To Montessori or Not To Montessori

That is the question!

In a previous post, I said that we were looking for a pre-school for our daughter and wanted it to be a Montessori-like school. Well, guess what! We visited 4 of them this week and frankly I wasn’t impressed. All of them were highly recommended by the parents at Microsoft and are schools with a very good reputation. One thing I have to point out is that not all the Montessori schools were the same. In fact, I felt that each subsequent school that we visited was better than the previous one.

No it’s not the schools that were bad per say. It’s the Montessori method that I didn’t like. Montessori is the in-thing these days, and parents rave about the method. Criticism is hard to find. And not without valid reasons – Montessori has a great sounding philosophy around individual freedom and seems to be a great method to build a child’s academic expertise. But I found the curriculum far too structured, rigid and dry. As a three year old, I want my daughter to play, sing, dance, paint, pretend, share and not count beads, or pour water from one cup to the other.

There was one piece of feedback that really sums up my thoughts and I am quoting it here:

I did not put my sons in Montessori preschools. I found the Montessori approach too structured for my children. Yes, every child moves at his/her own rate, but he/she moves through a particular set of exercises. Those exercises are a set of manipulatives that the child must learn to use in one particular way. The method was devised for children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds in the early 1900′s and focused on common daily tasks. My children’s house has brooms and dishes and pitchers, and they don’t need specific instruction in preschool about them.

For my son, I wanted more free-form art projects, fantasy play, group play, and no academics. I found that in the non-Montessori schools. The preschool program was very “hands on” and there were no desks.

The other criticism I have is that the Montessori curriculum is too individual based. While it is important to build an independent, self-sufficient individual, there is a reduced emphasis on working together, sharing or group play. In fact the Montessori method encourages children to work on their own projects individually and the teacher tries to dissuade other children from collaborating. When we were observing a Montessori classroom, all children with sitting quietly on their own working on their own little project. While that skill is important in life, that’s not a structure I want to impose on my daughter this early on. One point to confess though is that this approach is not common to all schools. As we progressed through visiting schools, the later schools were more open to group activities than the former ones. However, in spite of some schools encouraging group work, the Montessori curriculum is always designed around an individual. Secondly, I found the dryness of the material and the instruction a bit unsettling. My daughter was perfectly happy trying to make coffee with the bottles that she was given to unscrew the lids of. That kind of imaginative and creative play seems very lacking in the Montessori materials.

And I don’t believe that a particular kind of pre-school has any kind of impact on future performance. While Montessori children might know their squares and cubes before they enter first grade and that may be quite impressive, I think other pre-school kids do just as well as long as they acquire the basic foundation needed for school. So right now my focus would be to look at non-Montessori schools where the activities are more free-flowing and where imagination and creativity are more important than learning academic skills. I may still be convinced to send her to a Montessori as long as it is for no more than half day (and in fact the last school that we visited actually offered a mix of both Montessori and free-form classrooms which was far more appealing to me).

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