Freedom of Choice - An Important Principle of Montessori

“Let us leave the life free to develop within the limits of the good, and let us observe this inner life developing. This is the whole of our mission.” – Maria Montessori

Montessori encourages freedom within limits through the design of the prepared environment. Dr. Montessori gave a lot of importance to freedom in the classroom. She makes a powerful argument that the roots of tyranny are in adults forcing children to obey their commands. When a child spends his entire day, year after year, following the instruction of adults and has no right to follow his own interests, he may come to believe that his own interests are unimportant. He may come to believe that his thoughts are not as important as the thoughts of the adults who are teaching him.

Montessori believed in discipline. But she realized that the way to reach it was by creating environments where children found engaging materials to use. When they are fully engaged in the work that appeals to them at their particular level of development, they become self-disciplined. You see in Montessori classrooms a group of three-, four- and five-year-old’s hard at work. No teacher could command such discipline, yet the children freely give it to their own self-chosen work.

Freedom of choice becomes a habit of mind. Freedom to explore your own thoughts and interests can open the floodgates to creativity, as it has with such Montessori alumni as the co-founders of Google, Wikipedia and Amazon.com – all Montessori graduates.

At @pepschoolv2, we understand all these learning differences and created an environment for children where they come in each day and choose what they want to work on.

LOOKING AT THE WORLD THROUGH THE MONTESSORI METHOD

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.

Problem Solving Skills, The Montessori Way

How do children get better at problem-solving?

The Montessori answer is this — children improve their problem-solving skills by continually having opportunities to independently solve real-life problems that pose just the right level of challenge. If the challenge is too easy, they get bored; if it is too hard, they become frustrated and give up.

Getting kids to assemble DIY furniture independently is a great way to promote problem-solving in small, collaborative groups! It is not trivial to do, and certainly not too hard.

In this exercise, children had to figure out how all the constituent parts of their newly purchased document cabinets, file holders and shelves fitted together. No help other than the (scanty) printed directions!

In 90 minutes, it was all perfectly done. A wonderful way to spend a morning, and certainly better than having adults do it for them!

Control the urge to intervene

Observe how carefully this 22-month old child is trying to string beads together.

Of all our many responsibilities towards children in school, perhaps the greatest one is to develop and protect their sense of concentration. Very often, this is achieved by controlling our adult urge to interfere in their work, and allowing them to correct their own mistakes.

While this is easy to say, it is very hard to do even for trained and experienced Montessori teachers. We have to keep reminding ourselves that struggle is good, that the young child learns best when struggle leads to discovery.

To help foster the child's concentration and independence, Dr Maria Montessori had her own advice for teachers (and parents!):

"I suggested to some teachers that they should wear a belt with beads attached. Then every time they have an impulse to interfere, they would draw a bead along. This is very useful, because when we have an impulse, we must act, and the reaction with the bead is a help. From day to day, one would make observations upon oneself in this way until one came to the point of not having to draw any more beads. We should then find that we had acquired a great calm and sense of repose. Perhaps we should have become transformed within. At any rate, we should have learnt the following: that almost all these impulses to action are unnecessary."

Fantasy & Reality in Montessori

An immediate difference most people notice between conventional kindergartens and Montessori environments is the absence of fantasy in Montessori.

When young children are building their own models of the world based on their formative experiences, is it fair to offer them things that are inconsistent with reality? Rather than providing children with amusing but fake tools, we prefer to offer them the real thing (real mops, brooms, knives, glasses, and so on).

However, this does not mean that Montessori children are discouraged from pretend play. Very often, children enjoy experimenting in different ways: both inside the environment (with the real tools of practical life), and outdoors (with that all-time favourite - sand). But this natural inclination to pretend should not be mistaken for a love of fantasy. Dr Montessori believed that children revealed their unmet desires during pretend play -- no wonder then that children love "making" yummy food in the sand pit!

Movement and Cognitive Development

Nearly a century ago, Maria Montessori pointed out that it was a grave error to think of purposeful movement as something different from the higher functions of the mind. Recent research now shows that movement and cognitive development are indeed closely related.

As Montessori educators, we recognise that children have an need to engage in movement. Purposeful movement is at the center of the Montessori approach to early childhood education, as it confers emotional, intellectual and physical benefits.

If you watch a Montessori environment closely, you will see coordinated movement is everywhere: be it carrying materials carefully, balancing on narrow beams, or carrying and moving chairs without any noise.

As children spend time in a Montessori school, they learn to coordinate their body and place it under the ready control of their mind.

Preparing Children For Life

People often ask us why we have practical life activities in the Montessori environment. How are these related to the child's development, they wonder.

At one level, these activities are great for building fine motor skills, understanding sequential processes and developing concentration in young children. However, we must remember that practical life activities must eventually be PRACTICAL! They have to help equip children for real life.

When our 6-8 year olds stay in school overnight for sleepovers, they put all that practice in practical life activities to use. The children are responsible for planning the dinner menu (they decided on salad & sandwiches), purchasing the groceries, doing the actual cooking (with minimal adult assistance), serving dinner, and cleaning up after.

Speaking as adults, we very much enjoyed the hospitality!

The Toddler's Sense of Dignity

We often forget that children don't automatically understand how to do some self-care tasks (blow their nose, comb their hair, wash their hands) that adults assume are easy. Remember: children really WANT to be able to do these things well & take care of themselves.

This wonderful extract from Dr. Montessori's book The Secret of Childhood, details the deep sense of personal dignity in young children:

“One day I decided to give the children a slightly humorous lesson on how to blow their noses. Since after I had shown them different ways to use a handkerchief, I ended by indicating how it could be done as unobtrusively as possible. I took out my handkerchief in such a way that they could hardly see it and blew my nose as softly as I could. The children watched me in rapt attention, but failed to laugh. I wondered why, but I had hardly finished my demonstration when they broke out into applause that resembled a long repressed ovation in a theatre. I had never heard such tiny hands make so much noise, and I had no idea that such small children would applaud so enthusiastically. It then occurred to me that I had perhaps touched a sensitive spot in their little social world.

No one really teaches them how they should blow their noses. When I tried to do so, they felt compensated for past humiliations, and their applause indicated that I had not only treated them with justice but had enabled them to get a new standing in society. Long experience has taught me that this is a proper interpretation of the incident. I have come to appreciate the fact that children have a deep sense of personal dignity.”

The Spirit of Self-Reliance

People often wonder why we make a big deal about children taking off their shoes on their own & placing them in the appropriate slots.

Wouldn't it be faster and easier if the adults just help them do it? Of course it would, but that is not the point. In Montessori, the goal is not to just get the act done, but to help the child recognise that they can take care of themselves.

Self-reliance and improved problem solving are important products of allowing children to become independent. Further, indirectly, children build their concentration, fine motor skills and co-ordination by relentlessly using their hands for a variety of self-care tasks.

Most of all, remember that we can help children remove their shoes. But what we cannot do is build self-confidence & independence FOR them. There are no shortcuts to this.