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There is interesting quote form speech of Montessori to UNESCO in The Technological Society(Jacuqes Ellul): 'We must awaken the child's social conscience. I kn

There is interesting quote form speech of Montessori to UNESCO in The Technological Society(Jacuqes Ellul): 'We must awaken the child's social conscience. I know that it is a complicated educational question, but the child who will become the man must be able to understand life and its needs, the fundamental reason for all existence, the search for happiness . .. He must know exactly what he must do and what he must not do for the good of humanity ... To reach these ends, we must prepare the child to understand the meaning and necessity of the entente among the nations. The organization of the peace devolves more on education than on politics. To secure peace practically, we must envision a humane education, psychopedagogy, which affects not one nation but all men on earth . . . Education must become a truly humane science to guide all men to judge the present situation correctly.' https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSociety https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci... (page 346) Its all in the eyes of the beholder, but I felt it almost as the education in brave new world, it was kind of strange, especially because my daughter goes to a Montessori school. I feel it will be much harder for her to reject it than it would've been in a normal school. A bit like Zizek's take on the modern Boss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQlJE7ABNu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQlJE7ABNu4

musha68k 4y ago
I’m not sure I follow what you want to say here? Do you mean the education doesn’t reflect “reality”? If so, don’t you think it can, will and probably has to change? I’m also not sure where you see the parallel to Brave New World, what I remember is that there weren’t a lot of truth-seeking change agents around? Quite the contrary, no? I would appreciate any clarifications for personal reasons.
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  I mean that it is an attempt to build a system that integrates the child so deeply, that the child can not build resistance, Montessiori's ideal is to start education at birth, how else can you 'shape' the person to take their role and responsibility in society. In the end, it is still a system for producing workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs, and I think there should be some space for "i dont want to be a part of this, there must be some other way to live" The first few pages of brave new world gave me this vibe, thats why I said its in the eye of the beholder, you read as much into a book as out of it. In the same time, my daughter is growing up to be critically thinking and self aware and independent and is enjoying the school very much.
  - sfpotter 4y ago
    I’m surprised you view Montessori education as some sinister thing despite your daughter doing well with it. I feel like you might be overthinking things. Leaving aside Montessori’s somewhat grandiose speech, it’s just a pedagogical mode which allows for more student independence. The main benefit, IMO, is that it reduces the amount of arbitrariness on the part of the instructor. Seems obvious that children will prefer to be able to have some say over what they do day to day. I don’t see how that squares at all with your suggestion that it’s brainwashing students a la Brave New World.
    - throwaway71271 4y ago
      Of course I am overthinking it, I am sending my kid there for the better part of the day :) if there is one thing I am allowed to overthink its the education system.
    - 2devnull 4y ago
      Elul was a Christian above all, so you can maybe understand it in that sense?
      - ask_b123 4y ago
        Who is Elul?
        2devnull 4y ago
        Jacques Ellul, the person throwaway7 cited as quoting Maria Motessori. Ellul was a Christian anarchist, which is of course redundant for most modalities of “Christian.” It explains the context of the Montessori reference, to me at least. Edit: a nice concise explanation of his view on pedagogy and montessori: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvpVXdhCQg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvpVXdhCQg
  - rjbwork 4y ago
    >In the end, it is still a system for producing workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs, and I think there should be some space for "i dont want to be a part of this, there must be some other way to live" https://www.youtube.com/c/ForestAnon https://www.youtube.com/c/ForestAnon you might be interested in this dude. he just walked away from society and built a hovel in the woods.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  Further on : [...] EDIT : > We note first of all that this technique must be implemented by the state, which alone has the means and the breadth to carry it through. But the rigorous application of the psychopedagogic technique means the end of private instruction — and therefore of a traditional freedom. [...] EDIT 2 : > despite all the pretentious talk about the aims of education — it is not the child in and for himself who is being educated, but the child in and for society. And the society, moreover, is not an ideal one, with full justice and truth, but society as it is. ORIGINAL : > When a society becomes increasingly totalitarian (and I say "society,” not “state”), it creates more and more difficulties of adaptation and requires its citizens to be conformist in the same degree. Thus, this technique becomes all the more necessary. I have no doubt that it makes men better balanced and “happier.” And there is the danger. It makes men happy in a milieu which normally would have made them unhappy, if they had not been worked on, molded, and formed for just that milieu. What looks like the apex of humanism is in fact the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them. They must have social consciences that allow them to strive for the same ends as society sets for itself. Clearly, when modern youth are fully educated in the new psychopedagogic technique, many social and political difficulties will disappear. Any form of government or social transformation becomes possible with individuals who have experienced this never-ending process of adaptation. The key word of the new human techniques is, therefore, adaptation, and we shall come upon it repeatedly as we consider each of these techniques separately. P.S.: One of main gists of Ellul's thought is that the technoscientific progress results in an increasingly totalitarian society.
  - throwaway71271 4y ago
    The Technological Society and Propaganda are amazing books with amazing ideas, and it was extremely difficult for me to see the light after I read them, specifically because of Ellul's writing style which just lives you no way to escape, and also because we are living now in his predictions. You can see the impact The Technological Society had on Kaczynski. If you are reading them, make sure you take your time.
svnt 4y ago
The near-inverse of Montessori is Waldorf, which is based on the work of Rudolf Steiner. If Montessori is skilled guides redirecting children to a constrained set of works until those kids do it themselves, Waldorf is a magical fairy godmother cuing children by song and felted puppets to engage their imagination in story and play. Both seem to have value. I believe Montessori’s methods feel so robotic in America because America is not early 20th century Europe, where so much magic, song, and fantasy was already an omnipresent part of the culture.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  But according to Montessori herself, "magic, song (?) and fantasy" were considered to be bad... at least where children education is concerned, but also probably for teenagers and adults, considering her Catholic views ?
  - anon291 4y ago
    Catholics don't hate fantasy, magic, or song. Some of the greatest fantasy novels are the works of devout Catholics, such as the Lord of the Rings, or Catholic-adjacents, such as the chronicles of Narnia.
  - marcus0x62 4y ago
    That’s an oversimplification — Montessori believed children have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality until the age of six. Fantasy is limited until that age in a Montessori school.
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    P.S.: To be clear, I'm reacting on one hand from this bit from the article : > She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. [...] > She especially disliked the fantastic lies told to children – the tooth fairy and Father Christmas and stories with talking animals. She saw them as an indulgence on the part of adults: > > We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance and the errors of the immature mind, just as at a not very remote date we were amused to see an infant laugh when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme. In short, it is we who are amused by the Christmas festivities and the credulity of the child. And on the other hand the hypocritical way in how many Christians classified Christian magic as "not magic" and then decreed magic to be evil (partially as a way to compete with paganism I guess ?)
082349872349872 4y ago
If you stop and think about the education in brave new world, how different is it from ours? Do we judge people's socioeconomic status by their clothes? Do we tell ourselves platitudes concerning other socioeconomic statuses? (you're poor and dirty, they're rich and arrogant, we're upright real honest to god middle class, etc.) Sure, Huxley turned everything to 11, but is there any part of the AF 632 world that doesn't reflect something that already exists here in AF 114?
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  No, because (despite what we tell ourselves about social progress) our world and society aren't that different than the world Huxley lived in and was commenting on. Dystopian fiction is outlined by an author's attempt to take notable societal patterns in their own time and extend them to their most extreme conclusions (sometimes modulo an interesting plot); one shouldn't be surprised when the most compelling works do a good job of capturing and explicating one aspect or another of the author's society.
kardianos 4y ago
Ah yes, reverberations of the New Soviet Man. "Awaken the Child's Social Conscience" to come into a world where they don't need to be controlled, but know exactly what they must do already. ... "truly humane". Also the inversion student-teacher roles sounds like Paulo Freire and his opposition to the strawman "banking model" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970). The question comes ultimately to: Is Rousseau correct that adults are correcting and that children in nature are pure, or are humans naturally selfish and children must be taught goodness and culture for them to live good and well. I believe in the second mode; the first one end in disaster for parents and society.
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  TIL, the banking model of education[1]. It doesn't seem like a strawman to me. It is of course only a model, and not a complete description of existing education. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_model_of_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_model_of_education
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  I dont question the teaching of 'goodness and culture', but how deep do you teach it? Imagine our ultimately technical society manages to build an education system that is so personal that it directly reprograms you. You go to school, hook up your airpods and get the program. How will culture change if everyone has exactly the same culture and goodness?
- lo_zamoyski 4y ago
  I think that if we wish to evaluate the Montessori method, we need to avoid cynical laziness on the one hand and utopian expectations on the other. Some things that came to mind while reading the article and the reactions to it: - Not all Montessori schools are the same. Not all are accredited by a Montessori body. - Children may benefit from varying methods, and Montessori seems capable of absorbing or accommodating them to by having the teacher adjust to each child's individual needs. - Individual needs do highlight the oddness of modern education, of how impersonal and bizarrely artificial it is. In a natural setting, children grow up in a family in which they learn from their parents and siblings, through the interactions with friends, and so on. Our social interactions, especially those that take place in the family, are all about responding to each other's individual and particular needs. Learning and what is needed to learn falls under this category of human needs. Learning is fully integral and self-same with life itself, not some thing to be artificially set apart into some separated, alienated thing, a factory that thinks of students as units. - As Montessori was Catholic, and Catholicism accepts the doctrine of original sin, it is more sensible to presume that she did not accept a Rousseauian anthropology. However, a rejection of Rousseauian anthropology doesn't automatically construe children as little monsters or reject the notion that we may become corrupted by others later in life. As a Catholic, Montessori would also be familiar with the age of reason before which children maintain innocence of any personal sin (sin entails culpability, culpability entails assent, assent entails understanding, and children still lack understanding). Of course, children can be said to be selfish in the sense that early in life, they have a good many basic needs that need to be met by others, etc. The effects of original sin concern the greater or lesser insubordination of both the corporeal faculties and the will to reason (the tendency to sin is a tendency to act, with greater or lesser awareness, against reason and what reason informs us is the good). - I doubt the encyclical criticizing "scholastic innovators" was criticizing Montessori specifically or all educational reform. Papal encyclicals are not some kind of grumpy, curmudgeonly grunt of the pope in which he complains about things young people are doing that he doesn't like. They're often quite pithy and contain a good deal of foresight and depth (Pius X's predictions w.r.t. "modernism" have played out, for example). Note that at the time, the modern system of schooling was not that old (some say it was inspired by Prussian methods). What he was likely criticizing were strange fads in education rooted in really bogus philosophical anthropologies. All education systems make tacit assumptions about human nature, and if they are wrong, they will misshape educational methods and possible misshape the child. There is no way Montessori held the do-what-thou-wilt view of children or would have opposed punishment categorically. She may have only objected to the prevailing educational paradigm, and in it, the way punishment was used.

musha68k 4y ago

I’m not sure I follow what you want to say here? Do you mean the education doesn’t reflect “reality”? If so, don’t you think it can, will and probably has to change? I’m also not sure where you see the parallel to Brave New World, what I remember is that there weren’t a lot of truth-seeking change agents around? Quite the contrary, no? I would appreciate any clarifications for personal reasons.

throwaway71271 4y ago
I mean that it is an attempt to build a system that integrates the child so deeply, that the child can not build resistance, Montessiori's ideal is to start education at birth, how else can you 'shape' the person to take their role and responsibility in society. In the end, it is still a system for producing workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs, and I think there should be some space for "i dont want to be a part of this, there must be some other way to live" The first few pages of brave new world gave me this vibe, thats why I said its in the eye of the beholder, you read as much into a book as out of it. In the same time, my daughter is growing up to be critically thinking and self aware and independent and is enjoying the school very much.
- sfpotter 4y ago
  I’m surprised you view Montessori education as some sinister thing despite your daughter doing well with it. I feel like you might be overthinking things. Leaving aside Montessori’s somewhat grandiose speech, it’s just a pedagogical mode which allows for more student independence. The main benefit, IMO, is that it reduces the amount of arbitrariness on the part of the instructor. Seems obvious that children will prefer to be able to have some say over what they do day to day. I don’t see how that squares at all with your suggestion that it’s brainwashing students a la Brave New World.
  - throwaway71271 4y ago
    Of course I am overthinking it, I am sending my kid there for the better part of the day :) if there is one thing I am allowed to overthink its the education system.
  - 2devnull 4y ago
    Elul was a Christian above all, so you can maybe understand it in that sense?
    - ask_b123 4y ago
      Who is Elul?
      - 2devnull 4y ago
        Jacques Ellul, the person throwaway7 cited as quoting Maria Motessori. Ellul was a Christian anarchist, which is of course redundant for most modalities of “Christian.” It explains the context of the Montessori reference, to me at least. Edit: a nice concise explanation of his view on pedagogy and montessori: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvpVXdhCQg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jVvpVXdhCQg
- rjbwork 4y ago
  >In the end, it is still a system for producing workers that fit in whatever the current regime needs, and I think there should be some space for "i dont want to be a part of this, there must be some other way to live" https://www.youtube.com/c/ForestAnon https://www.youtube.com/c/ForestAnon you might be interested in this dude. he just walked away from society and built a hovel in the woods.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
Further on : [...] EDIT : > We note first of all that this technique must be implemented by the state, which alone has the means and the breadth to carry it through. But the rigorous application of the psychopedagogic technique means the end of private instruction — and therefore of a traditional freedom. [...] EDIT 2 : > despite all the pretentious talk about the aims of education — it is not the child in and for himself who is being educated, but the child in and for society. And the society, moreover, is not an ideal one, with full justice and truth, but society as it is. ORIGINAL : > When a society becomes increasingly totalitarian (and I say "society,” not “state”), it creates more and more difficulties of adaptation and requires its citizens to be conformist in the same degree. Thus, this technique becomes all the more necessary. I have no doubt that it makes men better balanced and “happier.” And there is the danger. It makes men happy in a milieu which normally would have made them unhappy, if they had not been worked on, molded, and formed for just that milieu. What looks like the apex of humanism is in fact the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them. They must have social consciences that allow them to strive for the same ends as society sets for itself. Clearly, when modern youth are fully educated in the new psychopedagogic technique, many social and political difficulties will disappear. Any form of government or social transformation becomes possible with individuals who have experienced this never-ending process of adaptation. The key word of the new human techniques is, therefore, adaptation, and we shall come upon it repeatedly as we consider each of these techniques separately. P.S.: One of main gists of Ellul's thought is that the technoscientific progress results in an increasingly totalitarian society.
- throwaway71271 4y ago
  The Technological Society and Propaganda are amazing books with amazing ideas, and it was extremely difficult for me to see the light after I read them, specifically because of Ellul's writing style which just lives you no way to escape, and also because we are living now in his predictions. You can see the impact The Technological Society had on Kaczynski. If you are reading them, make sure you take your time.

svnt 4y ago

The near-inverse of Montessori is Waldorf, which is based on the work of Rudolf Steiner. If Montessori is skilled guides redirecting children to a constrained set of works until those kids do it themselves, Waldorf is a magical fairy godmother cuing children by song and felted puppets to engage their imagination in story and play. Both seem to have value. I believe Montessori’s methods feel so robotic in America because America is not early 20th century Europe, where so much magic, song, and fantasy was already an omnipresent part of the culture.

BlueTemplar 4y ago
But according to Montessori herself, "magic, song (?) and fantasy" were considered to be bad... at least where children education is concerned, but also probably for teenagers and adults, considering her Catholic views ?
- anon291 4y ago
  Catholics don't hate fantasy, magic, or song. Some of the greatest fantasy novels are the works of devout Catholics, such as the Lord of the Rings, or Catholic-adjacents, such as the chronicles of Narnia.
- marcus0x62 4y ago
  That’s an oversimplification — Montessori believed children have difficulty distinguishing between fantasy and reality until the age of six. Fantasy is limited until that age in a Montessori school.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  P.S.: To be clear, I'm reacting on one hand from this bit from the article : > She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. [...] > She especially disliked the fantastic lies told to children – the tooth fairy and Father Christmas and stories with talking animals. She saw them as an indulgence on the part of adults: > > We are amused by the illusions, the ignorance and the errors of the immature mind, just as at a not very remote date we were amused to see an infant laugh when it was tossed up and down, a proceeding now condemned by infantile hygiene as wrong and dangerous in the extreme. In short, it is we who are amused by the Christmas festivities and the credulity of the child. And on the other hand the hypocritical way in how many Christians classified Christian magic as "not magic" and then decreed magic to be evil (partially as a way to compete with paganism I guess ?)

082349872349872 4y ago

If you stop and think about the education in brave new world, how different is it from ours? Do we judge people's socioeconomic status by their clothes? Do we tell ourselves platitudes concerning other socioeconomic statuses? (you're poor and dirty, they're rich and arrogant, we're upright real honest to god middle class, etc.) Sure, Huxley turned everything to 11, but is there any part of the AF 632 world that doesn't reflect something that already exists here in AF 114?

InitialLastName 4y ago
No, because (despite what we tell ourselves about social progress) our world and society aren't that different than the world Huxley lived in and was commenting on. Dystopian fiction is outlined by an author's attempt to take notable societal patterns in their own time and extend them to their most extreme conclusions (sometimes modulo an interesting plot); one shouldn't be surprised when the most compelling works do a good job of capturing and explicating one aspect or another of the author's society.

kardianos 4y ago

Ah yes, reverberations of the New Soviet Man. "Awaken the Child's Social Conscience" to come into a world where they don't need to be controlled, but know exactly what they must do already. ... "truly humane". Also the inversion student-teacher roles sounds like Paulo Freire and his opposition to the strawman "banking model" (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970). The question comes ultimately to: Is Rousseau correct that adults are correcting and that children in nature are pure, or are humans naturally selfish and children must be taught goodness and culture for them to live good and well. I believe in the second mode; the first one end in disaster for parents and society.

amadeuspagel 4y ago
TIL, the banking model of education[1]. It doesn't seem like a strawman to me. It is of course only a model, and not a complete description of existing education. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_model_of_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banking_model_of_education
throwaway71271 4y ago
I dont question the teaching of 'goodness and culture', but how deep do you teach it? Imagine our ultimately technical society manages to build an education system that is so personal that it directly reprograms you. You go to school, hook up your airpods and get the program. How will culture change if everyone has exactly the same culture and goodness?
lo_zamoyski 4y ago
I think that if we wish to evaluate the Montessori method, we need to avoid cynical laziness on the one hand and utopian expectations on the other. Some things that came to mind while reading the article and the reactions to it: - Not all Montessori schools are the same. Not all are accredited by a Montessori body. - Children may benefit from varying methods, and Montessori seems capable of absorbing or accommodating them to by having the teacher adjust to each child's individual needs. - Individual needs do highlight the oddness of modern education, of how impersonal and bizarrely artificial it is. In a natural setting, children grow up in a family in which they learn from their parents and siblings, through the interactions with friends, and so on. Our social interactions, especially those that take place in the family, are all about responding to each other's individual and particular needs. Learning and what is needed to learn falls under this category of human needs. Learning is fully integral and self-same with life itself, not some thing to be artificially set apart into some separated, alienated thing, a factory that thinks of students as units. - As Montessori was Catholic, and Catholicism accepts the doctrine of original sin, it is more sensible to presume that she did not accept a Rousseauian anthropology. However, a rejection of Rousseauian anthropology doesn't automatically construe children as little monsters or reject the notion that we may become corrupted by others later in life. As a Catholic, Montessori would also be familiar with the age of reason before which children maintain innocence of any personal sin (sin entails culpability, culpability entails assent, assent entails understanding, and children still lack understanding). Of course, children can be said to be selfish in the sense that early in life, they have a good many basic needs that need to be met by others, etc. The effects of original sin concern the greater or lesser insubordination of both the corporeal faculties and the will to reason (the tendency to sin is a tendency to act, with greater or lesser awareness, against reason and what reason informs us is the good). - I doubt the encyclical criticizing "scholastic innovators" was criticizing Montessori specifically or all educational reform. Papal encyclicals are not some kind of grumpy, curmudgeonly grunt of the pope in which he complains about things young people are doing that he doesn't like. They're often quite pithy and contain a good deal of foresight and depth (Pius X's predictions w.r.t. "modernism" have played out, for example). Note that at the time, the modern system of schooling was not that old (some say it was inspired by Prussian methods). What he was likely criticizing were strange fads in education rooted in really bogus philosophical anthropologies. All education systems make tacit assumptions about human nature, and if they are wrong, they will misshape educational methods and possible misshape the child. There is no way Montessori held the do-what-thou-wilt view of children or would have opposed punishment categorically. She may have only objected to the prevailing educational paradigm, and in it, the way punishment was used.