Are There Only Two Kinds of Montessori Educators?

Transcending Montessori to meet her in the future

Long before I decided to embark on the path of becoming a Montessori educator, I was told that there were only two types of people who enter the field.

One option was ideal. The other, not so much.

This lens dominated my early work as a Montessorian. As all lenses do, it helped me contextualize my work with adults in Montessori environments. However, like all binaries, it was limiting, and breaking this lens was significant to my own ability to serve my students and their human development- but I’m getting ahead of myself.

A humanizing pedagogy must be lived

My desire to become a Montessori educator, and my ability to enact the pedagogy with such swiftness early in my career, is due to my experience as a Montessori student from Children’s House through Upper Elementary.

I do not remember much about what I did during that time in my life, but I remember how I felt in the space and the relationships that were formed there.

Teachers were my partners in learning and mentors as I grew older. Each person at the school knew me, and I knew them. I was able to bring my full, authentic, developing self to school each day and be accepted for who I was.

Of course, this is not the norm for most students.

In my work with adults who have only experienced a traditional system of education, it is often difficult to enact this humanizing pedagogy because they were socialized into a pedagogy of compliance, control, and dehumanization. The phrase “it happened to me, and I turned out OK” is repeated often.

This difficulty in enacting the Montessori Method has nothing to do with the intellectual ability of those coming from traditional settings, but about their implicit paradigms of teaching and learning which were shaped by their experiences as children. A Montessori classroom, in which the children are normalized and in a state of flow, appears orderly to a trained Montessori guide. To a traditional teacher, it appears chaotic. Same class, different paradigms.

This is why Montessori wrote that “the teacher must not learn a new method but must acquire new attitudes. The more the teacher has been able to lose or forget their old position, the more able they will be to become a good teacher in this method.”

These paradigms often determine which type of Montessori educator you will be, according to what I was told.

There are only two types of Montessori educators…

As relayed to me by a school administrator, the two types of Montessori educators are as follows:

1. Those who want to be completely “faithful” to Montessori’s vision and do exactly as she prescribed in her writings.

2. Those who want to move the Montessori Method closer to traditional education, creating a “Monte-something” classroom.

I have seen this dynanic play out in the many schools that I have worked in. Those who want to be faithful are painted as “idealists” while those moving toward traditional are painted as “pragmatists.” This sets up a losing proposition for those who want to fully implement Montessori’s vision, because who can blame a pragmatist for just “trying to get things done?”

There are a few issues with this binary and the idea that the Monte-somethings are pragmatists.

First, the binary assumes that all educational development and innovation in the last 100 years has only been in the realm of traditional education, and anything of value that could be included in a Montessori classroom must come from traditional, because it “works” (for more on this, see my post on why traditional education doesn’t actually “work”).

Furthermore, the idea that those who bring traditional methods into Montessori classrooms are “pragmatists” muddles the goals of Montessori education and of Montessori schools.

Montessori’s goal in creating the scientific pedagogy, as she called it, was to be an aid to life and to serve the needs of children so they could experience positive human development. It is based in a pedagogy of freedom and independence.

The goal of traditional education is mass memorization and regurgitation of content for the preparation for future schooling. It is based in a pedagogy of compliance and control.

These are fundamentally different aims.

It should be clear by now that I am not on “Team Monte-something.” You might think that I have affinity for those who are “faithful,” and I do, yet I do not count myself as a part of this camp either.

Ultimately, both of these positions are based in fear. Those who want to be entirely faithful to the method fear that any change will benefit the traditionalists, therefore not serving their students positive development. As such, the “faithful” resist any change to the work. Taken to the extreme, this means never updating the Montessori Method- something Dr. Montessori herself was against.

Those who want to move Montessori toward traditional education fear that Montessori students will not “match up” academically to their traditional peers, despite this being debunked by recent research by Dr. Angeline Lillard, among others. Taken to the extreme of getting students ready for future schooling, we see “no excuses charter schools,” whose extreme regimines of compliance, control, and content memorization are based in the racist “broken windows” policing policy. These schools boast high college acceptance rates. Yet, students from no-excuses charter schools often drop out of college in extremely high numbers because they were never allowed to develop any form of independence.

Since both of these are fear-based decisions, both operate out of scarcity, therefore not truly serving the students in their care.

So which one am I? Charting a third path

As a rule, I reject binaries because there are always shades of gray to explore. In fact, while I have met educators who generally fall in these two categories, no human being in their full complexity will even fully embody one side of a binary. We must reject these binaries and move toward a third way (or multiple third ways!) which are not based in fear, but in confidence and conviction, and which transcend the existing binary.

So what is the third way? How can we liberate Montessori guides to make decisions out of their conviction for human development, rather than fear?

In his memoir Educating for Right Action and Love: Extending and Expanding the Montessori Vision, Dr. Phil Gang recounts the following exchange with Ada Montessori, the wife of Mario Montessori Sr.

“In 1982, several months after Mario Montessori, Sr. passed away, his widow, Ada, sent a letter… In an excerpt she writes, “I only feel that Mario had the real gift for pointing out the essence, and I am afraid people may lose themselves in the details.” Nearly 40 years later I would have to concur with this foretelling. Although the movement has expanded, the roots are being lost to outcome-based learning.”

In Gang’s assessment, we see the “Monte-somethings,” in their stance as so-called pragmatists, chipping away at what makes the Montessori Method so powerful. So what is this essence that Ada speaks of? Dr. Montessori herself gave us the keys- we need to be willing to listen.

At the end of The Montessori Method, Dr. Montessori wrote the following:

“This book of methods compiled by one person alone, must be followed by many others. It is my hope that starting from the individual study of the child educated with our method, other educators will set forth the results of their experiments. These are the pedagogical books which await us in the future.”

Montessori’s work in creating the scientific pedagogy was to be the start (not the end) of future experiments as to how we can best serve human development. She did not set out to create a complete, finished manual of how to enact a pedagogy which served human development.

Montessori set the stage for others to continue the experiment and innovation for the purpose of fostering positive human development and serving all children, in all contexts, for the purpose of creating a more peaceful world.

We must follow Montessori’s direction and not merely imitate her results but engage in the experiment which is true scientific pedagogy.

This is my calling, and the “third way” that transcends the two fear-based binaries and meets Montessori’s essence. I desire to experiment and push Montessori further toward learner-centered, progressive pedagogy. When experimenting on how to best serve our students development, I think we have much to learn from other school experiments and cross-disciplinary studies.

In an article titled “The Scientist in the Classroom,” Ginni Sackett quotes Louis Menand who writes that “ideologies justify and dictate. Ideas question and liberate.”

The Montessori method must not become a static ideology which seeks to justify itself and dictate a single way forward. We must continuously question ourselves and our work to liberate our practice and to fully embody Montessori’s calling.

Here is a very short list to illustrate the point:

• Are there some ways in which our environments stifle independence? For this, I look forward the research and experimentation at Sudbury schools, such as Free to Learn by Peter Gray.

• How does our modern understanding of neuroscience inform education for human development? For this, I turn to scholars such as Mary Helen Immordino-Yang.

• What kind of literacy pedagogy meets Montessori’s vision of language as psychic formation, allowing the child or adolescent to form themselves in the context of their society and culture? For this, I turn to critical pedagogy (Paolo Friere, Ira Shor, among others), James Moffett, John Warner, and Maja Wilson.

Bringing these thinkers in conversation with Montessori in order to enact the scientific pedagogy do not dilute the method, they enhance it.

Montessori did not create her work in a vaccum: she was in constant dialogue with experts in various fields to shape her ideas and her work with children.

When our stance is to lean into the scientific pedagogy, to create education for human development, and to push the method toward self-directed, learner-centered, progressive pedagogy, we are truly following Montessori’s directive.

Montessori called us to write the pedagogy books of the future. Do we have the courage to do so?

Meeting Maria in the future

In an AMI presentation in 2010, Raniero Regni said that “to go beyond Montessori is to rediscover Montessori. Montessori is waiting for us in the future.”

In order to meet Montessori in the future, in order to write future books on scientific pedagogy, as she called us to do, we must have the courage to expand on her work.

In her lifetime, Montessori faced significant setbacks and criticisms of her method, yet this did not deter her from continuing her experiments and seeking to holistically serve children in a humanizing environment.

What would our Montessori schools look like if we were seeking to meet Montessori in the future- if we saw our schools as labs, not to tinker at the edges of Montessori’s writings, but to truly extend her work?

I often find that summer break, when we are away from the day-to-day of our school routines, is the best time for this introspection and innovation.

Montessorians: How are you working to meet Montessori in the future?

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Introducing the Enlightened Educator Project!

I am launching a new endeavor with my college and friend Wendy Fisher: The Enlightened Educator Project. Our mission is to develop mindful, reflective, and resilient educators to make education more humanizing and sustainable for all.

We envision a world where teachers and students are liberated to bring their full selves to their educational communities, making schools hubs of happiness and human flourishing. We believe that our work, in partnership with you, is a key step in making this vision a reality!

Our online community for educators is free to join through this summer at this link!

We are currently inviting schools to enroll their staff for our 2024-2025 Enlightened Educator cohort which begins September 2024. Learn more here!

To hear more about the project, check out our website at www.EnlightenedEducatorProject.org

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