From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun May 19 2002 - 17:56:34 MDT
Olga: "Listen to their own drummer..." ???
1: Anyone can call their school Montessori. There are
plenty of German Kindergartens here in Orange County
using Montessori equipment and calling themselves
Montessori. They are not.
2: The children in a real Montessori school have more
freedom than in just about any other environment.
They have the absolute right to work on whatever
project - or no project - that they choose, so long as
they are not destroying the environment. This means
in practice that a director has to check them out on
the didactic material the very first time they use any
particular piece of it. If they start destroying it,
it will be taken away and saved until they are ready
to use it non=destructively. Altho there are group
learning activities - songs, story telling, group
games, etc. - no one is forced to join in. And, if a
child is working - and they use the term "working"
specifically, not "playing" - with a piece of
equipment or reading or whatever, NOONE - and that
means even a director, has the right to join in or
interfere without explicit consent. The entire focus
of the Montessori social environment is upon
individualism and individual rights.
A key assumption of the Montessori philosophy is that
the child has an inner timetable that tells him or her
when they are ready to learn something. This is not
something that can be dictated by an adult. The
environment is stuctured on the results of many
decades or careful observation and notes on every
single child in every single school in thousands of
schools worldwide. One piece of new equipment is
introduced to a set of classrooms for observation.
It is typically designed by scientists and
mathematicians together with cognitive learning
theorists. It is studied and - if successful -
perfected over years of careful scientific observation
to see how it futs naturally into a progression of
concepts, such as mathematics.
No other early childhood environment even comes close
to this in providing for the individualized growth of
a child.
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