rates.” The article continued:

For the second year in a row the Texas Education Agency gave school districts a pass on dropout rates, sparing five Central Texas districts from earning the state’s lowest rating. Without the waiver, the…districts would be rated academically unacceptable. All five districts instead were rated acceptable…. State education officials said they didn’t include dropout rates in determining accountability ratings because some districts need more time to transition to a new method of calculating dropout rates.6

I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or to cry. Could it really be that our measurement of academic acceptability or unacceptability could be affected by an accounting decision?

In my job as a pilot, I frequently spend a few days at a time with various crewmembers who live in other parts of the country. Inevitably the conversation turns to our kids. I’m often asked, “How are the schools in your area?” I’m always stumped by this question. I’ll hem and haw and come up with something insightful like, “I think they’re alright.”. I know the question they’re getting at is, “How are they rated relative to other schools in the state?”. Not only do I not keep up with the ratings—the paper’s quote above was news to me—but I don’t think the question has any meaning. It’s like asking, “How are the wives in your area?” Or, “How are the churches in your area?” Marriages and religious belief are so personal, so variable, and so full of mystery that I cannot think of appropriate ways to rank them. It seems that only vague but relevant questions of happiness, fulfillment, inspiration, or nurturing apply. Yet marriage and religion are two of the most important aspects of our lives. Education is also in this category. Learning is such a personal, individual activity that it is impossible to quantify. The most relevant questions about the effectiveness of education should be similar to those of marriage and religion. Are the kids happy, fulfilled, inspired, and nurtured? Those administrators who attempt to rank schools using other criteria just end up looking ridiculous.

Our measure-mania is getting absurd. We measure the silliest things: box office earnings for movies, college rankings, stock market averages, and political poll numbers. All of these figures at one time may have had some value to researchers or marketers, but they’ve grown into the main event, the whole reason for making a movie, going to a particular college, investing in a company, or forming an opinion of a president. What’s next? The ranking of artists? (Oh, wait: Oscars, Grammys, and Pulitzers.)

The sophomoric college-ranking fad is a system of measurement, which, in the words of education activist Lloyd Thacker, “makes kids sneaky, game-playing conformists.”. College-bound high school students tend to fixate on SAT scores, ACT scores, and grade point averages in their quest to be accepted to the most highly-ranked college possible. They debate the merits of taking easy classes to boost their scores or taking harder ones to have a more impressive college application. They pad their application with various clubs or social organizations, usually doing the absolute minimum required to “get credit” for their various half-hearted endeavors. I know, because that’s what I did too. What suffers in the pursuit of scores? Learning. Confused, many parents of traditional school students might ask, “There’s a difference?”

One Halloween we took our kids to a party. During the party, the grown-ups called all the children together to pose for a costume contest. It was painful to see a glimpse of the future that we adults had planned for our children. One moment the ghosts and witches were excited to be dressed up in a scary or transforming costume, enjoying the feeling of surprise at seeing how their friends had dressed up. The next moment they were being forced to compete with one another to see who was better. It was sobering to see adults imposing a competition, a ranking system, on a perfectly happy and content group of kids—kids who were valuing each other’s creativity and enjoying each other’s company. Prior to the adults taking over, the kids had no interest in ranking their costumes.

What’s the proper relationship between measurement and value? The parts of our lives that are accurately measured don’t seem to accurately reflect the value we feel of our lives as a whole. We know our car’s gas mileage. We know our income bracket. We know our cholesterol level. We know the grades on our child’s last report card. We know the square-footage of our house and how that compares to the neighbor’s. We know tomorrow’s forecasted high temperature. We know who owes us $10. But what about peacefulness, burning desire, or humor? What about immersion in a worthwhile community project? What about a fascination with Prussian history, or kite-flying, or curing cancer? What about joy? Is there no value in these things?

We are so desperate to compete and to measure one another that we grasp at the easiest currency with which to compare: keeping score. It is staggering to recognize the damage our schools have wrought by fixating on only those metrics easiest to measure. The traditional system does not take appropriate measurements of student performance and school performance. Our measurements have become divorced from the underlying value.

The same devastating mistake has affected the business world. Both the “mortgage crisis” and the “financial meltdown” swirling around us are the collective realization that our primary method of measurement (home resale value, company stock price) has lost its connection with the underlying value of the asset. We got so swept up in how much somebody else would pay for our asset tomorrow that we didn’t consider what the value of the house was to us today. We bought the stock, but didn’t think about the underlying value of owning a percentage of that particular business endeavor. We based our value on what we thought someone else might think in the near future. We’ve been “sneaky, game-playing conformists.”

Here is another link on YouTube

Book information:
Reading age: 12+
Word count: 62000
Number of unique words: 6500, Word list
Number of pages: 242
Year: 2009
Links: Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube, Goodreads, LibraryThing, Common Sense Media, Lexile

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