I got confused and sent my kids to a Montresori school, where they learned wine appreciation and stonemasonry.
I find the income = success metric to be pretty useless, as it ignores prestige, creativity, and other factors Montessori students and their parents might weight more heavily when choosing a career. Among my friends sending their kids to Montessori schools, most are liberal-leaning types who’d be very happy to raise an artist, writer, or other free-thinker in a profession where success does not equal income. If Sally the former Montessori student has a gallery show in Paris by age 30, but makes only 15K a year, is she less successful than Bobby the former public school student who makes 40K a year as a Walmart manager?
Browsing this thread, seems to me the OP would be getting more response to remove the term “better” (which is setting off all kinds of objections), and restate the question as two more factual sub-questions.
- How do the lifetime earnings of Montessori students compare to students from traditional public schools?
- If we can control for other factors, how much of any difference can we attribute to the Montessori method?
–Muttrox
Darn you! Not only did you steal my joke before I could make it, you did it better than I would have.
Obligatory *Onion *link.
It really depends on the school’s principal, who is formally known as “Montesorris Rex”
I think it’s hard to make a good comparison. I’m going to say something that could make me no longer anonymous on the off chance a parent of one of my school’s students is on the board. I work at a public Montessori school, although I’m not a classroom teacher and am not Montessori trained. It’s not easy to make a comparison between public Montessori schools and traditional schools. First is the extremely small sample size. Second is that the current climate in public schools makes it well nigh impossible for a school to both public and truly Montessori. The emphasis on standardized test scores creates pressure to depart from the method teachers were trained to use. Also, in our system we take kids up to 8th grade who haven’t been in a Montessori environment before.
I think it works very well for a lot of kids. I also think it doesn’t work so well for others. I don’t think there’s any way to answer the OP’s question accurately.
The century-old Montessori education method is more successful than traditional teaching methods, according to research.
Thankyou.
Well, I guess that settles the matter, doesn’t it?
Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. In the school where I work there are families where the parents move one child to a traditional school and keep one in the Montessori school. Anyone who states that one approach works best for all kids loses me right there.
As noted by others -“best or better” is really determined by how individual students respond. No one can say one particular style of teaching is the best for everyone.
Very close friends send their daughter to a Mont. school. My wife and I didn’t know much about it and spoke to another good friend who was teacher.
She explained the Mont. teaching style and commented was that it really dependant on the student. She was quite positive about it overall and said most kids do well early on, but as they get older they either excel or struggle. Some kids want / need more structure than the self-directed Mont. system provides. This usually becomes apparent around 10 or 12 years old. Her comment was if they excel, keep her in Mont. if she struggles, get her out ASAP.
No news for a few years, then our friends started to tell us about how, after doing amazing up to grade 3, their daughter was starting to struggle with grades, she now “hated school” etc. Then one morning they couldn’t find her in the house. Eventually they found her at the top of the tree in the backyard! She was hiding because didn’t want to go to school.
They pulled her sent her to another school where she excelled. She’s a very very gifted kid now studying medicine at uni. and getting very high grades. She just didn’t respond well to the Mont. teaching style. “Best” is child dependent.
I don’t mean to hijack at all but I am compelled to put down my .02:
Interesting. I say this as, eventually, I found myself at home at a technical college to finish off my BS and eventually MS. And, that sounds very familiar. However, when I tell people I went to a technical college they kinda have this reaction like I went to an easy school. Technical disciplines more or less require a hands-on approach (constructivism) to get past ones learning curve and then promote discussion on what we all learned. DevOps is like this, computer programming, computer networking, telecommunications, etc.
So, rather, an ideal university/college would use either method depending on the program or class.
The next time I talk about my schooling, I’ll be sure to start with: “I went to a school that applied Constructivism to the majority of the disciplines which we were taught. Kinda like a Montessori school for kids, but for adults, you know, a technical university.”
Anyways… I imagine the ultimate outcome of a local Montessori school compared to a public local school would be the amount of money that the local county puts towards schooling.
Mayyyyybe. But I think most technical schools don’t work that way. A constructivist approach is more than just hands-on: it supposes that through constant work with materials, students will construct the knowledge themselves.
If your technical school were teaching you to build a simple circuit, which one of these things would the prof be likelier to say?
CONSTRUCTIVIST: Students, I’ve provided you with a variety of materials at your work station, including wires, light bulbs, batteries, aluminum foil, popsicle sticks, and balloons. I invite you to spend awhile experimenting with them. Share what you find out with your classmates, and in an hour we’ll reconvene to talk about what we’ve observed.
TRADITIONAL: Class, I’ve provided each workstation with two wires, light bulbs, and batteries. Working with your partner, touch one end of each wire to opposite ends of the battery. Touch the other end of each wire to the light bulb as illustrated on the accompanying slide. If you’ve made the light bulb light up, you’ve created a complete electrical circuit, and the next slide will help you understand how this works.
In both cases, you’re working with the materials in a hands-on manner; but the constructivist way is much more student-led than the traditional way.
All I can give is personal experience. Their “at your own pace” concept can be both good and bad. I know that it was expected when I came out of a Montessori school to a public school (in 5th grade) hat I would be behind in certain subjects, like math. Then I got moved to the advanced class after the first day. But, then again, I had maxed out the math curriculum at the Montessori (which did not include algebra) and had a mathematics teacher for a grandpa, and we literally sat around doing math for fun.
Some actual factual info: The Montessori method was originally created for students who who needed one-on-one attention and would get behind in school. A lot of the preschool and kindergarten stuff is really life lessons. I do know that we had a lot of more troubled students come in to the Montessori. Hence I don’t know if the low expectations was actually due to the teaching.
I do know that a lot of students forgot a lot of stuff they learned when they switched over to the public school style. Without the constant reinforcement, where you had to repeat the lesson you did previously before moving on to the next one and get 100% (though you got to try as many times as you want), it seemed people forgot.
I tended to not have problems with that. Mine main problems were being a perfectionist in my writing and everything, and thus everything just took way too long. Fortunately, I gave that up somehow when I got to public school. I think it may have been the lack of focus on grading handwriting.
Personally, I think Montessori did me a lot of good. And it definitely helped some disadvantaged kids. But judging whether it is better–and, even then, if it’s the method of individualized attention that helps–is something for data to determine. And, like others, I’m not even entirely sure what to look for.
Varies by teacher, as does math, grammar… My favorite History teacher took advantage of the fact that his 9th-grade course wasn’t part of the 12th-grade General Exam to teach it at our own pace. We spent a whole month on Egyptian religion; the other class that had the same teacher went through religion in a week and a half, moving then to dynastic issues we never bothered with. Meanwhile the three groups which had the other teacher were memorizing the exact dates of battles and other bloody events. Those students claim they generally weren’t required to remember on which day of the week did the battle take place; for some they were expected to, because it had been on a Sunday for specific reasons.
People learning their first language figure out its rules (or at least the immense majority of them) without formal teaching, although eventually they get correction from parents and other “grown ups” (where grown up is defined as anybody taller than the child); what’s taught in grammar and literature class is the formal versions of those rules, as well as taking a walk through those dark corners people are less likely to figure out by themselves (what makes poetry be poetry? what makes a poem a poem, as opposed to being poetic prose?).
No it doesn’t - they didn’t put “FACT!!” after the statement.
To a large degree, the century-old Montessori method is the traditional method, nowadays. Most schools have adopted Montessori methods to some degree, mostly based on which parts of it work best.
My daughter attended a public Montessori school though 8th grade. Even though it was a public Montessori school any student with significant behavioral issues had to transfer to a regular public school. I think that alone was enough to make the experience better for her than a traditional public school.
It also cooks the books a bit when it comes to determining which school puts out better students.
Yeah, I saw an article recently about a new charter school in Cleveland that’s getting such wonderful results, but if you read a bit further in, you see that they’re only accepting students who meet the state gifted standards (roughly, 98th percentile). If you put nothing but gifted students together in a school, they’re going to excel pretty much no matter what you do to teach them.