All or nothing
Hi everyone,
There is a broad consensus—now more than ever, thanks to covid-related frustrations—that the educational establishment is broken.
But people disagree on solutions. Not just in a small way, but a big way. People disagree over the kind of solution needed. They disagree not just on tactics, but on grand strategy.
One school of thought holds that to fix education what is needed are standards, clear benchmarks that students at certain grade levels are expected to meet. This has been an increasingly common line since Reagan, and manifests in large-scale projects like the Common Core or NGSS science standards. On almost all of the details of the implementation, including pedagogical approach, these projects are largely, and even deliberately, silent.
One of the most common patterns in educational technology is to see solutions in education as focused on delivery and distribution. Educational content should be put into a new form (e.g. online content), one that anyone can access cheaply and go through at their own pace. This involves some pedagogical innovation around individualization, but the scope and sequence of the curriculum is left untouched.
There are pockets of educational reform that focus very specifically on curriculum development, for example, on textbook development, or on developing innovative math content. This approach does not typically include developing the corresponding teacher training. Other pockets focus strictly on pedagogy, such as Project Based Learning, and are conspicuously handwavey around curriculum. Still others focus on reforming the role of the teacher, parenting, demography, access, class size, protecting the autonomy of the child, and so on.
What most every strategy has in common is narrowness. There is a strong view on what change is required along one or two dimensions of education. Along all the other dimensions of education, it’s at best a hopeful gesture at a better approach, and worst an embrace of the status quo.
The result is reform that is hobbled, of which examples abound. A New York Times Magazine article from a few years ago, representative of a complaint that recurs at regular intervals, lamented that the latest promising innovations in math education have fallen flat because “once again, the reforms have arrived without any good system for helping teachers learn to teach them.” Alternate curricula, like Kahn Academy, invariably end up mapping to something like the Common Core when it comes to defining standards and benchmarks for education. (Montessorians aren’t immune to this, and there are reasons why it’s important to do such mappings—we do it too!—but there’s also a danger that they get used in a way that compromises the core program.)
The huge, bureaucratized nature of the educational establishment makes piecemeal change virtually impossible. When some aspects of the system are taken for granted—e.g. textbooks, or assessments, or teaching methods, or the structure of the school day—they bring with them the inertia of the whole establishment. The state of affairs forces an “all or nothing” approach, where to solve any problem you have to solve them all.
One of the most unique things about Higher Ground is that we have adopted a comprehensive strategy. We fall squarely on the “all” side of “all or nothing”.
No aspect of education is taken for granted. If we can’t find a history textbook to our satisfaction, we’ll make do with the best resources we can find—while in parallel writing a new history curriculum. We’ll also think about what our teachers need to know to deliver that curriculum and develop Prepared Montessorian training for it. With technology, we have a number of customized systems and are increasingly working on using on our inhouse platforms, such as Altitude—with the goal of serving and integrating with a radically different in-classroom approach. Yet another domain: a great many quality schools struggle with funding and logistics, or crumble after changes in leadership. We have specialists committed to developing systems of operations and leadership that endure. I could go on with our approach to financing schools, to designing facilities, to earning the partnership of parents, and countless other things that are often stumbling blocks for others but are for us tremendous assets.
We do everything. In manufacturing terms, we’re vertically integrated. In analogy to the world of software, we do full stack development. In the language of Montessori, we take a holistic approach to the extreme.
Adopting a comprehensive strategy comes naturally to us because we are radicals in our approach to education. To be a radical in education is to want to get education right fundamentally and in principle—from the root up. We have a willingness to go as deep as need be in thinking about the mind, learning, and human development. That’s the “root” part. Being comprehensive is the “up”. It’s systematically implementing it, making sure that everything is growing from our roots and that nothing is grafted on.
Montessori reconceived education at the level of fundamental principles defined in terms of the nature of the developing child. She also saw that a comprehensive strategy followed from this: the physical environment of the child, the social make-up of the child’s cohort, the pedagogical preparation of the guide, and so on. The holistic approach to the child is an instance of vertical integration.
I think we push this holism even further. We are unusually good about and committed to the “up”. We ask: can we further the holistic approach to the child by engaging parents? What kind of support structure do teachers need to fully engage in their role as guides—what’s the prepared environment for educators? What does it take to establish quality Montessori schools systematically and consistently, and in a way that reaches a huge number of children? What do our principles really mean for older students—should we really be satisfied with the existing curricula for middle school and beyond, as many other great Montessori schools do, or would something different be better?
I don’t know of any other group of educators that has taken on such an ambitious scope. It can feel daunting, really, it’s liberating. It means that nothing can come up that is outside of our problem domain. We’ll never have to rely on cobbling together whatever is already out there. We’re unshackled from the status quo, and thus free to create real, enduring change in education.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium