Happy Friday, everyone.
I believe we are entering a period of great change in education—an era in which we will rethink fundamental assumptions, and completely transform the way human children are educated.
There are promising signs of this approaching change. As one small example, journalist Travis Pillow comments on the emergence of horizontal learning organizations:
For most of its history, American public education was controlled by tens of thousands of vertically integrated monopolies. School districts built the schools, hired the teachers, scheduled the school buses, and ran the lunchrooms.
Horizontal learning organizations may operate schools themselves, but they also support learning environments in other ways. They may supply online instruction or logistical and pedagogical support to schools operated by others—or cooperatives and microschools operated by families or community groups. Like charter management organizations, they often work to instill organizational cultures and promote particular educational philosophies.
(Pillow’s piece mentions Higher Ground as an example of an organization experimenting with horizontal networks.)
David Brooks, writing in the New York Times last week, lists many changes we are seeing across the country. But whatever promise the future holds, Brooks also notes that there remains an absence of leadership:
Parents, of course, are aware of these new realities and have begun to adjust their thinking… but the nation’s leaders seem blissfully unaware... [Y]ou would think that education would be one of the most talked about subjects in America right now… What we’re seeing here is a complete absence of leadership—even in the midst of a crisis that will literally bend the arc of American history.
The reality is that we are in the early innings of what will be a very long game. The exhaustion with imperfect virtual solutions has led to a post-covid “bounce back,” a bounce from radical experiments to traditional schooling, and many are skeptical that covid-era innovations will have staying power.
A lot of the political chatter will turn out to be noise. Much of the discourse deals mostly with who pays for education, along with a few hot-button “culture wars” issues. Despite the opportunity for a great rethink, the debates aren’t yet centered on fundamental issues. They are getting there—there is fundamental rethinking happening, and the tectonic shift that everyone is feeling is real—but they aren’t yet reflected in the national dialogue which tends to focus on more superficial considerations. A great rethink is here already, but it isn’t evenly distributed.
As I mention in this essay, the thing that’s really exciting is the promise of a coming golden age of pedagogy. An age in which we rethink not just who funds education, or who makes choices about education, but the why and how of education: the purpose of education, the nature of human learning, the role of motivation, the relationship between one’s view of schooling and one’s view of the good life.
The world of education needs political innovators and technological innovators, but most desperately it needs pedagogical innovators. It needs people who don’t just rethink the structural conditions of education and the tools and interfaces of education—it needs people who rethink education. People who apply the insights of philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science in fresh, radical ways.
The world, fortunately, has one such innovator in Maria Montessori. Montessori draws on Enlightenment themes of agency, self-creation, the cognitive and practical power of the human mind, and the liberty of the human spirit. And she couples this foundational framework to a lifetime of deep, novel, observational insights into human development. The result is an entirely different way to understand the nature and scope of the educational project.
The work now is to draw upon Montessori’s identifications, and to innovate on their basis. It’s the creative effort of using her genius as a launchpad, much the same way that the insights of Newton and Lavoisier and Darwin have been applied, extended, and built upon in the past centuries.
In a world split into zealous adherents and myopic critics, Montessori herself longed for collaborators.
“[N]obody will ever collaborate,” she said around 1920. “Either they accept what I say, and ask for more, or else they waste precious time in criticizing. What I want now is a body of colleagues, research workers, who will examine what I have already done, apply my principles as far as I have gone, not in a spirit of opposition or conviction, but as a matter of experiment.” What she sought was for someone to “work shoulder to shoulder with me in a scientific independence.”
She sadly did not get that in the 1920s. But with the disruptions of covid, the loosening of the death grip of the establishment and emergent political openness to change, the immense progress in psychology and technology, and the newly activated energy of parents to consider something different, I have hope Montessori will find her collaborators, finally, in the 2020s and beyond.
Ray Girn
Founder and CEO, Higher Ground Education
"What I want now is a body of colleagues, research workers, who will examine what I have already done, apply my principles as far as I have gone, not in a spirit of opposition or conviction, but as a matter of experiment.” Maria understood that there was more work to be done in the near and distant future. For me, she left behind the example of following the child, collaboration, and doing small things with great love.