Miles posted this article called Against School, which I read this morning just after reading an opinion piece in the New York Times called Clueless in America.  The two articles make an interesting juxtaposition.  Clearly, something is wrong with our public education.  I wish I could say I had been surprised by either of them, but I was frustrated with public school long before I read these articles.  Why else would I have dropped out?

I went to a Montessori school from pre-school to fifth grade, and I loved it.  In the Against School article, the author talks about his grandfather slapping him for saying he was bored.  One teacher at our Montessori school, still one of the best teachers I have ever had, used to tell us “Only boring people get bored.”

When I entered public school in the sixth grade, I used to go home from school in the afternoon and cry.  I can remember having a conversation with another desperately bored Montessori graduate, that same year, about how the only possible purpose of school was to keep us occupied for seven hours a day so we wouldn’t cause too much trouble out in the world.

I heard some parents talking recently about their elementary-school age child who had recently stopped going to a Montessori school and started going to a public elementary school.  He, too, would come home from school and cry.  After a few weeks, his concerned mother asked him if school was any better, and he responded “I think I’m getting used to it.”

When I arrived at the conclusion of the “Against School” article, and even before then, I was thinking of Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy.

Scientific observation has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment. The task of the teacher becomes that of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity, spread over a specially prepared environment, and then refraining from obtrusive interference. Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. Doing so, they will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of a New Man who will not be a victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society. - Maria Montessori, Education for a New World

Let them manage themselves, indeed.

Posted in reading, teaching by rachel