We weren't taught the alphabet until the age of about 6-7 and basic arithmetic at 7-8. We did begin learning foreign languages at age 6, however. In practice my older brother taught me to read and count well before the Steiner curriculum did, but I still think that the education was very valuable.
I think that creativity in adults is often stifled because they don't want to "get it wrong". People are afraid of trying their hand at a new skill or taking a risk on a new idea because they are "realistic" about their chances of success. Children just do it anyway. I think that Steiner schools encourage this attitude, and no doubt Montessori schools do the same.
There's a reason the really big hitters are often first-time entrepreneurs - they are naive enough to try. Creativity works the same way.
One problem I noticed with the particular school we were helping to start was that the majority of the parents were technophobic to the point of hysteria: they literally asked me not to bring my laptop to meetings. As far as I can tell, this isn't a necessary feature of such schools. The general lesson, for me, is that in settings like this (e.g., an alternative educational facility bootstrapped by a small community) the school can take on the pathologies of the community, with potentially undesirable results.
I think this came about partly as an extension of Steiner's views on television as something that stunts imagination and creativity. The first 7 years of the education have a very strong focus on mental imagery, and there is probably a belief that viewing concrete depictions of concepts on a computer is harmful.
I happen to believe that a computer can allow increased exploration of the imagination when used for creative tasks, but in the 90's schools were mostly using them for looking at Encarta and so on. That's exactly what Steiner schools want to avoid for their younger children.
As an aside, I think the biggest benefits I received from attending Montessori were independence and self-motivation-- I was never forced to learned something, I had to want to learn it first and pursue it myself.
I think that creativity in adults is often stifled because they don't
want to "get it wrong". People are afraid of trying their hand at a
new skill or taking a risk on a new idea because they are "realistic"
about their chances of success.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_...
I think it's often because they don't understand the difference between a good product and a good business, so their expected outcomes tend to be at the extremes. Some of them end up doing ridiculously well, but overall I wouldn't consider not understanding lead gen, sales cycles, margins, cashflow, lifetime customer value, etc. to be a virtue.
I, thankfully, realized this pretty early on, with help from my siblings. Collectively, we quit caring about gold stars, and started to actually learn. IMO, the main problem is that we're taught that it's bad to be wrong, and not good enough to try to outweigh the risks if you're not already fluent in the area. Success is essentially all that's valued at both an educational and social level, which entirely ignores the value of actually learning something, improving your future attempts.
tl;dr: "Win or go home" is killing our minds.
Which I find quite strange, especially as our Western culture wouldn't have existed without Socrates, who championed the exact same ideas you're talking about :)
You found a startup because you wouldn't be happy doing anything else.
I can't imagine getting a real job. Ever. For me, the set of things I could be doing with my life is {startup}.
I remember seeing a quote from some very successful founder saying that the only reason he went into entrepreneurship is because he was completely unemployable.
<rant>
People forget that economics takes into account things other than money. A lot of "economic" discussion would go a lot smoother if people remembered this.
</rant>
I'm not actually sure how similar Waldorf/Steiner is to Montessori, aside from both shunning the same bad ideas.
Creativity is very important for Waldorf, but not the main issue in Montessori. For example, you must be presented by a teacher on how to work with a material (play with a Montessori toy) first. There is not much room to art, nor imaginative play in Montessori.
If Montessori has a remarkable effect on success, I think it's because it helps children the value of working hard at an early age. There are no programs to distract you. You pick something, play with it as long as you like, learn all you like from that one and continue with a more difficult one.
As there is no rush, you do your all work like wearing cloths, putting your dish to the table. Being able to do all work yourself, one very important skill that every entrepreneur must have :)
My daughter is 1.5 years old and knows almost all of the alphabet. Is this a good thing or bad thing?
For my boys, (3.9 and 1.5 years) I looked into Waldorf and was actually completely turned off by the fact that reading was completely ignored until much, much later. (7 years) For my eldest, who is already reading 2 and 3 letter words and phonetically sounding larger ones, this would be such a set back that he would be discouraged.
I think it isn't important where he is right now, but more so that he is encouraged to continue learning and continues to have an enjoyment of learning. I think that's really where our schools fail and why a self-motivated Montessori child can be a high achiever.
It is a clue that she probably is good at "symbolic thinking". More of this stuff to come in the near future. Just make sure she has plenty of chances to develop this (probably innate) ability.
On the other hand, as she grows up, you probably should keep an eye on her and help to mitigate any shortcomings that'd eventually show up. But this is the same with all children anyway.
Is that strange? I started school (a "regular" one) at 7 (as is customary in Sweden) and I didn't know the entire alphabet or basic arithmetic then. None of my classmates did.
Ahem. I spy a latent variable in this correlation. Can you find it?
Hint: Montessori education may or may not have advantages. But unless you control for educational background and income of the family, your analysis has a problem.
This WAS controlled for. Correct analysis WAS done, peer reviewed, and published.
It's a shame this is so highly upvoted. Pointing out that correlation does not equal causation is the very first most obvious criticism to make of a finding, but don't sail in with that criticism until you've made sure that causation wasn't actually suggested by legitimate research.
What a shame.
The Science paper cited at the bottom of this article found that Montessori kids from one school in Wisconsin had slightly better performance on some kinds of academic tests. The story's "finding" is that Montessori kids are overrepresented amongst the creative/business/economic elite. Clearly, one follows from the other, right?
But yes, let's talk about the up-voting of comments that sound approximately correct, but actually aren't.
See for example statements from the article like "perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Montessori alumni lead two of the world’s most innovative companies...". To which I would say, yes, it almost certainly is coincidence. Look at the (non-Montessori educated) leaders of pretty much every other company in the world as counterexamples.
The description of Jeff Bezos's behaviour makes it sound like he was an exceptional example of children in that system (unless Montessori teachers routinely have to pick kids out of their chairs), so probably not a good example of typical results from that system.
Go into an inner city Los Angeles elementary, and I guarantee you the great majority of parents wont have even heard of the name.
TL;DR: the parents of people who care enough about their education to enroll them in a montessori school, would have probably turned out pretty bright kids regardless.
http://www.montessori-science.org/montessori_science_journal... (click "see article full text")
An excerpt:
On several dimensions, children at a public inner city Montessori school
had superior outcomes relative to a sample of Montessori applicants who,
because of a random lottery, attended other schools. By the end of
kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized
tests of reading and math, engaged in more positive interaction on
the playground, and showed more advanced social cognition and
executive control.
Really? You think it's just a matter of caring enough to make it so? I think I'd phrase this differently -- that the parents of people who have the means to send them to a montessori school probably would have the means to give them other advantages in life as well, so their kids are probably going to do pretty well regardless.
To your point though, you could also cite a number of people not educated in Montessori schools who were very creative and achieved big things.
It goes without saying I don't have a citation for that, but based on my personal experience as a child and a parent I strongly believe it be true.
That being said, I see correlation here, not causation.
To be a little bit tongue and cheek, I could write the headline:
"99% of successful people do not attend Montessori schools"
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5795/1893.full?ijkey=3...
Although they reference the study in a really odd way: "Neuroscience author Jonah Lehrer cites a 2006 study published in Science that ..."
What does Jonah Lehrer have to do with the study? AFAICT absolutely nothing. He appears to be a contributor to the WSJ, but he didn't write the study. And none of the links they present are even to the article where he apparently cites this study. I have no idea why he's mentioned here.
Tangent aside, I think that's the real meat.
"The creative elite" -> "so overrepresented" -> list of five names in tech, one rapper, one 20th Century culinary master
I stopped taking the article seriously at this point.
a)Taking your kid out of public school and
b)Encourage your kid to do things he finds interesting with you at home and take him to museums and crap
True, it requires a mostly unemployed parent, but Montessori has just discovered how kids learn naturally at a young age. Just like a kid learns a language without having to be formally taught, he learns other things without formal education as well. The older years it's a different story, but there's really no need to pay a ton of money for a Montessori pre-school. Any parent can do it.
While parents can certainly homeschool, you can't claim it's an equal substitute for Montessori education.
Montessori's method is centered on structured, self-directed individual activities with materials prepared to focus children's attention on one or another particular skill considered important. Traditionally, it does not involve "doing things with you", "museums and crap", or just "doing things [one] finds interesting".
Yeah, but it's easier to shift the responsibility to other, more "professional-looking" people, especially if you have the money to do that.
Which doesn't mean that I don't agree with you. One of my first childhood memories is of my father teaching me the letters of the alphabet, when I was 4 or so. He was on a lunch-break, I remember that, he worked on a construction site. After that it was easy to learn to read by myself at about 5, one day I just opened a kids' book and, as I had already knew what those letters meant, it was easy to start reading. He also taught me the first words and expressions in French ("ceci est une pipe" and all that), when I was 8 or 9. Nothing too fancy, he just taught me how to pronounce the words in French and we read a couple of simple phrases out-loud. That gave me a huge advantage over my school-colleagues a couple of years later, when we started to learn French in school.
It also mattered a lot for me that my parents' house was full of books, and the fact that I saw my father reading each and every day.
I have two friends who have experience with Montessori, and like you, I'll put together funds to get my future kids in there some day.
One of my friends is an Aikidoka. He had started hanging out with some folks who turned out to operate a Montessori school. They liked him enough that they invited him to teach there -- more to expose the kids to different ideas. My friend tells me that there is a selection process involved for the kids, and not all kids can get in. They'd put them in the environment and see how they acted. My friend and those operators are pitching Aikido to the national board as a form of conflict resolution. Which, if you know anything about Aikido, is remarkable.
The other friend is the only old man I know who says things like, "I can't wait to see what will happen", and "Using predictive modeling is like driving by looking at the rear view mirror." Most old people I know are quietly staring at death looming in the future. This guy put his son through Montessori. His grandson is now in Montessori, though the daughter-in-law objected at first.
From the comments from these two, from the smattering of articles I've read about them, the key behavioral patterning related to startup is the development of gumption. That is, instead of using external reward-punishment and coloring-inside-the-approved-lines, these kids go out and do what they want, using their own internal sense of right and wrong. It's something I've been hacking my own mind with much of my adult life -- through things like playing Go. Does this guarantee these a Montessori grad to be wildly successful at building out a startup? No. But it will save a lot of misery from twisting yourself, cringing from Authority or staying trapped in a losing situation (a la Gervais Principle).
That is way better than recruiting Tiger Moms and Dragon Ladies.
If anyone has experience with any of the above, I'd love to hear about it.
I've launched one child into adulthood (he is deeply interested in the start-up culture, which is one reason I hang out here on Hacker News) and have three more coming up. Interaction with other curious young people is crucial while growing up. Any school experience that encourages that is worthwhile at least in part, while any school experience that ends up discouraging curiosity (as a remarkable variety of schools do) is to be avoided.
P.S. I finally had a chance to tour Exeter this year while high school shopping. Exeter does have an interesting approach with the Harkness table for all classes and the problem-solving-based curriculum.
Edit: here's a useful overview of alternative teaching methods - http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25926
But don't decide based on reading and abstraction, go meet the people in the communities you would be putting your child into (including home-school communities) and see if you fit in with those people and if they seem nurturing. And explore more traditional options to see if the people there are exceptional.
My wife works at a small Catholic school (who would have thought?) with an amazing community that fosters intergenerational, self-guided, scrape-your-knee-climbing-a-tree sort of learning. I'm sure most parents drive right by and think "pfft, Catholic school," and their abstractions are leading them to miss a real gem.
Two can play this game. :)
Grade school is designed to teach people enough to read The Bible, and enough writing and arithmetic to not get cheated by the fancy, downtown shop keepers.
High school is designed to teach the bulk of the citizenry to work according to a fixed schedule, probably in a factory, along with a faceless mass of similary trained people.
It sounds inflammatory, but it's true.
There may be problems with public schools in the US, but using a few successful individuals who went to an alternative school as evidence of problems seems disingenuous. I'm certain there are a lot of examples of wildly successful people who went through traditional public schooling.
Schools in the midwest do not focus on "skills associated with living on a farm". Even in agriculture-centric Iowa farm labor is about 8% of the population, the other 92% of people are employed in offices/stores/factories/etc. For comparison, 5% of workers in California are employed as farm laborers for some part of the year.
The schools entire focus is on university preparation (often to a fault, many students would probably be better suited by a more vocational focus). No public school is teaching anyone to read the bible, and to my knowledge private Catholic or other religious schools are no more common in the midwest than in New York or California.
Ignorant stereotypes based on state/region are just as foolish as any other ignorant stereotype.
Jay-Z started in the projects and didn't finish high school, and he's doing even better!
Holy crap, I know where I'm sending my kids!
(In fact quite a lot becomes clear.)
You can do your own search for "journalism curriculum degree" if you want more corroboration.
It depends on the kid, I guess. I have an independent, creative side to me that also needs strong discipline to get anything done, so I'm grateful to have experienced both worlds. As far as current prices go, my divorced and randomly employed mother was sending both my sister and I there until we opted for the local public school as it fit better with our social lives, and I know there were some kids there in the same boat as us, but overall it was a good mix back then with the benefit of being in the hippy Cambridge of the '70s.
My advice would be to buy the best education for your kids that your money can buy, and unless your local school system is the pits, I wouldn't home-school them. There's a lot to be said for socializing at an early age and teaching the kids subjects in addition to the regular curriculum isn't against the law either. If the kids are smart, they'll put the regular coursework behind them and need the extra teaching anyways.
If the child is a dullard, don't waste too much money on them as you'll need it for later on for when they really fuck up.
In my experience, barring truly mentally challenged children, most children classified as 'dullards' by the education system just don't understand how to cope with the traditional model of teaching. Once someone takes the time to understand them and teaches them how to 'work the system' while still learning, or once they themselves realize that they can take things in their own hands, they shine. I have seen this time and again with cousins, friends and a bunch of kids my mom taught when I was growing up (She is a teacher).
So, if the public school teacher thinks your child is a dullard, it may be a much wiser investment in my opinion to consider educational institutes that will pay a bit more attention to the child's needs. In fact, it may not even take that, it may just take one good, concerned teacher to understand why the kid can't cope, gain their trust, and then teach them how to get the most out of the existing system.
All of this is IMHO, and I am not a teacher, just someone who has seen a lot of kids suffering because of how they were labelled as dullards and subsequently ignored for years by teachers AND given up on by parents. I have also seen 'dullards' change course and shine, once they had the right help.
This is exactly one of the topics of that course -- some children do not fit in.
Teacher gave an example of this one fat kid she had that was aggressive and obnoxious to everybody, while failing at tests and even skipping classes. She then began to treat him nicer and praise him for every stupid achievement of his, while talking to the other teachers to do the same -- the child had a miraculous recovery; as it happens he was being aggressive in response to how he was treated by other teachers and colleagues.
It's not that teachers don't know this, BUT the public school is overwhelmed by too many children. In my 1-4 grades I was in a classroom of 30 children (I'm not in the US, and that number nowadays is more like 20-25) ... how can you, as a teacher, attend to the special needs of 30 children, everyday?
Private schools have the resources and the capacity for smaller, more focused classrooms, with teachers that are better paid, and thus happier (well, at least in some cases). That's the only real difference that makes an impact, IMHO.
Can't say I was ever classified as a 'dullard' but my grade school scores indicated that I was. Even when I went to college, after a stellar start, my performance deteriorated. After considerable time, I was able to go back to attend a world-class university and excelled, largely because I had learned what the goal actually was. When I was young, I mistook the 'traditional model of teaching' for learning, which was something I was quite good at. The goal of being the recipient of 'teaching' (ie, a student) is to achieve higher scores than everyone else. In fact, learning is potentially an impediment because it requires critical thinking, and you won't get far as a student with that. Some students understand the real goal and do quite well. And some may even learn at the same time. Many others are simply frustrated or turn off completely, as I did.
A classic example is dyslexia. One of the smartest women I know says she was classified as a special-needs student until her dyslexia was diagnosed. Since then she has become an accomplished lawyer, Oxford/Edinburgh masters student and an award-winning novelist.
It's been my experience that a home environment with parents who read and care about expanding horizons will tend to offer the children guided "self-directed" learning, observation and indirect teaching, and productive routines of "focused" activities versus idle play, and these children will tend to outperform peers without that same desire to constantly learn instilled in them -- regardless of the formal education they acquire.
Pick a sizable group of kids selected to indicate strong parental interest in how the children learn. For example, kids whose parents at any point considered homeschooling them. You'll see above average scores, even if, in fact, the child in question ended up never being home schooled. The selected trait seems to be simply parental interest in the child's learning.
Curiously, the Wikipedia article on Montessori claims among randomly selected/rejected applicants, the selectees performed better. That would seem to eliminate other variables. But it also says any difference was gone again by age 12, quite a few years before the successes cited in the link.
I suspect that given the right home environment, it's not that Montessori makes your kid smarter, but that generic grade schools make your kid dumber until the age children manifest individuality. Also see "Outliers" for thoughts on how arbitrary performance and learning measurements seem in grade school as a function of birth month versus school year.
But it is very counterintuitive for the engineer in me who wants to measure progress by how much of the alphabet they know. It takes a lot of trust in the somewhat nebulous and touchy feely Montessori philosophy, if you read the wikipedia page about it you'll see that even the educators can't agree on what it is exactly. (Montessori did use scientific methods to arrive at her recommendations, but interpretations differ). There's things the type of educators in such schools do that makes us rational people cringe (kids are not allowed artificial flavoring in their lunch food...). But, well, it works (for my kids at least).
Since I am too rational to give up on measuring I conclude we are probably not measuring progress the right way by testing how much letters in the alphabet they know.
Why would that make you cringe?
But the Montessori method is fascinating, and does have a few studies backing it. On a personal level as a Montessori kid, I know it definitely gave me a head start over many of my peers (by encouraging my math fascination, I was able to do long division before I entered kindergarten and my sister had a similar experience with reading) and a much more enjoyable/inspiring early education experience. There is no one true way, but I know I will personally place any of my children in Montessori.
I also vaguely remember having a head start on math as well, which allowed me to breeze through the math games during computer time and play more advanced games like Rocky's Boots (a game where you assemble logic gates). Like the "January-born hockey player" thing in Outliers, I feel that going to Montessori school may have possibly given me a compounding head start in my computer education. Either that or it just gave me an inflated ego.
At the same time, just because someone went to a Montessori school doesn't automatically mean they will be a successful person. My wife worked in a Montessori school a while ago and I can't say that I agree with their method of teaching - and this is coming from a guy who went to LAUSD from grade 6 and up.
Successful: go back and credit Montessori for making me a rebellious, curious nonconformist.
Unsuccessful: go back and partially blame Montessori for those same values, that make navigating this world of rules and structures difficult.
PG's writings would make me think that he leans more towards the Montessori side of things, and probably a lot of HNers are the same. I'm glad jsavimbi spoke about his need for strong discipline.
if you wanna write a blog post speculating on that, i'd gladly post it to HN
"101?"
"I'm sorry M'a'm, your son is an idiot"
Concatenation is not the reasonable answer to addition of numbers.
What strikes me about this article is its characterization of Montessori schooling as largely unstructured and free. I think it must be comparing it to a much over-structured methodology, perhaps like the public schooling I got growing up.
Styles vary somewhat among Montessori schools, but what I've seen is that in the early years, the age Montessori is most known for, there are specific materials children work with and specific ways they're expected to work with them. A child may not get out a work he/she hasn't been shown how to use. He must return the work to its proper place before selecting another one. The materials aren't tools for self-discovery. They're tools for letting self collide with reality until such time as the applicable real concepts are understood.
However, the one simple freedom of being able to choose a work does make it a sharp contrast from the lock-step style of education I grew up with. I hear public schools aren't always this way, according to relatives who sent kids to public school in Lexington, MA.
In higher grades the emphasis on materials fades, but the basic idea of letting children work within a structure remains. For example, in upper elementary (grades 4-6) the students develop their own classroom code of conduct. They're given some structure about how to do it, though. I see Montessori as a balanced methodology on the freedom/structure dimension, not an extreme.
What I remember most from my Montessori education in my early years (preschool through elementary) was that we were allowed to progress at our own pace. Our teacher(s) set up various tracks of things to complete, for example we had math cards you could study and then do some problems on and eventually take a test to move on to the next set, or we had a series of books and you needed to select one from the set and answer some questions before moving on to one from the next set. About half of our time was allowing us to work on whatever we wanted. If you got ahead in a subject, the teacher would find more for you to do on it. If you got behind, the teacher would try to help you get over whatever hurdle of understanding you had.
As a result, I was a few years ahead of myself in math. Every time the teacher got a new set of math cards I would do them all as quickly as I could and I prided myself on being a few years ahead. However, my reading was a bit behind because I never really cared to do the in-school reading as I preferred sci-fi. There were other children who were just the opposite.
The benefit was that I didn't have to sit in a class room doing the exact same boring lessons as the rest of the class. If I could figure something out in 5 minutes I didn't have to sit through a 1-hour lecture on the subject.
I would attribute that to there being many more men founders, and that the vast majority of children attend other types of schools. Any crossover will be vanishingly small.
Montessori teachers are certified largely by two centers in the world, in Italy (http://www.montessori-ami.org/), and in US (http://www.amshq.org/). As far as I know AMI sees itself as the "original" Montessori, rejects others, and more strict in many ways, like they don't allow any toys in classrooms, they don't have any books (just lapbooks produced by teachers or children).
I have real problems with strict, spiritual Montessori. Why would we be against to toys? Maria Montessori crafted wonderful toys for her students, and now they are called "Montessori Materials". What's wrong with Lego's? I think if Maria Montessori had Lego, she would use them.
Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, all have different methods to inspire for raising kids and even for start-ups (http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...). But, none is magic.
Take kids from wealthy, well-educated families and put them in small groups with educators that also happen to be very well-educated and very passionate and you will get great results whatever the pedagogy.
Contrast this w/ poor kids whose parents had low educational attainments, stuck in giant classes with poorly-paid teachers.
If you put 6 well-off kids with 1 passionate, well-educated teacher, you will get good results almost every time.
Montessori approach may have its merits but I find it very hard to separate them from the demographics of its students and teachers. The study in Milwaukee does not seem sufficient to establish a link. Those passionate about teaching are probably more likely to be attracted to the Montessori school than the regular public schools because it has a distinctive approach and probably more liberal management.
I would love to love to know if the Montessori schools in teh Milwaukee school had the same teacher/student ratio as the other schools in the study. I am betting they didn't.
If anything, the fact that they only list 4-5 names tells me that at best, the kind of education you receive at that age is not that important after all (I think your parents and your environment are probably bigger factors) and at worst, the Montessori school doesn't really work that well after all.
An educational monoculture suffers the same vulnerabilities that a biological monoculture does. We should foster a diversity of approaches, supporting the sharing of techniques, approaches, and contexts.
This is why we are starting a new K-12 school, based on some new ideas (Tinkering School, and A Curious Summer) and incorporating some really old ideas (apprenticeship and mastery). We call it Brightworks (http://sfbrightworks.org). Have a look at our approach, share your ideas, join us at the edge of innovation in education.