My reflections on how Montessori education charted the course for my life.
By Daya Ambirajan
Independence is a quality that has been important to me ever since childhood. I like to do things and decide things by myself, without being told what to do by external forces. Throughout my life, my process of learning has reflected this — in both my hobbies and academic career, most of my learning has been done independently. I enjoy tinkering with things in order to figure them out — literally, in the case of my hobbies including guitar and crochet, and figuratively, in the case of mathematics. I like to take my own time to figure out for myself where I need improvement, rather than have someone spoon feed the answer to me.
I attribute this quality to the Montessori system. Rather than explaining concepts outright (like in a traditional classroom), the Montessori teacher acts as a facilitator. They enable the child to seek out learning on their own, through materials placed in the classroom. I spent my early schooling years in the early 2000s in a Montessori environment, so I have experienced this firsthand.
The Montessori system allows children to pick and choose their own activities under a framework laid out by the teacher. Within this framework, they can choose the activity, as well as where and with whom they would like to work. In my preschool years, I chose to spend my first two years of school solely building my vocabulary and learning language. I only spent the last six months working on mathematics in order to catch up with basic concepts. While this may look like a discrepancy in my learning, my knowledge of math did not suffer. In fact, I did well in the subject throughout school.
This ability to understand my own needs has aided me in making important decisions to this day. I used a process of elimination to choose my stream in the 11th standard, and again to choose my undergraduate degree — I first ruled out the subjects that I did not desire to take, and this was only possible because I understood my own strengths and weaknesses.
Another quality that my preschool years have instilled in me is that of focus. The ‘three-hour work cycle’ within the Montessori method is the idea that children should be left uninterrupted for three hours at a time, free to pick up any activity they want to do. In my Montessori days, I would pour liquids from one container to another for hours on end, so much so that my classmate wrote his very own report card for me about my methods of pouring. This activity is not a traditional form of education by any means. However, it gave me the space to concentrate for a long time on something I enjoyed.
This ability to choose something I enjoyed as a hobby and focus on it for long periods of time has helped me throughout my life. When I was in the 11th standard, I crocheted around a hundred items for a stall in a local sale. This is a feat that would not have been possible without the ability to stick to the project and complete every item that I had planned to make for the sale. So, Montessori education not only helped me to identify that crochet is something I enjoy, but also to sit with it till a project is complete to my satisfaction.
Montessori taught me that everything should be considered as work — right from the cleaning and maintenance of space. It has taught me to break down whole processes into parts, and to acknowledge and dedicate time to every part. Thus, it has enabled me to take activities such as cleaning, maintenance and organization into account when planning. It has also enabled me to see the whole picture of any project I take on, and all the tasks that are required to complete it.
Montessori education helps children learn using the world around them, rather than from a textbook. Our teacher, for instance, used the word ‘sharing’ in order to teach children the concept of division in math. While in many instances, division is a purely theoretical concept, connecting it to the real-world idea of sharing helps children ground what they learn in class to the real world. Personally, I was so struck by the idea of division essentially meaning to share something equally among several parties that as a small child, I made a valentine’s day card with division signs on it.
The Montessori idea of concrete-to-abstract, that is, using a concrete prop (such as the idea of people to share with) to explain an abstract concept like division is a technique beneficial throughout life. It has helped me with my high school and college classes as well, especially those to do with social sciences. In preschool, we were always taught abstract concepts using observation (i.e., what we could personally see). With these tools in hand, all I had to do to understand concepts in social science was look around me. Marxist concepts such as class conflict and hegemony were readily available to me just by looking at the people around me and how they interacted with others. Thus, Montessori has given me the ability to see concepts in social science as more than words in a textbook, and as actual observations of people interacting.
So, as a Montessori-educated individual, I can confidently say that the driving principles of my early education and the tools that it has given me still help me to this day. The method of teaching and learning has left me with a broader understanding of the world and how to navigate it than a more traditional kind of schooling would have. It has taught me independence, given me the ability to solve problems and come up with solutions, and it has taught me to truly understand the mechanics of the world around me.