Reflections on a public school kindergarten tour
Dear Parent,
Just like you, I have a daughter in Montessori school, an almost 5-year-old who is eligible next year to start kindergarten. I’ve been attending open houses, going on tours and observing classes at a variety of schools, public and private, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live.
Right before the holidays, I toured a highly-rated public school in my neighborhood and listened to the principal answer parent questions. She was an engaging speaker, clearly passionate about her career educating children, and very much in command of the audience. She vividly discussed the challenges faced by public schools in this time of budget cuts, and shared with us how she and her fellow principals of my town’s top-rated schools make the best out of a difficult situation, supplementing public resources with parent donations and in-class parent volunteers to provide a good public school education to each child.
I was impressed, more than I thought I would be–that is, until I asked a few questions about the classrooms themselves. One in particular stands out in my mind. As a Montessori mom, I asked about motivating children, about individualization, and about the amount of autonomy and choice these young students have in their classes.
How much choice do students have in public school? This principal’s answer came down to one word: “None.”
She explained that there are so many state-mandated curriculum standards that every minute is needed to ensure that all students meet these standards. While there may be a small amount of “choice time” in kindergarten, “after the academic subjects have been covered,” there is no choice on what to study or when in the higher grades at this school. She made it clear that all students work on the same topics at the same time, and that, at most, they might have a choice as to how they do projects; for example, whether they present their research on a historical figure in 5th grade as a collage, an essay, or a PowerPoint presentation.
Now, I knew that this is what traditional education often looks like, but the bluntness of the answer took me by surprise.
Sitting in the audience with two dozen other parents, I tried imagining my very inquisitive Montessori daughter entering this “California Distinguished School.” Like many Montessori children, my daughter has had many passions in her Montessori room and is used to pursuing her interests intensively. She just recently fell in love with geography, becoming absorbed for hours in making maps of the world, filling them in with colored pencil or water colors, cutting out countries and gluing them on paper, and labeling them in her developing cursive handwriting.
With the freedom of Montessori, my daughter has become a self-starter and will sit down and write shopping lists for me, label things around the house and write warning signs for us if a floor is wet or the weather is cold and we need to wear a jacket. She’ll eagerly read a Books to Remember story to me when the fancy strikes her–but just as likely will lose interest in these same things when she thinks an adult (often, that’s me!) is trying to make her do them.
And that’s where the problem lies: combine the “no choice” answer communicated so succinctly by this principal, with a kindergarten curriculum that requires every child to start with the very basics (such as letter sounds, simple rhymes or numerals 1 to 9–things that a Montessori child will have mastered long before she starts kindergarten), and you have the recipe for a potential motivational calamity.
In the extreme cases, a bored child, resentful of being made to go over already-mastered basics again, may become a troublemaker. Another one may just become reluctant to go to school and put up a fight in the morning against going–and at night against doing the required homework.
But even children who appear to be well adapted may suffer long-term harm, albeit less visible and often overlooked.
Children who are pleasers, who value their relationship with respected adults, may relatively easily adapt to this new environment, re-tracing their steps and docilely covering a second time topics they already mastered in Montessori. With their strong Montessori foundation, they may excel, be a teacher’s favorite, and have a great year-end progress report.
But what will happen inside, to their motivation for learning? While in the past, they loved to learn for the joy of discovery, for the pleasure found in acquiring a new skill or to do those intriguing activities they’d observed older children do, now a different motivation takes hold: to please adults, to fit in with the group, to earn stickers or good grades, and to avoid punishments.
I am afraid that my daughter might fall in this category, as she is a sensitive, empathetic child, one who’d rather get along than persistently fight for her interests. I shudder to think about her inner drive being stunted, her flame for learning being extinguished, her inner passion for understanding her world and mastering skills that matter to her replaced by a focus on extrinsic rewards, such as grades and test scores.
Of course, I want my child to be successful in life, but to me, success is not just good grades without context. Success, as I see it, and as we view it at LePort, is about finding your unique passion in life and becoming really good at it. It’s about flourishing as an individual, about being vibrantly alive and deeply, meaningfully happy.
It goes without saying that to become a successful adult, children must in fact learn a massive amount of skills and acquire a wide range of meaningful knowledge. Helping a child master these skills and acquire this knowledge is a core responsibility of any school. But a great school must go far beyond that. It must find ways to tie this learning to a child’s unique inner motivation; its teachers must individualize teaching to take into account a child’s existing background knowledge and interests; they must work hard to stoke that precious flame inside the young mind, not extinguish it.
With three years of Montessori under her belt, I am quite confident my daughter would adapt and even excel in public school. And, paradoxically, that’s one reason why my husband and I will take on the financial challenge of keeping her in Montessori through the elementary years.
Heike Larson
Vice President, Outreach
Mrs. Larson works remotely for LePort Schools from her home in Oakland, and her 5-year-old daughter is a 2nd year student at a local Montessori school there. Mrs. Larson has been researching school alternatives partially as parent, and partially to better understand the choices Montessori parents have when their child turns 5, so she can help parents at LePort think through this critical decision.
What difference does choice make? Watch this fun short video to see how a child’s flame can be extinguished or kindled in elementary school.