Tim Seldin & Paul Epstein Ph.D. An Education for Life

Foreword
W
hat is education for? How we answer this question is critical for the future of our children,
our nation, and our world. Yet all too often it gets lost in debates about standards, testing, and
other procedural reforms that treat education as something to be done to children rather than
for and with them.
The Montessori Way shows that we can, and must, go back to basics – to the real purpose of education as
drawing forth from each one of us our full human potential. It is a highly practical book. But it is much more
than that. It describes a way of life – a way of thinking about the nature of intelligence, talent, and the potential
for goodness and greatness among all people, a way to nurture and inspire the creativity, curiosity, leadership,
love, and imagination that lies within us all. It reminds us that the child is the
mother/father of the woman/man she or he will one day become, and that the most important human task
is to nurture and educate children.
Based on the pioneering work of Maria Montessori, as well as more recent knowledge about how children
develop, learn, and access their full humanity, The Montessori Way embodies what I call partnership
education. It is designed not only to help young people better navigate through our difficult times, but also to
help them create a more peaceful, equitable, and sustainable future.
Rather than relying on a paradigm of domination and submission, of winning and losing, of external
rewards and punishments, of top-down rankings, fear, manipulation, indoctrination, and pressure to
conform, The Montessori Way presents an education that focuses on partnership, independence, mutual
trust, and respect, on both individual achievement and collaboration, while developing our minds and hearts.
Explicitly or implicitly, education gives young people a mental map of what it means to be human. Much
of what young people worldwide learn through both their formal and informal education holds up a
distorted mirror of themselves. When their vision of the future comes out of this limited world view, they cannot
develop their full humanity or meet the unprecedented challenges they face.
In The Montessori Way, Tim Seldin and Paul Epstein offer sound guidelines, practical tools, and
inspiring real-life stories of how, working together teachers, children, parents, and others can create
learning communities where everyone can feel safe and seen for who we truly are, where our essential
humanity and that of others shines through, lifting our hearts and spirits, empowering us to realize our highest
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual potentials.
In her unshakable faith in the human spirit and her fearless challenge to traditions of domination, Maria
Montessori is one of my role models. Her legacy, as expanded and enriched by countless others, is the gift of
this wonderful book.
— Riane Eisler is author of Tomorrow’s Children:
A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century,
The Power of Partnership, and The Chalice and The Blade.