The Promise (and Persistent Myths) of Montessori Education

Speaker 1 You know, we could erase all of those materials tomorrow, and the core of the scientific pedagogy would be the same, and we'd still be able to have developmentally appropriate environments because everything we're doing, we're basing off of our observation and our experimentation with young people and based on what we know and understand of their developmental needs.

Speaker 2 Hello and welcome to the Human Restoration Project Podcast. My name is Nick Uthington. Covington. Before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this episode is brought to you by our supporters, three of whom are Skyler Primm, Sybil Prieb, and Simeon Frang. Thank you so much for your ongoing support. Montessori schools are some of the few that wear their pedagogy on their signage. Cottontail Creek Montessori School, Montessori Children's House, Acapella Montessori, just to name a few of the dozen or so here in Iowa. And while the majority are private schools, there's a growing number of public Montessori schools and programs as well. I think because of these two factors, being largely private and one of the only public facing pedagogies around, you don't necessarily have to be acquainted with the Montessori method to develop an opinion about it. We recorded this in two sessions. One with Andrew Falstich, director of education at Oneness Family School and co founder of Developing Education, alongside Doctor. Aize Sabader, school founder, co founder of the Black Montessori Education Fund, and former executive director of Association Montessori International USA. And our second session was with Kelly Janelis, Montessori adolescent program director, math specialist, and co founder of Developing Education. And in this episode, you'll hear the journeys that brought them to Montessori education, what Montessori is and isn't, and what otherwise mainstream education can learn from the ideas and practices first developed by Doctor. Maria Montessori over one hundred years ago. I came into these conversations as more or less a blank slate and left an inspired wannabe Montessorian. So if you're like me, you'll wanna check out the extensive reading list attached to the show notes as well. Now before we get too much into what Montessori education is and how it's different from other approaches, I wanted to know each of our guests' stories. Who are they? What's their journey in education? And what drew them to this work in Montessori?

Speaker 3 I was, two ways into Montessori. One is the just the theoretical knowing of Montessori. I was a student, at a small historically black college in Atlanta, Morehouse College. And my, roommate who at the time was the class valedictorian, and so he's super smart of smart cats. And I would stay up wee hours in the morning studying. This guy is never studying. He's, like, just gallivanting around doing his thing. And maybe at 2AM in the morning, one day, just gotta wake this guy like, what are you doing that you don't and he's like getting straight a's and I'm burning the midnight oil. In fact, they even called me mister Neon because I'm keeping the light the neon light on wee hours in the morning studying. And he's like, oh, I'm a Montessori child. You know? And I'm like, oh, man. I need to find out more about this Montessori thing if it's got this guy just glancing, you know, breezing through with straight a's. And so that was my initial introduction. And so we actually went on to open up a school that was Montessori inspired because I was so impressed with some of the Montessori, you know, recollections that he had of Montessori. And so I read up as much as I could and tried to incorporate it in the school that we opened up. So that was just the theoretical. However, fast forward to I moved to DC in hopes of opening up another school and I'm on the way, got married, had children, you know, met a beautiful woman, had children, And my wife became a Montessori, educator herself, and our children were able to go to the Montessori school. And it was my child that really had me do the deep dive into Montessori because while my wife would be telling me while she was even going through training, wow, this Montessori is fascinating. This is revolutionary. This is the way to change the world. And I'd be like, oh, yes, dear. Yes, dear. Okay. Oh, yes, dear. And the day that they had the open house where the guide allows the child to show you around and introduce you to the work that they were doing. And at that time, I was actually helping to run a after school program working with middle school students. And my child was maybe six or seven in the my wife tell I for some reason, I thought it was in the primary, but she said, no. He was in the lower elementary. But he starts to show me around some of the work that he's doing, and it just blew me away that it was comparable to the work that some of the teenagers in the after school program that I was working in. That night, I went home to my wife and said, do you know that Montessori is a do you know that Montessori is a way to change your world? And so I was all in 10 toes down that, yes, Montessori is the pedagogy to to truly change the world. Really, you know, again, just based on some of the things my son was doing at a I mean, just briefly, I mean, he was, literally, he took an interest in Greco Roman culture and, you know, he started to talk about some of the things and he knew, like, more about Greco Roman culture than probably everybody in our house put together. And, you know, he was walking around with 400 page books on Greco Roman culture at, like, seven years old. I'm just like, this is mind blowing. And so, yeah, I was I was all the way in.

Speaker 1 I my story with Montessori, I like to say that I'm a lifelong Montessorian, because I entered a Montessori school at four years old and was there through sixth grade through the end of upper elementary. And that experience, I didn't really know it at the time, but it fundamentally changed my life. It changed, you know, who I am. It changed how I see the world. And after sixth grade, I went to a traditional New England prep school just one mile down the road from where I am right now. And at that school, in high school, I had the opportunity to travel to China as part of a service learning program, and we were working in rural schools in Yunnan province. And it was the first time, you know, my my experience was what it was. It was student centered and student directed, and I called my teachers by my first name and their first name, and they cared about what I was interested in and what my passions were and asked me what I thought and what I cared about. And, you know, I went to a totally different cultural context to a place that was, you know, hugely underprivileged in a lot of ways and realized that most of the world didn't get the kind of education that I had, and it was a huge huge awakening moment. And and from that from that moment on, my path had sort of been pivoted toward education, though I hadn't yet connected the dots to Montessori until a couple things happened. The first was in January 2020, I was in grad school, and I was part of a trip to Southern India, and it was a research trip. And we were studying microfinance and women's empowerment. It wasn't an education trip, but this professor said, Landry, I know that you're studying education, and so, you know, we'll spend a day visiting two schools. And the first was the this place called Nita University. It was the number one engineering college in the state of Karnataka in Southern India. We had this presentation by, the admissions director who stood up in front of us and said 75% of our graduates at the number one school of engineering are unemployable. Unemployable. They cannot engineer anything because they've only learned by rote learning. They don't know how to ask questions of their professors because that's culturally inappropriate. They don't know how to relate interpersonally. They have so many issues with, like, working together and collaboratively because they've only been taught to work as individuals that are competing against each other for grades. And she said, this is a huge problem, and we actually don't really know what to do about this. And so we left Nietzsche University thinking, oh my gosh, you know, this is like, what what do we even do about this? And then in the afternoon, we went to a Montessori school for, children, probably two or three all the way through high school for exclusively for children who were orphaned. So all of the children lived on campus. The adolescent students ran the operation of the entire program, the finances, the food, the facilities, all of the above. I saw young people with all of the odds stacked against them thriving. I saw them being empowered to make change in their community. Students were graduating from from high school at this Montessori school and were making real meaningful changes in their communities, positively benefiting these places where, you know, they'd come from. And it was this juxtaposition of this pillar of top tier Indian education on the whole fundamentally failing their young people versus this Montessori school which had no money, barely any resources, maybe only one or two staff that even had a Montessori credential because they couldn't afford to have any more. And this school, with all of these odds stacked against them, was able to create these amazing outcomes for these young people. And so that was the moment where I said, okay. Montessori is calling me back. You know, I have to come back to this pedagogy. And, you know, ever since then, I I think I think that Aizay is spot on, that this is a pedagogy that's not just about, it's not just about learning more things. It's not just about, you know, it's it's not just about making kids, you know, happy or feel good, though certainly that happens, but it's about how do we change the way human beings relate to one another, to our environment. It's about how do we actually listen to young people who are telling us the things about our world that we as adults have taken for granted or that we're doing that may be in so many ways fundamentally harmful to our existence as human beings, and how do we let that guide us to this future that Montessori described of a place of equitable interdependence? And every time I've been in a Montessori environment, I see the potential for our young people to lead us to that place, and that's what I saw in that school in India, that's what I've seen in Montessori schools across the world ever since. And so from four years old to to now, I've been hooked.

Speaker 4 I could probably fill the whole episode talking about this, so I'll do my best to to keep it short. But let's see. Way back in the beginning, I would I would start by saying that I myself am a product of a traditional public school system where I I think it is relevant to say that as a white female, of fell into the compliance of that system. I learned to follow the rules and do what I was told. And interestingly, as I learn more as an adult human who has experience with education, I realized that a lot of my creative problem solving and and just open not open mindedness, but that creative piece of me, I think, was really stifled by going through that that system. So but that's my way back background. Because I fell into those rules and thrived in that system, I decided that that's what I wanted to do with my life. I was gonna be a teacher. I was gonna you know, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to teach. Once I realized that numbers really worked for me, I was like, I'm gonna be a math teacher. That's what I always wanted. So that was the career I pursued. Straight out of college, got a job at a very large, low income public high school district, and very quickly realized that the student population there was not reflective of me and myself and that these these learners were gonna need something different than what worked for me. So after about five or six years in that system, I was frustrated with the system. Not the students themselves, but I felt stifled by all of the the politics, you know, the the administrators sitting behind a desk in an office, off campus, telling me what my students needed, swore off teaching, was gonna use my math degree to be an actuary or something else. Quit quit my job. At that time is when I had my firstborn, so it was kind of a natural break. I ended up being a stay at home mom for a few years, took some time to decide what what next steps are going to look like. And when my oldest, who's now 12, was two, a friend of mine said, hey. You've gotta check out this local Montessori school. And I was like, mana what? Like, I had never heard of it before then. So I checked it out, and I'm like, man, you know, the school starts at two and a half. And I'm like, 2.5? Like, I'm still a stay at home mom. I was pregnant with my second at the time. Like, I'm not ready to send her to school. But I check out the school, and I'm like, okay. Yeah. It seems like a pretty good spot, so we'll start her. But part of why I live where I live is because we're in a good public school district. As a public school teacher, when I bought the house, that was one of the things I considered. Right? So okay. We'll put her in early childhood there. But once we get to kindergarten public schools, well, then I learn about the multiyear cycle and that capstone year and how important it is to stay. So, okay. Fine. We'll stay through kindergarten. First grade, we're going to the public school district. I went to public school. She'll be just fine, just like me. Right? And then the the folks at that school needed some extra help in their elementary classroom as they were getting ready for, like, a works work expo thing. They knew that I had a teaching background, was a sit home mom. They invited me to just kind of be another, you know, adult person in the room for a few weeks. And being in that that early al first through third grade classroom, I was like, oh my gosh. I can't take my kid out of this system. Specifically, having the math background that I have, seeing all of the materials, how they build upon the foundation set in primary, just the ability to like, everything that we talked about being the dream when I was in public school, you know, freedom to move, like, individualization, all of those things were just everywhere and built in. And I was like, oh, man. I guess we have to stay. And right around that same time, their adolescent program was looking for a math specialist. And I was like, well, darn. I guess this is probably the place for me. And so we kept my kid there. I started in the, 12 through 15, so seventh, eighth, and ninth grade adolescent program as a math specialist. That was about eight years ago. And then over time, my role has grown. Now I'm the director of the program. My kids are nine and 12 and still attending there, so my oldest is going to be in the adolescent program with me next year. I've never regretted the decision once. I see the difference in the young people that get to go through an education system that actively teaches them how to be kind and decent humans and be a member of community and society and comparing that with folks who don't have that same experience, I I wouldn't change a thing. So it's interesting to see I would say that starting my career, I was very focused on the typical outcomes. Like, you have to learn these math topics. You have to get these grades. You have to get these scores. And now, you know, eight plus years later, I'm I'm fully flipped and, like, none of those things actually matter.

Speaker 2 I also wanted to know how do Aizi, Andrew, and Kelly describe Montessori education for people who see the sign outside the school but have no idea what it stands for? And what are some of the misconceptions people have about Montessori education?

Speaker 1 The 30,000 foot answer is, I mean, kind kind of what I said, not to repeat myself, but it it is about helping young people become a, who they were meant to be so that our world can move to a place of peace. And Montessori writes about peace education, and what she means by peace is not so she has this really great book, Education and Peace. If you haven't read it and you're listening, I I highly recommend you do. And she, although many years earlier, has the same sort of idea that, Martin Luther King junior writes in his letter from a Birmingham jail, this idea of a, you know, a positive peace meeting the presence of justice versus a negative peace, which is just the absence of conflict. And she really saw education as this way to move us toward this idea of positive peace, toward this meaningful presence of justice in society. You know? And but then I think, you know, to get maybe more granular, what a monastery education means is that every young person in the environment gets fundamentally treated with dignity, that their that what they need individually and collectively is considered and is meaningfully provided. And in Montessori, we don't ask the question, you know, what do I think a child of this age should be doing? We ask, who is this young person in front of me based on their developmental needs, based on my observations? How can I prepare an environment that best fits their needs? And that's why I think Montessori is also a really powerful tool for inclusion because we're not saying, how do we fit every child into a box? We're saying, how do we prepare the environment to serve every child? And we're always saying, change the environment, not the child. So if the child is not thriving in a Montessori program, then the environment must change to support that child. Now sometimes that doesn't happen, certainly, but, you know, that that really that to me from the macro to the micro, it's about it's it's about being in that emergent space of how do we provide the best thing for this young person, whatever it is that they might need at any given moment, and trust that when we provide that, development will occur. So we don't do it say, oh, well, they have to master standard, you know, five point four point three by next week, so we're gonna give them this. We say, what is the thing they need to be a thriving person? And when we do that and every time I've seen it done, you know, whether it's an early childhood all the way through high school, all of those other pieces fall into place so easily because we've focused on the whole person first.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No. I I definitely appreciate what Andrew has, shared. And what I like to do in explaining Montessori so you could get real technical, I just try and come at it simply by saying from my vantage point, the easiest definition of Montessori education is common sense education. It's it's common sense in that you first are you know, one of the mantras within Montessori is follow the child, and you are allowing the child to be in the driver's seat of their learning process. And so you allow the child to follow the things that interest them, and so thereby, you don't have to twist their arm for them to learn five point four point three. You know, they you don't have to twist their arm to say, well, now this is, you know, March and we should be covering algebra, and so you have to study chapters two or three. No. The child is interested in the thing. So, again, my son, seven years old, was interested in Greco Roman culture, and he's soaking up as much Greco Roman culture as he you know, so the teacher didn't have to force him to he was the one saying, well, give me more and walking around with 400 page books of Greco Roman culture. And so, you know, that you are following allowing the child to follow their interest, that's common sense. It's common sense to allow children to learn in a social manner and that you place children in mixed age groups, then they're able to connect with students who are older, some students who may be younger, and you almost have, what I like to call the positive peer pressure. Right? And so you have sometimes the older students helping to guide the younger students in things that they might be interested in learning because they see the older students. And so that's common sense to allow the natural developmental process so that students will, be able to to to blossom and to be able to move and talk and have fun in the learning environment. That's common sense. I mean, children want to be children. They want to be able to move. They want to be able to, you know, laugh and, you know, really enjoy themselves. And that Montessori allows for this natural human development and for the child to follow their curiosity. And as Andrew said, an environment that then looks to nurture that, it seems to me pretty common sense education. And so that would be my simple you know, of course, you could get super technical, but that's just the simple of it for me.

Speaker 1 To underscore the piece that it's based in human development, It's not based on what we think development is. It's based on what we know development is, you know, and I think that sometimes we you know, when when you look at how conventional education is structured, you see a linear path of growth. In first grade, you learn this. In second grade, you learn this. In third grade, you learn this. That's not how development happens. And so when we base it on human development, that like, that's where the power I I think of it is. We call it a scientific pedagogy because at its best, it's not about the materials. Sometimes people think, well, Montessori is about the pink tower or the, you know, the rods or whatever. And, those materials are important, but it you know, we could erase all of those materials tomorrow, and the core of the scientific pedagogy would be the same, and we'd still be able have developmentally appropriate environments because everything we're doing, we're basing off of our observation and our experimentation with young people and based on what we know and understand of their developmental needs. And I think that's, like, that that to me is the point where, you know, I think that there's a lot and I've said this. I think that there's a lot that, you know, Montessori and progressive education can learn from each other. I think that's Montessori's core fundamental insight is that, you know, we spend a lot of time guessing what we think young people need. But if we're just basing it off of their development and our observations of them, there's a lot less guesswork to go on there.

Speaker 4 Well, I think that the biggest misconception is that I think most folks have heard the the quote, follow the child. And I think many people misinterpret that as give the child freedom to do whatever they want, and the the adult does not exist. Interestingly, a lesser known Montessori quote that I'm not gonna get exactly right, but it's along the lines of, you know, the teacher can tell that that their classroom is functioning well when the children behave as though the adult is not there. And and and, like, in in a way that the adult would expect, right, so that the children are engaged in purposeful work and the teacher can just step back and observe. And and it's not this wild, crazy, like, children are running around doing whatever they want. So even as we're talking about math, I'm thinking, man, I could see folks who are not familiar listening to this and and still not seeing the vision that I have in my mind of what it looks like. So so, like, I guess I would say that all of the work specifically, I'm gonna talk specifically about adolescence. So, again, while everything in Montessori is mixed age, it's usually three year chunks. It it tends to differ for adolescent programs because having students stay through ninth grade if you don't go all the way through twelfth grade is tricky. Right? Folks wanna start high school when high school starts. So I feel like I'm very fortunate. I I don't know of many other programs that have the 12 through 15 altogether. So that's that's really great to have. But excuse me. Sorry. The concept is students are still learning. Students are being offered different different lessons and and topics within the disciplines. It's just done in a way that allows them to connect more fully with the work. So most often, you would give what's what's called, like, a sensorial or an experiential invitation to the work. So coming up this next quarter in my own program, our my students are going to be doing a project related to a pollinator garden. We were offered an opportunity to start up a pollinator garden on campus. Okay. So within that, I have planned an opportunity for us to go to a local arboretum and look at what their pollinator garden looks like and talk to some experts and sort of spark some interest. And then there are so many branches off that students can choose to kind of deep dive their their their work on, whether it's what is a pollinator? Oh, I wanna study just bees. Oh, I wanna learn about the life cycle of a butterfly. What are the plants that pollinators like? What why are why are pollinators important? Why are we talking about this? What do we need to do to the soil on our campus to get it ready to receive these plants? Are we planting seeds? Are we starting them inside? So so it's this whole branch, but it begins from them going and seeing something and talking to people outside of the walls of the school and then connecting that invitation with their personal interest. So I'm not saying, hey. Do it study whatever you want. It's here's here's the the the umbrella. Here's the capsule that we're all going to be working within, and now follow your passion within that. And then I, as the practitioner, need to be responsive to, oh, this kid is wanting to study this thing, so I need to prepare some lessons that can support that work. I need to support that student in finding their own resources, etcetera, etcetera. Also within that, I'm looking for connections to history, connections to math. Obviously, a a garden in pollinators is very science heavy, so it's going to be easy to find connections to that. Last quarter, my students studied US government, and we took a trip to our state capital. And I found you know? So that's a very history humanities heavy thing. Well, we had students develop hypotheses about how they think the government actually works compared to what official documents say it's supposed to do. So now they're getting a lesson in science about developing and testing hypotheses. Even though they're not using microscopes or slides or anything like that. We're still integrating how science looks through that lens. I gave them lessons on how the unemployment rate is calculated, and we looked at some graphs and charts and data related to the age of members of congress. And so so it's they're getting all of these pieces. They're they're reading graphs. They're developing hypotheses. They're learning history. They're learning government, but it's done in a way that is both interconnected and relates to to their interest. They have some type of an offering where they can live and experience the thing. It's never just on paper.

Speaker 2 For Kelly, part of becoming grappling with the baggage of mainstream schooling, particularly around math education. And for all of my preconceptions about the Montessori method being primarily concerned with little kids on the rug playing with wooden blocks, what does Montessori education look like with otherwise traditional academic content for adolescents, especially in mathematics?

Speaker 4 I would say that playing with blocks is actually a really good way to put it.

Speaker 2 A 100%.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean so so first, I think the root of this is removing the adult in the room as the sage on the stage and and breaking down this notion that the adult is the holder of all knowledge and the giver of all knowledge and that children, adolescents, students are these empty vessels that are just passively waiting to be filled from the adult. So in a Montessori classroom, math specifically is taught concretely. Right? So there's this idea of beginning with a concrete experience and then moving eventually into abstraction. So and and this is really what clicked for me because as a math teacher, again, in a traditional public high school setting, I remember trying to explain some high school level math concepts and and, like, grabbing markers or erasers or whatever whatever objects in the room I could to try to show students concretely, this is what I mean, even something like division. Like, this is what division is. You have I literally have six things, and I'm dividing them into two piles. Like, it's not Yes.

Speaker 2 My my experience with math, this was, like, in the nineties. Right? But was with those number cube block things. Yeah. Right? Like in like, here's a cube of a 110 by 10, and here's a line of 10, and then and we would make all the different things and do, I don't know, areas and so we could visualize concretely with the blocks what multiplying five by five looks like, right, with those cubes. That that I just again, another revelation is like that is starting in the concrete and moving more to the abstract than attaching, you know, number theory and stuff to those ideas. Oh my gosh. Exactly. And Montessori, so

Speaker 4 the she has so many great books. Interestingly, the first Montessori book that I was offered to read was her book called Psychogeometry, which sounds a little crazy. It's not. We I I suppose this is a good opportunity to sidestep. I'm not sure if Andrew Aizay talked about the idea of a psychodiscipline, which is a very Montessori concept, which is the idea of offering these disciplines, math, science, language, history, humanities, but through a lens that is sensitive to the learner's time, space, and place, where they are in their mindset, what they're ready for, what is going to be meaningful to them. So you're not just dumping the subject, but you're doing it through a way that allows the learner to connect with the subject and and the way that the subjects are also intertwined. So in in psychogeometry, geometry through a psychic lens, I realized the the how many Montessori materials exist. So, of course, I'm working with adolescents. I think most people think of Montessori first through early childhood, right, where they have all of the blocks, they have all of those things. And so I knew some of the materials, but not all of them, and and she outlines them in this book. And the precision and the way that they all overlap with each other is taking your idea of, like, the blocks that you put together to the stick of 10 and the square and the cube and just, like, exploding it. So all of her math materials are all it's all based in the metric system. Everything is one centimeter to up to 10 centimeters. She has materials called the metal insets that are flat that students will trace. Those are the same dimensions as, like, the pink tower that you can build up, that are the same dimensions as the broad stair that you can build out. That so all of these so students, as they're you know, these are learners age, like, two or three to six are working with these materials and really like, in addition to seeing concretely what's happening, they really actually kind of get this ingrained sense of what quantities feel like. So and and one of them, the the the number rods is the the longest one is one meter long, and the students are supposed to carry it end to end. And part of the reason was so that they would grow up knowing, like, here is a meter and and could estimate. So that's what I would say is that from the earliest age, students are taught that math is not some theoretical concept. It's not something that you're imagining. You've got bead bars. You've got, you know, squares and cubes of kinda like what you're saying, the little blocks except they're beads. There are different colors that that help you to see the way that they're related across different materials and across different concepts. And all the way up through, I I use some Montessori materials with my ninth grade students. You know, we use Montessori didn't develop specific materials for adolescent learners, but we practitioners have taken the elementary materials and sort of expanded it. So when I'm teaching my students how to factor polynomials by completing the square, we are using materials where they're literally completing a square. One thing that I appreciate about a Montessori classroom, even starting as young as primary, I can hear my own children's primary teacher saying that the beauty of having a more open schedule and having the gift of time is that when a student is wholly immersed in meaningful purposeful work, there's not a bell that pulls them out of it and says, like, okay. I know that you're in the middle of counting the the thousand chain, you know, or or doing whatever the case may be, but now it's time to read. Yeah. We're done thinking about math. We have to go think about history now, and then we have to go run the mile. Right. Right. Exactly. Just I think about how cognitively

Speaker 2 draining all of that task switching was for me as a teacher Yeah. And, like, contributing to eventually my burnout and and leaving classroom teaching. And I just think, like, kids experience that same thing every single day. Like, no wonder they're not bought in and invested. They know that the bell's gonna ring Right. Right as they're about to get started with something. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. A 100%. So

Speaker 4 so I'll I'll share what the trajectory of what my specific adolescent program schedule has looked like, but this is one area where I think that different programs vary quite a bit. When I first started, our our schedule was pretty much open. It was just like, you've got the day. Here are the things that you need to get done. Get them done. I do think that over time, young people's capacity for that has changed. And at the risk of getting on to a whole other topic, certainly, in the wake of COVID. I've I've noticed that that the young people I'm working with need a little bit more structure than that. So, yeah, so our day is broken up into still pretty big blocks. So so at the younger ages in primary and in elementary, there is an expectation that students have a three hour is it three? I think it's three. Three hour. No. No. I'm second guessing myself. Block of work time where they are uninterrupted. They have that chunk of time to move between work, to to immerse themselves in work. They could read for ten minutes, decide they're not into it, put it away. They could get out some writing. They could get out some math work. They could whatever the case may be. So, again, at the adolescent level, it's it's a little bit different, and this is part of the conversation that that we've been having recently. So my students, I've still set aside the first I think it's more like two to two and a half hours of our day as time where they are working on work that is not on a computer. So that that is their one criteria. Usually, that means that they're focused on either math work or language work. Language work could be working on a paper that they're writing, could be writing a journal, could be reading something, either that they've been assigned or for leisure. In my program, they have lots of different math opportunities. We have a math seminar. The students also have a seminar that's based on a piece of literature. So so the morning two and a half hours is just a chunk of time where you're working on whatever you need to work on. We actually I I skipped over. We start our morning with about a fifteen to twenty minute community meeting. So as soon as our day starts, a student leads the meeting where we review kind of the week that we're in, what are due dates. So, yes, the students do have dates when assignments are due. What a lot of them are not like, here's the lesson that we learned today. Here's the homework for that lesson today. It's due tomorrow because tomorrow, we're gonna have another lesson on a different topic, and you'll have a new assignment. It's it's usually weekly or or longer of these due dates. So but everybody gets on the same page about what work is coming due. Anything that we have going on specifically that day. We do spend a fair amount of time off campus. What are what are things that we need to expect about the day? And then at the end of that morning meeting, my students make themselves a checklist or a to do list for the day. What are the things that I need to prioritize throughout the day? And then it's up to them to fit it in when and where it works for them. After that two and a half hours, they've got another ninety minutes. Is this math mathing? I don't know. It's it's gonna be close enough. Nobody's scrutinizing my schedule, where they have an opportunity to be working on a Chromebook. So and, again, this is very it's it's interesting to me to juxtapose a traditional system where I think almost everything is on a Chromebook, at least the local schools. I don't know if this is how it is by you, Nick, but by me, everything is one to one all the time. I've had students who transfer out of my program to the local public high school for tenth through twelfth grade, and they're like, they gave me the paper assignment, but it's also online. And I don't know if I'm supposed to turn in the paper or if I submit it online, so I just did both things. And it's a whole, like, wild one to one tech world out there. So so my students have about an hour to an hour and a half Monday through Thursday when they can be using a Chromebook, and it is specifically for typing final drafts of papers. So we expect them to be handwriting notes. They handwrite journals. They do a lot of handwritten work. But if they're doing a research paper or something more formal, we ask them to type it. We do let them use some online sources for research, but we also expect a certain number of printed sources that we'll get from the library. And during that time, when they have access to their Chromebooks, we have a small group of students who is cooking lunch for our whole community. So every day, our group of about 15, we have three students who go plan a meal every day, cook lunch. And then the afternoon in my program, again, is another block of what is it? Maybe another hour and a half ish. So so while I'm skipping over the important part, we have community lunch. We all sit together, eat the lunch that students prepared for us for that day. After lunch, my students clean up the environment. They clean up everything that was used in the kitchen. They mop. They sweep. They dust. Water the plants. We keep chickens and bees. They go out and take care of the animals. After that, my 12 to 15 year olds have recess every day. They go outside. They have thirty minutes of unstructured outdoor time to go and be young people. And then after all of that, our afternoon chunk of time is about an hour and a half, and that varies by day. So we have one day where we're focused on community work, meaning, bigger work related to our gardens that we're keeping our chickens. If we, our students sell things, you know, what what they need to be doing for production and exchange, we call it. We have a day where an expert comes and does creative expression lessons, whether that's creative writing or it's art or things like that. We have one day where it's physical expression, so we we spend an extra chunk of time learning a team sport or dance or something like that, and then a couple days where they've gotten more open work time in the afternoon. So I would say that in the adolescent program, we have more structure than in some of the other levels of Montessori, but it still is intentionally big chunks of time where students need to decide and prioritize for themselves, like, what work they're doing and and when.

Speaker 2 All of this begins to reveal the elephant in the room. With its one hundred years of practice and development and its inroads into public school districts around the country, why does the predominant mainstream education model look the way it does and the Montessori model remains on the outside looking in?

Speaker 3 If you go back in the history of education, there are competing, philosophies on education, and I think you see it very starkly when you look at the American educational system. So for if you even look, you know, within capitalism, you see that they have a assembly line, you know, factory model, that this is how we're gonna build these cars, you know. So we have this station, this happens at this time, then go down the assembly line, then that happens there. And, there was a push for a factory model of education that, said you have the children in rows, you have the bell that rings at, you know, 08:00, and then they move at 09:00 to the next thing. And so this is what they call the factory model of education that was devised, and I think it's based on the Prussian educational, system that, you know, they felt would be really good to funnel a bunch of children in and be able to keep them in organized, you know, manner and then have the sage on stage to direct what they're gonna be doing. And you have the tabula rasa, and you just then pour into this blank slate, you know. And so, that factory model of education then comes into this human development scientific pedagogy that, you know, has been described with Montessori. And then, you know, here in The US, many folk doubt it and cast aspersions on Montessori's more human developmental following the child approach in favor of the factory model. And I I would dare say that, you know, and so while for many of the elite, they saw this human developmental approach and adopted it for many of their, children, but for the masses of people, it's easy to funnel them through this factory model. And I think that, you know, even within many, university settings and many traditional educators, they thought that the factory model, at least from my that's my read of it, and I think that's why Montessori didn't get, so so so much, made make so much progress.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, when you look at Montessori's writings, it's really interesting that, you know, over the course of her life, obviously, her ideas are evolving. She's doing more experiments. She's working with more young people. She's refining the method. And the through line of it all is she's seeing how powerful this can be to fundamentally change the status quo. There's a moment in her life in you know, when she's in Italy and she gets this proposal from Mussolini to make all of Italian schools Montessori schools if they basically kowtow to the fascist state. And she thinks about this idea and ultimately rejects this proposal, and as a result, is exiled in India for seven years, essentially on house arrest for the majority of that time because of her stand against fascism. But, you know, as she's living through World War two and working with these young people and seeing the she's seeing the powerful insights of this work, and she's realizing that not enough people are listening. And you can see the stakes in her writing and her speaking increase throughout her lifetime and get, you know, towards the end of her life almost quite hyperbolic because she is deeply concerned. I've got a actually, I've got a quote right here that I think is really illuminating. She writes, there are only two paths before us. We must either prove worthy of our great achievements or die as a result of them. And she really believed that humanity has made such progress scientifically, but has not made what she called the spiritual or inner capacities, the moral and ethical dispositions to use those great achievements in a way that benefits humanity versus a way that would destroy humanity. And, you know, I think to to really underscore what I use a said is that the status quo doesn't benefit from Montessori kids who question the status quo. There is power tied up with our education system, which is primarily social reproduction. You know, we we certainly see that in in The United States, and that power has a vested interest in not having people question that power, you know, which is precisely why, you know, I I think Isaiah is exactly right that we see Montessori schools in these small affluent pockets. And even then, you know, I I did a podcast episode with a friend of mine, Justin Tosco, and he said, you know, we really need to stop celebrating the Montessori graduates like Jeff Bezos and the Google founders. And because that that's actually not the vision that Montessori described. She's, you know, rolling over in her right now thinking that those are the models because those are people who aren't breaking the status quo. They are the status quo. They're the ones who are taking advantage of people with their massive wealth and power. You know, a true Montessori education does the opposite. Montessori wrote about the creation of this new human. When human beings would go through a developmentally appropriate education, they would become this new human. To paraphrase what she wrote about it, the new human would not be the victim of events, but would have the clarity of vision to transform the future of human society. That's what she saw as the outcome. And so I think, you know, for for that reason alone, those who are in power will know, the revolution won't be funded. Like, they'll never make all Montessori schools because then they'll lose their power. I mean, even when I was in grad school, and at the time I went to to UPenn Graduate School of Education, it was the number one graduate school of education in The US. And and I say that because Montessori came up a couple times. Once in my curriculum and pedagogy class, and we talked about it for five minutes, I was like, wait. Can we can we go back? I just come back from India at the time. I was like, this is actually a really powerful scientific method, and my professor was like, oh, no. That's like a fringe thing. We don't need to talk about that. And then this is during the pandemic. I'm writing a policy brief. It was part of our capstone, and my proposal was I've done a lot of work in in West Philadelphia public schools and seen how, you know but talk about schools that actively harm young people. Like, I mean, it was it was horrific what what I saw in those settings. And so my proposal was, okay, everybody's at home. This whole virtual thing isn't working. Take this time during COVID and transition all Philadelphia public schools to Montessori schools. K through twelfth grade, just like go, you know, go the full thing. And my professor, different professor, instead of critically engaging with that idea was like, that's just a preschool method. Write about something serious. And it's this denial of you know, there's a rejection of anything that's not the norm. Not to bash on Penn, but I think, you know, and they actually just called me for money and I said, well, wouldn't you change your stance? I'll be happy to donate as an alumni. I was at an event this past May and they're they're they were talking about equity in education, which I think is hugely important. But their their fundamental premise was we just need to give more kids what everybody else already has in the conventional system. But the conventional system actively harms most kids. You know, I just brought adolescents from my Montessori high school down to Capitol Hill as part of an advocacy day with the Montessori public policy initiative. These were all young people that had been in conventional schooling and came to us from Montessori high school, you know, at some point during their high school career, and they were able to articulate really clearly, you know, the differences between this conventional schooling where their health and well-being were not centered, where they were seen as a number, where their issues weren't meaningfully addressed, where them giving feedback was seen as divisive and disrespectful versus their experience at a Montessori high school where their health and well-being was prioritized, where they were seen and heard as full people, where where they were thriving and having an experience that they didn't even think was possible. You know? And so I think that there's this denial of, well, there's only one way we can do education, and it's too hard to do any anything else because there's there's vested interest in power. And, you know, then the debate is, so do we have conventional public schools or do we have the vulture capitalists who have these, you know, private schools and whatever and and sort of this this battle or same thing with the public and charter. I think we're having the wrong debate. I think we've seeded the pedagogy debate, and we need to reopen that up because it doesn't matter if it's a public school, if it's a charter school, if it's an independent school. If it's using top down authoritarian pedagogy that only benefits the powerful, that itself needs to be fundamentally questioned, and that's what I think Montessori could really add to to the national and international debate.

Speaker 2 For better or worse, billionaire elites like Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg have famously either attended or sent their kids to Montessori schools. But it seems counter to Maria Montessori's message of education for peace to have her pedagogy co opted solely for the children of rich white people. So who is Montessori for exactly? Doctor Sabater's work on Montessori for black people and the Black Montessori Education Fund helps us understand how Montessori is for everyone and the opportunities and challenges of expanding the reach of Montessori education.

Speaker 3 Yeah. No. I think that would be probably one of my number one and maybe number two myths to bust is that Montessori isn't just for, you know, upper class, you know, white students. And for me, as I observed in Montessori environments, I definitely would see, maybe a good percentage of individuals that fit that bill. However, as I saw students socializing and having fun in the learning experience and allowed to move freely and allowed to, you know, just have joy in the learning process, I realized that all children, who, you know, might be interested in these type of, systems should be afforded the opportunity. And it was right after I'm, coming out of grad school with my, you know, doctoral degree, and so I have the highfalutin degree. I had some connections with folk in different places, and we had the, assassination of brother George Floyd. And I remember going, you know, with my, son, Isaiah the second, to one of the Black Lives Matter, rallies in DC, and the pain of the black community was palpable. And so it it it really was like one of those moments. You know, Aizay, you you have this highfalutin degree, you have some connections. And so is there something you can help to bring to your community to to shift the pain into, possibility? How to move from this pain to to some to some healing, and it was, well, you know, I have some some some agency. Let me go ahead and try to bring this liberatory educational construct as my way to bring some healing, bring some therapy, bring some possibility to my community. And it was there that I, you know, said I'm gonna try and, you know, shout from rooftops. I'm a beat the drums. I'm a, you know, be shouting at the top of my lungs that we need to engage more folk in the black community into this, you know, really holistic therapeutic, liberatory educational, construct. And so, you know, from that point in 2020, we began to provide resources so that, you know, black adults who wanna get a Montessori credential that they might be you know, we put some skin in the game, put, you know, some funds on the table for folk, for a family who might not have a a Montessori public charter or public option to put some funds on the table for them to be able to send their child to a Montessori school for, you know, black Montessori leaders who wanna even engage in developing their own black Montessori school, putting some funds on the table or expand an existing, you know, enterprise. We, you know, we don't pay at all, but we do put a little, grease the wheels just a little to try and help further folk along the way. And then even to allow folk to have some resources if they wanna study the lived experience of black folk in Montessori. And so we have, you know, buckets of funds and have really been trying to speak to, as many, interested black communities, black churches, black, you know, organizations encouraging them because many folk within education do just follow the status quo. They just look at oftentimes traditional education, and Montessori is maybe a footnote if if even a paragraph in somebody's textbook that they really, you know, just as Andrew just, you know, alluded to, they really don't give it serious thought and don't look at the breadth of how Montessori really engages in this human developmental process to allow students to to blossom. And so I said, wanna bring that to more, children, more adults in my community and, you know, have been doing that for, you know, five years now. And, yeah, we you know, and it's funny when we went to, talking to some of the, prominent historically black colleges, the dean over at Howard University, Dean Williams, you know, pulled me aside and said, he said, do you think there really will be a lot of black folk that might be interested in this Montessori approach? And we said, okay, Dean. We're gonna do an event at your place and let you see, and it was standing room only. And, you know, again, even when we opened up our fund and said, you know, and I and I I just gotta tell this quick story. So when we opened a fund, we said we were gonna give away, maybe $10,000. I think we said we were gonna give away. And we did this event. We worked with, this org this group of folk who wanted to celebrate doctor Montessori's. I think what was it? A hundred hundred. Was it I forget which anniversary it was. And we're gonna do this must have been Montessori one fifty. So maybe a hundred and fiftieth. And is that right? Maybe, don't quote me on the exact, you know, what It's a long it's a lot of years. It's a lot of years. It's a lot of years. And we, you know, broadcast that the Black Montessori Education Fund is gonna be supporting folk, and we got requests of over a million dollars. And so we laughed at ourselves that we were gonna try and give away 10,000 with a million dollars in request. And so we had to you know, we during that event, we raised maybe, like, 25,000. So we wound up giving away everything we raised because we just had so much demand for more black individuals being engaged in this, you know, liberatory educational pedagogy.

Speaker 2 That that is so incredible. And if I could follow-up, like, as you're shouting from the rooftops, right, speaking in black communities, do you run into the same set of stereotypes that we've been talking about about the exclusivity, the whiteness? And I wonder, do you get the same kind of conversion stories as your own?

Speaker 3 So it's interesting. In some black communities that know something of Montessori, there is a receptiveness, because they have either seen Montessori in practice or they had some progressive parents who wanted to put them in Montessori because they particularly in the, primary, you know, so they had three, fours, and fives before it's time to go to a public school, a traditional public school. And so they might have had some Montessori experience, and they are aware of the benefits of Montessori. But then I also have run into many who feel that Montessori is just a free for all and that the students are able to do anything and it's not structured. And so I don't wanna you know, I want my child to really be disciplined, and I want my child to be able to interact with, you know, the the powers that be. And so I don't want them just in an unstructured thing doing you know, running around. And so have to help people to understand well, actually, Montessori is structured. In fact, some might say it's even more structured than you know? And so, you know, helping to to shatter myths is definitely something that has to be done in many in many and then others, they just don't know you know, they've heard of Montessori, but they've never really explored it much.

Speaker 2 If you're like me leaving this exploration of Montessori education, wanting to learn so much more, Aize, Andrew, and Kelly have you covered. So where do they recommend we go from here?

Speaker 1 The one Montessori text, in addition to what what I use a has shared, because I think they're all, you know, the greatest hits, is citizen of the world, which is actually a collection of her writings, which is sort of like a like, that's what I give to people as, like, as an introduction because it's a nice it's a nice selection without getting too in the weeds. You know, Montessori is very verbose, and she's she sometimes she goes on tangents, so this way and that way, and and so there's, but that's I think that's a really great place to start. And there's also been some books written recently by other folks. So there's I think it's the monastery potential by Paula Lillard Preshlak, which is, you know, sort of a nice overview for people who are really new. There's also, diverse families, desirable schools, which is about monastery in an era of school choice written by Mira Debs maybe six or seven years ago now. Think that's that's quite that's that's a pre COVID book or just pre COVID book now, which is wild. You know? And and that that book also has a lot of fascinating history of Montessori in The US, particularly Montessori in black communities, which is a history we don't hear about. And, of course, this is I'll I'll do a shameless plug for both Aize and Aize has a a radio show, and it's not exclusively about Montessori, but he talks about it all the time. And and I talk about Montessori all the time on on my podcast, breaking the paradigm as well.

Speaker 3 So I would say there are some really groundbreaking works, recently. One is, Erica Moretti put out one of the best weapons for peace, talking about using Montessori as, an effort towards peace. And now I I gotta just go off on a tangent. So Montessori is known as focusing on peace. However, this would be a challenge to Montessorians who might be listening that in this time where we see wars and rumors of war and more wars happening than we even are counting properly. How many are actually engaging their young people in their environment and what does peace look like in the time of war and how do we, in person to person ways, but then even raise our voice to really advocate for peace? And so I think theoretically many talk about it, but to be able to see it in action, I think is something that I, you know, again, I I gotta go off on a tangent to to to just hit that. I also would direct folk to, one of the other I mean, definitely for us who, you know, went through the adolescent training, Manosori's work on, the child and adolescents is definitely, you know, hit some some key points there. The other book that I wanted and this is for, folk who have young ones at home, and it's a series by Simone Davies, and Jennifer Uzadiqui. It's the Montessori child series. And so they have followed almost the different planes. Right? The, you know, students along the developmental process. And so, yeah, the Montessori child, I would direct folk to, Simone Davies and, Jennifer, Uzadiqui. So that's a whole little series. And and mine is a, FM radio show on WPFW, eighty nine point three in the nation's capital called hashtag you must learn and comes on most Thursdays, 6PM. And if you wanted to go to the archives, go to wpfwfm.org. And in the archives, you could just search hashtag you must learn, and you will see some of the past editions. And, yeah, I'm regularly bringing on Montessori in to help broaden people's, horizon and broaden their awareness to this the power of the Montessori approach. And, I would direct folk to the Black Montessori Education Fund, to you know, we did a our first conference, last year where we plan to get a 100 persons and we didn't get a 100 persons. We had over 200 and, you know, 20 persons come to this conference. We were pulling our hair all like, okay. Where are we gonna put all these people? So it was a good issue. This year, we're doing a retreat over the Juneteenth weekend, this summer. And so if folk wanna check out some of the work, go to blackmontessori.org. Again, that's blackmontessori.org. And again, thank you so much for this opportunity to be able to share, you know, something that is definitely passionate, in my heart.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm gonna go down the Montessori list. Of course, there are there are many things from non Montessorians. If you're gonna read one book by doctor Montessori, I would say that it should be from childhood to adolescence. That interestingly, it's the appendices of that book, appendix a and appendix b, that adolescent practitioners go to as the the writings from doctor Montessori about what an adolescent program could look like. But as the title implies, she does talk about from childhood through adolescence. Another one that I would say by doctor Manasuri is education and peace. And it sounds like you maybe hit on this with Andrew and Aize, but doctor especially given the times in which we live, which unfortunately are seeming not that dissimilar from the times in which doctor Montessori lived. Funny how that works. In that book, she talks about the idea that peace is not just the time and space between wars, but, like, as long as one group of people is being dominated by another group of people, then we're not achieving peace, which I think is a really thought provoking idea. And, again, as the name implies, she talks about how the way that we educate young people is the only way to work toward true human solidarity and and worldwide peace.

Speaker 2 Thank you again for listening to our podcast at Human Restoration Project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to start making change. If you enjoyed listening, please consider leaving us a review on your favorite podcast player. Plus, find a whole host of free resources, writings, and other podcasts, all for free on our website, humanrestorationproject.org. Thank you.