As a measurement, please consider “better” to specifically mean lifetime earning of the average student who attended the school. Given this measurement, are Montessori schools better than traditional public schools?
I don’t know but every day I walk past a Montessori school. The sign out front says “The learned Robin” with a picture of a Blue Jay…
It seems to me that this measurement is fatally flawed. The two schools themselves could have identical effects, and I’d expect the average student who attended private school to have higher lifetime earnings by virtue of the fact that they came from a family that was wealthier and/or valued education more than the average public school student.
Sure, but is that actually true? Any evidence to support that hypothesis?
Are you asking whether families that send their children to private schools tend to be more affluent than average or at least not poor? The answer to that is yes in general. What type of cites do you want for that revelation.
There is such a thing as public Montessori schools as well but the vast majority of the 8,000 or so Montessori schools in the U.S. are private and cost in the mid to high thousands for full-time schooling. The public Montessori schools also tend to be in areas that are at least somewhat affluent or at least not poor as well.
However, the vast majority of them only offer programs for pre-school through elementary school. That another confounding factor in this question. The Montessori schooling component usually ends at a young age before the students move on to another type of education whether that is traditional, boarding school or some other alternative model. There are some Montessori high schools as well but I don’t know if you want answers that are restricted to that fairly small and self-selected population.
The question is meaningless. It’s like asking “Are red cars faster than sports cars?”: Whether a school is Montessori has nothing at all to do with whether it’s public. Worse than that, actually, because nobody can agree just what makes a school “Montessori”.
Montessori is a method of teaching that focuses on constructivism, the interaction between experiences and ideas. It isn’t a particularly effective form of education for subjects that require learning a lot of facts or rules.
There are Montessori public schools. Different studies in them have shown different impacts of Montessori instruction on student performance.
Montessori is primarily used with younger students. Maria Montessori herself never developed a formalized instruction plan for adolescents (although her followers have.)
And the other quibble is that the OP’s definition of “better” is correlation with above-average lifetime earnings. Apart from the point already made that lifetime earnings correlate with many other factos better than they do with educational methods, there is the point that the Montessori method doesn’t particularly aim to increase lifetime earnings.
This method of teaching is also known as “teaching”.
I’m not aware of the existence of any such subjects. Got any examples?
It really depends on the school, not whether they have “Montessori” in their name. When we were exploring preschool/elementary schools for my daughter, we visited one so-called Montessori school that’s sole claim to the Montessori name was, and I quote, “We, um, we have some Montessori toys over there…” The director couldn’t name for me even a single Montessori principle or theory, and as far as I could see, none were implemented in the day to day activities of the school. While we were there visiting, the teacher herded all the children into a circle on the floor where she was yelling at them to sit still and recite the alphabet in unison while she pointed to letters on a felt board. That’s…about as opposite Montessori as it gets.
One study about 10 years ago got a lot of press; it found superior outcomes when comparing a Montessori school to a traditional school for urban minority students in Milwaukee. There are other favorable studies linked to on this pro-Montessori site. But just be aware that not every school that calls itself Montessori actually is.
kunilou’s definition isn’t very exact. Constructivism emphasizes student creation of knowledge, whereas more traditional education emphasizes the teacher explaining to the students what’s happening.
Consider two extreme approaches to teaching students about electrical circuits.
The constructivist will provide students with wires and batteries and lights and tell them nothing. Students will mess around with them until someone goes HOLY CRAP THE LIGHT JUST LIT UP and others gather around to see what happened. The teacher facilitates students in a discussion: what just happened? Why did it happen? How can we test your ideas about why it happened? Over time, students will perform a variety of experiments to test and refine their understandings of circuits.
The traditionalist will give students a passage to read about circuits and then will lecture to students about circuits. A diagram, or even a demonstration, may be included. Students will be tested on their ability to answer questions about circuits.
IMO, neither approach in isolation is very useful. A mix of the two is most effective. Montessori goes pretty far toward the constructivist end of the spectrum.
OP, you’ve got a crapload of confounding factors: self-selection of families that go to Montessori schools, questions about whether lifetime earnings accurately reflects the objectives of Montessori schools or average public schools, questions about whether Montessori and non-Montessori schools of 50 years ago (those whose graduates have clear lifetime earnings) are comparable to today’s schools, etc. I think your question is barely answerable now even in theory, and the data you’re seeking almost certainly don’t exist, and if they did, would be useless for almost all purposes.
What’s driving this question? Maybe we can help you refine it so that it’s both answerable and meaningful.
Maybe it’s because I went to school a couple of generations ago, but IIRC, history required learning a lot of facts. English (the grammar portion) had lots of rules. If you weren’t aware of certain facts and rules in chemistry, you could burn the lab down.
I sent all three of my children to Montessori preschool, and my wife later worked there. I happen to like the approach very much. But it isn’t the be all and end all for all students or all subjects.
It’s not a meaningless question. Clearly, there’s the assumption of trying to control for as many other factors as possible. Correlation is perfectly fine, I’m not asking anything about causation.
I’m not asking about any of the other factors you bring up. They’re off topic. The variable here is binary, montessori schools versus traditional public schools. The measurement is lifetime earning. Which variable results in a higher lifetime earning value? Pretty simple.
This is almost certainly closest to the truth, but I’m still curious enough to attempt to find an answer to the original question, or one as close to the original as possible.
Just curiosity. A lot of my friends have kids, both in Public schools and in Montessori schools. Would like to be prepared for the future as well.
I’d be happy to refine along geographic regions, perhaps a greater metro area or a US state. Might also be good to refine “lifetime earning” to “total earning before age 30” or something age more tractable.
I’d like to keep time to as recent as possible.
My wife trained to be a Montessori teacher but stopped when realizing she would not be able to afford to send her own kids there. Also, the issue of Montessori ending at such a young age left us wondering what to do at that point, as far as feeling forced to send them to another school that would “undo” and/or ruin it. This GQ, so my opinion that Montessori is better than Public, but no school is the best is not relevant. That said, there is data (do I have it? no) on the benefits of early childhood education, and I suspect that the benefits of such young intervention would be positive and lasting.
My experience with Montessori was that it was more rule-based, really. But you weren’t supposed to memorize. You learned entirely by doing. Everything had some sort of physical object that you would use to learn it. You would be sat down and shown how it was done, and then you were supposed to do it. When you seemed to be doing well, then they taught you something else.
You also could not make mistakes. Or, well, you could, but you would be returned the paper and be expected to fix them. In fact, not making mistakes was a large part of whether you could move on.
It’s more about learning at your own pace, it works great for some, and not so great for others. I was ahead of my classmates when I moved to public school. But they all assumed I’d be behind based on their previous experience with people coming from my school. I actually got moved around a bit.
When I did get to public school, I got a lot more lazy. And I think that would have held me back a lot if it had happened in elementary school.
How much Montessori school? A lot more kids go to Montessori preschool than Montessori high school. Are you controlling for parent income levels? Are you controlling for public vs. private schools? Are you controlling for class size? Are you controlling for parent education levels? Are you controlling for funds spent per student? Are you controlling for time spent in the workplace? (A child who goes to cmmunity college and begins a career by age 20 may have earned more money by 30 than a student who goes to med school and doesn’t complete her residency until she’s 29).
I’m deeply skeptical that anyone’s gathered this information, but if they have, you need to control for a lot of factors before you have data you can use to analyze the efficacy of a Montessori education.
No. The teaching methods aren’t necessarily the same, even if that wasn’t an adequate description. But many Montessori methods have been adopted by mainstream schools.
Try Google - there seem to be many studies out there. Too many for me to post here.
The Houston Independent School District has three Montessori schools. They are part of the Magnet Program–where admission can be quite competitive.
So, dividing schools between “Public” & “Montessori” does not reflect reality. I’d bet that most students attending Magnet schools have a few advantages–like parents interested in their education, who can make the effort to get their kids admitted. And parents able to get their kids to a school that may be out of their neighborhood. Students get free transit passes, but first grade is a bit young to be sent off alone.
If the OP is concerned about educating his kids, he ought to do more research in his district. Is he just trying to Prove A Point?