An article in The New Yorker magazine caught my eye a couple of weeks ago. It was entitled “The Miseducation of Maria Montessori.” Being a product of the Montessori method, I read the article in full. This was not the first time the idea of Filipino children in public educational institutions being trained using the Montessori method.
Two year ago while my boss and I were discussing about the pedagogy of Education 4.0, I mentioned to her about how the description of learners who would be the products of the Education 4.0 approach, had commonalities with the Montessori method. She mentioned that the reason why I immediately grasped the concept of Education 4.0 is because of the fact that I was schooled under the Montessori method from pre-school up to the elementary grades.
What is Education 4.0?
Education 4.0 is a purposeful approach to learning that lines up with the fourth industrial revolution and about transforming the future of education using advanced technology and automation.
Creativity is the foundation of Education 4.0. It emphasizes the need to prepare students to take on challenges, head-on.
Education 4.0 will require gradual paradigm shifts:
Demand-led instead of supply-led educationCompetency-based instead of knowledge-basedLifelong learning instead of front-loaded learning Modular Degree instead of one-shot going Emphasis on EQ than IQ alone
To keep up with the change, one has to revisit the traditional educational paradigms with a futuristic approach. Students should be adept with skills set by the fast-changing technology; they should be led, but not instructed; information should be made accessible, but not fed to them.
Both general and vocational education should aim at making students skill-ready to compete with the outside labor force.
Given the education crisis the Philippines is currently experiencing, why not dramatically alter the educational paradigm in the country to adapt more to the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is already upon us by starting with the children?
The pedagogical basis of the Montessori method is detailed in the article:
At the turn of the twentieth century, it was revolutionary to think that a child’s education could be child-centered—shaped according to his or her actual brain and body. Montessori and her many disciples made this common sense. What’s more, they believed something that still seems counterintuitive today: that children are, in their essence, methodical, self-directed beings with a strong work ethic, perfectly capable of deep concentration, and that their tendency toward inattention and disruption can be a reasonable response to disharmonious surroundings. As Cristina De Stefano writes in “The Child Is the Teacher” (Other Press), a new biography of Montessori, “Children, placed in the right environment, provided with the right materials, soon stop being agitated and noisy and are transformed into quiet creatures, calm, happy to work.”
This most orderly and tranquil of educational philosophies had its beginnings in the most grim and chaotic of circumstances. In 1897, Montessori, one of the first women in Italy to earn a medical degree, had recently graduated from the University of Rome and was volunteering at the school’s psychiatric clinic, where her responsibilities entailed visits to the city’s ghastly insane asylums. At the time, mental illness was widely viewed by Catholics as a form of divine retribution, but Montessori became attached to the children who lived in the asylums, many of whom had been committed owing to disabilities, although others simply suffered from malnutrition or neglect. Her interest in the children led her to the writings of the special-education pioneer Édouard Séguin, who employed balls, blocks, beads, buttons, and everyday tools in his work with asylum children in Paris, and of Friedrich Froebel, the German educator who originated the concept of kindergarten and gave his name to the toys known as “Froebel gifts”: balls of yarn, wooden spheres and cylinders. Séguin and Froebel understood that children’s desire to touch and manipulate everything around them, easily mistaken as behavior to be managed, might be better seen as self-education.
Not to put a chip on my shoulder, but my Montessori education has certainly served me in good stead from high school to college and in my professional life, in terms of my work ethic and my desire for continuing education on my own, since I could not find the time to indulge in post-graduate studies because of the demand of my job in international trade, which required a lot of travel. This is one reason why I am akin to being a Jack-of-Most-Trades.
The article is made more interesting because of the fact that Montessori first experimented on her pedagogy with the children of poor Italians.
The chance to pursue that reform came in 1906, when Montessori, now an educator of some renown, gained the backing of a group of Roman financiers. The next year, on the day of the Feast of the Epiphany, she opened her first schoolroom—the Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House—in a tenement in San Lorenzo, a working-class neighborhood with high rates of poverty. The building superintendent’s daughter was put nominally in charge, overseeing about fifty children, ages two to six, in activities such as button-fastening, water-pouring, and drawing with colored pencils. The schools multiplied in Italy, then across Europe, often finding their most hospitable environments in regions with a strong socialist presence. At the Casa dei Bambini in Naples, some of the pupils were so poor that they weren’t familiar with the utensils they set out at meal time; in France, Montessori classes were set up expressly to aid kids who had been traumatized by the First World War. And yet these children, despite their deprivation, evinced a stunning response to Montessori’s methods. In particular, they made rapid and enthusiastic progress in their writing skills, encouraged by a system—movable letters, cut from sandpaper and pasted on boards—that was based on play, rather than on rote memorization.
Since I was a child, the concept of “work” was instilled in us as students at OB Montessori. Even then, we were always characterized as “special children,” though the term was not that popular at that time, even when there was nothing wrong with us. We did have school mates who were suffering from one form of dysfunction or another, but they were not isolated or grouped together as one.
While we did see through their different behavior, we never looked down upon them but instead “worked” with them in our daily classroom activities. The Montessori education was based on “working” with materials which is how we learned. Class lectures were very minimal which is why transitioning is required in a “normal” school.
I would have wanted to attend high school at Montessori also but it was not offered yet then. I went to San Beda for high school and had to adjust to class size, learning Pilipino because we did not have that as a subject in Montessori and Religion. About the only religion we had was our First Communion. I did not learn of the Angelus and various holy days of obligation until I was in San Beda.
The New Yorker article does ask the very interesting question of how and why did the Montessori method became exclusive for the rich and not widely available for everyone? If it was so revolutionary, why was not it adopted worldwide?
And what is Maria Montessori’s afterlife? De Stefano criticizes unnamed skeptics who believe that Montessori’s “ideas cannot be applied in schools for the masses, that they work only with the children of the rich, who attend private schools.” Yet the obvious irony of Montessori’s crusade on behalf of the poorest and least powerful in society is that its most visible legacy is selective private schools for the élite. As word of the San Lorenzo experiment travelled around Rome, two of the early adopters were the city’s mayor and the British Ambassador to Italy; soon, aristocrats and diplomats were hosting Montessori classrooms in their parlors. The first Montessori school in North America began in a Georgian mansion in Westchester, in 1911, with twelve students: the six children of Frank Vanderlip, a founder of the Federal Reserve, and some cousins and friends. The educator Helen Parkhurst, who trained under Montessori in Rome, went on to found the Dalton School, in New York City, where tuition now tops fifty-seven thousand dollars. And, although Montessori’s influence remains a salutary force in universal pre-K programs, it dims abruptly in public kindergarten, where Common Core standards squeeze out free play in favor of academic drills and assessments. (I dread the day that my son, currently enrolled in New York City’s U.P.K. program, is forced to resign as mayor of the block center.) Today, there are only a few hundred public Montessori schools in the U.S., and as Mira Debs, the executive director of Yale’s Education Studies program, has pointed out, they tend to follow a pattern, “becoming Whiter and wealthier with time.”
The arc of Montessori’s rise shared the same coördinates as that of many a visionary. As De Stefano shows, the disorienting effects of fame fostered in her a dependence on sycophancy, but also a paranoid distrust even of her closest acolytes. (When she broke with Samuel McClure, the publishing impresario who helped to promote her work in the U.S., a dismayed supporter observed, “She seems to me to lack the faculty of knowing who her friends are.”) Her ardent faith in her philosophy and methods begat their popularity, but also a fear that popularity would dilute and destroy them. The longevity of the cult of Montessori flows, in part, from her extreme efforts to protect her work from contamination: she maintained a personal monopoly on training and certifying teachers in her method, tightly governed the distribution of Montessori texts and tools, and even sought patents for her minor variations on objects as familiar as block letters or an abacus.
Of course, what she was attempting to control was a stake in her own intellectual property. Around the age of forty, as her schools continued to proliferate and demand for her training grew, Montessori resigned from her position at the University of Rome, hoping to focus entirely on her burgeoning educational movement. “From now on,” Kramer wrote, “she would support herself and her dependents on the proceeds of her training courses and the royalties from her books and didactic materials, a situation which lent her activities a certain commercial aspect they would not have had if she had remained a salaried academic propounding her ideas in an academic framework.” Financial incentives, in other words, made it more likely that Montessori’s project—a mating of altruism and scientific inquiry, born in asylums and slums—would become transactional and exclusive. Her growing celebrity, meanwhile, insured that she would drift out of the pedagogical laboratories of tenement schools and into the drawing rooms of her upper-crust benefactors. The Montessori method routed disproportionately to rich white kids because good things do, but also because she increasingly viewed her project as, in Kramer’s words, “a patentable business.” The method was not only something to be taught; it was something to be sold.
The author of the article blames Montessori for the exclusivity which became the hallmark of her educational pedagogy but I would like to think of it as a combination of both. The Montessori method is agnostic and that would not sit well with the Roman Catholic Church. The agnosticity and the pedagogy were too radical for the times. The Montessori Method became exclusive and expensive.
In the country, its pioneer practicioner, Dr. Preciosa Soliven, has not expanded beyond one main campus and four branches, all in Metro Manila. She has launched outreach programs several times but none have been successfully scaled, even if these targeted the lower income groups in specific cities in the National Capital Region.
In the past, the weakness of the Montessori method, based on my personal experience, is the lack of emphasis on the physical development of the child. While we had physical education, there was no formation of teams for inclusion in leagues or other sports aggrupations. Back in 2016 when I was asked to do an audit of the Montessori system, this was still evident. The emphasis was still on arts and culture. This explains why Rannie Raymundo, Lea Salonga, Aiza Sequerra and Pia Pilapil, are notable Montessori alumni.
It is hoping too much that someone at the Department of Education takes cognizance of this idea. But to my mind, what would be best for the Filipino child than to be imbued with learning at a very early age and the mindset required not only for the present but also the future. Continuing education is a necessity not only now but even before. Adapting to change is and should be a constant, for any individual.
The DepEd’s vast bureaucracy and the lax enforcement of teacher’s qualifications have been the primary reason why the public education sector has been producing mediocre students. Local city colleges and universities have been sprouting up as part of politician’s social development agenda but politics is prevalent in the institutions. What is worse is the laxity in the enforcement of CHED standards for both the faculty and the curriculum. There is also corruption with faculty members obtaining their post-graduate degrees from the very institution they work for with “concessions” i.e., a euphemism for favored treatment. The graduate schools are also notorious for malfeasance such as the “selling” of degrees, lock, stock and barrel; no need to attend classes with the course fully paid for up to the thesis/dissertation stage. The additional credential allows for the promotion of the faculy member to the next higher rank assuming there are plantiall positions available.
In the past two years, our worlds have been turned upside down by the pandemic. The pandemic is not over yet and we are again caught in the whirlwind of adverse geopolitical developments with a war in Europe and the continuing battle between the US, China and Russia for the title of the ruling hegemon. There is the possibility of a new world order rising from the present conflict.
It is interesting to note that Jeff Bezos is a product of the Montessori system. The article had this to say about one of the world’s richest men:
Contempt can also resemble philanthropy. In 2018, Jeff Bezos, the richest former Montessori pupil in the world, announced that he was putting two billion dollars into his Day One Fund, dedicated, in part, to establishing “a network of high-quality, full-scholarship Montessori-inspired preschools.” The project has opened five schools in Washington since 2020, with plans to expand into Florida and Texas this year. Bezos’s vow prompted some early-childhood education experts, including Mira Debs, of Yale, and Joel Ryan, the executive director of Washington’s Head Start program, to ask why a man possessed of two hundred billion dollars would elect to compete with existing, cash-strapped public preschool programs instead of simply giving them lots of money. The answer may be found on the Day One Fund Web site, which states, “The customer set this team of missionaries will serve is simple: children in underserved communities across the country.” There is a novel dystopian horror in this promise—it conjures an image of Jesuit-manqué preschool teachers walking barefoot and dehydrated across miles of Amazon warehouse floor in search of a hundred-piece counting board as, elsewhere, a child waits expectantly behind her Ring Video Doorbell, anxious to Rate Her Experience.
Day 1 Academies Fund
The Day 1 Academies Fund is a non-profit organization launching and operating a network of tuition-free, Montessori-inspired preschools in underserved communities. Directly operating the preschools creates an opportunity to learn, invent, and improve.
The Fund uses the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those is a genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer. “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” And lighting that fire early is a giant leg up for any child.
Our goal is to enable every child to become a creative leader, original thinker, and lifelong learner. Bezos Academy preschools offer year-round programming, five days a week, for children 3-5 years old. Admissions prioritizes low income families.
In selecting communities for our preschools, we consider a wide range of data, including income levels, participation in free and reduced-cost meal programs, and gaps in access to licensed childcare providers. We also look for local organizations and businesses that understand the needs of their community members, and are excited about the prospect of hosting a tuition-free, high-quality preschool in their neighborhood.
Families, communities, hosts, and school staff are essential partners in igniting the love of learning in every child. Thank you.
Perhaps the time of Maria Montessori and the Montessori method has finally come. Perhaps not either. But as a product of the Montessori method, I have always tried to see the good side of things rather than bad side of things. I do not think that this idea of mine will come to a fruition. Not all who are born are meant to be leaders. Those who make it to the top have done so because they have swum with the sharks and survived. This is just me putting the idea out there for posterity.
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