Elementary is urgent
Happy Friday, everyone.
I walked into an elementary classroom recently, and asked a group of children if they were interested in a lesson. I’m building some new science curriculum and wanted to try it out with students. The response was immediate: eyes lit up, hands flew up, and a chorus of voices exclaimed: Yes! Me! I want a lesson! Can I have a lesson too? Can I come?
I hadn’t even told them yet what the lesson was about.
This is the magic of elementary. If you have an elementary classroom in your school, or if you’re lucky enough to have an elementary child in your life, try it out. Offer to teach your elementary child something. Anything. Anything that you love or know how to do. Ask them if they want a lesson on paper making, or paleontology, or the nature of truth, or the different types of lizards that live in the American Southwest. Ask them if they want to learn to tie a knot or multiply big numbers. Anything. And for the most part, you will be surrounded by students eager to learn what you want to teach.
This doesn’t happen in early childhood, where the children can’t yet engage with most of these intellectual adventures. And it doesn’t happen in adolescence, when students now ask: Why should I learn this? How does this help me succeed in the world? It is only in the second plane of development, those magical elementary years, when a child does not ask WHY they should learn. They only know that they are driven to do it.
In the way a younger child is driven to explore his physical capabilities, an elementary child is driven to explore her intellectual capabilities. It is important, it is necessary, it is essential that she challenge her mind.
Can you think back to your own time in elementary school? Maybe you were a reader—can you remember being so immersed in a book that being pulled away felt like a physical pain? Walking down the hall to breakfast with the book still in front of you, unable to bear putting it away even for a minute? Can you remember becoming fascinated by some area of inquiry, whether dinosaurs or Ancient Egypt or hockey players or something else?
Of course, different children are interested in different things; you can engage anyone in a single lesson on the lizards of the Southwest or dinosaurs or Ancient Egypt—but it may be only one in a hundred for whom the seeds of that lesson burst into flower and become an enduring interest.
But this is exactly why the right elementary environment is so essential.
Elementary is the time when children learn they CAN fall in love with intellectual inquiry, with mental effort and reward. And this sensitive period, once shut, is very difficult to regain.
When a need isn’t met in early childhood, there’s usually some definite external sign. The child screams, or bites; cries, or throws a tantrum.
Whether we recognize the unmet need or not, the child is telling us—as loudly as they can—about the problem. But what about the elementary child whose driving, primary, fundamental need for intellectual challenge, exploration, and growth isn’t met?
She usually doesn’t throw a tantrum. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t bite, many students don’t even “act out.” Instead, they grow quiet. And quiescent. Carl Sagan put it like this:
You go talk to kindergartners or first-grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts. They ask deep questions. They ask, "What is a dream, why do we have toes, why is the moon round, what is the birthday of the world, why is grass green?” These are profound, important questions. They just bubble right out of them.
You go talk to 12th graders and there's none of that. They've become incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade.
Tragically, frighteningly, that terrible thing often happens silently. An elementary child deprived of challenge, of stimulation, of the ability to stretch her intellectual muscle and grow simply accepts a new reality where learning is not fun. Not accessible. Not worth doing. She sits quietly in a class and does enough to get by.
And something so vital is lost.
So why is Montessori elementary so important? Why is the elementary age so essential, so urgent, to get right? It’s the time when children are opening their minds to the world—driven to learn in a way they will never again experience. This is the time when children are building their relationship with mental effort; deciding if they can have deep, enduring values. This is when they discover that the world around them is understandable and accessible to them.
The elementary child is magical: we need only revive within ourselves a fraction of that spirit, that excitement towards and for the world, to understand how beautiful this time is. And as you look at your elementary children, remember too that it is fragile. They will not scream if mistreated. They will not always show you externally if their needs are not met. They will simply and tragically lose that fundamental drive to learn, to explore, and to understand.
So what is the role of the elementary guide? They are the guardians of magic.
Have a great weekend!
Laura Mazer
VP of Curriculum