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

The Montessori Way understands
that learning, not education, is the
issue. Children are not taught, they
learn. Teachers do not teach. They
show, model, encourage, and create
situations and conditions for children
to investigate, inquire into, and discover.
In sum, children, not teachers,
build knowledge. And, children do not
develop or learn uniformly at the same
standard pace.
Truthfully, children can only learn
when they do. A child will talk, walk,
and balance a bicycle only when she is
ready. A child will understand numbers,
operations with fractions, equivalencies
between geometric figures,
causes of historical events — only
when she is ready. A child will blend
visual symbols for language (“c” – “a” –
“t”) and read only when she is ready.
In keeping with the Montessori Way,
we honor and respect individual children
for their particular approaches
and styles of learning. We help children
develop habits and skills of lifelong
learning with natural systems —
curiosity, inquiry and exploration —
without resorting to external rewards,
threats, and competitions. Why do
human children suddenly require
learning goals in the form of measurable
content standards to demonstrate
that they learn? The argument, of
course, is more political and, therefore,
more controlling. It’s not a question
of learning; it’s a question of who
wants children to learn what.
Parents and teachers should access
their state and local content and
achievement standards; these are available
on the websites of state departments
of education. These impressive
lists of objectives hide the fact that real
learning does not follow a neat and
orderly progression. The focus must
be larger than what is learned and
include understanding of how and
when a child learns. In sum, we must
learn to ask, “At this moment, who is
learning what — and how?”
Montessori recognized this kind of
question and developed an approach
to instruction called the “scientific
pedagogy.” Montessori teachers act as
research scientists and endeavor to
understand the complete child in
order to help facilitate the process
Montessori called “educating the
human potential.” Children are naturally
becoming; they naturally engage
in a whole developmental process. Not
knowing today (as measured by a low
test score) is not the same as not
knowing forever. Similarly, knowing
today (a high test score) does not
guarantee knowing always. Humans do
forget.
Montessori discovered the requirement
of repetition in a child’s learning
process. In her day, the schooling process
involved recitation. Teachers
spoke, and children recited back what
they heard. In Montessori classrooms,
children learn from repeated explo-
THE MONTESSORI WAY
rations of materials. Children observe
and study natural life and learning
materials.
With repetition, children increase
their understanding of particular concepts
and improve their capabilities
with particular skills. This is as true for
young children learning to arrange and
sequence a set of cylinders of varying
lengths and diameters as it is for secondary
students learning to research
and present a persuasive argument in a
written essay or a proposal for how to
improve local recycling efforts.
Education reform is as necessary
today as it was at the start of the twentieth
century. The directions of current
efforts are too narrow and, based on
political agenda rather than children’s
development, too dangerous. Instead,
each child deserves a complete education
in which all of her or his unique
capabilities are engaged; an education
we call the Montessori Way.
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