A world for agency
Happy Friday, everyone.
Montessori environments are meticulously prepared. They are beautiful and orderly. Craftsmanship and intentionality are brought to every detail of the furnishings, the learning materials, and their arrangements. A great Montessori environment is, for the children who spend time in it, attractive, predictable, and usable.
One reason for this is because children are absorbing their environments. The Absorbent Mind is the name of one of Montessori’s best books. In it she wrote that
Impressions do not merely enter [the child’s] mind, they form it, they incarnate themselves in him.
Children have minds that work differently than adult minds. Adult minds consciously consider, deliberate, filter. They are like painters, thinking about how to capture what they see with great care, brushstroke by brushstroke. Children’s minds are like cameras. They take in more information, in more detail, more holistically, and more directly to their subconscious. Painters can selectively ignore bits of ugliness or disorder or uselessness. Cameras cannot—and neither can small children. So we need to be extra attentive to what they take in.
But there is another, and, to my mind, more basic reason why a prepared environment is so important. Children are active agents. They learn and grow, first and foremost, by making choices and doing things. And where do they do those things? With what do they do them? If the child is acting, what are they acting with and on? What is the raw material for their activities? Their surroundings. Their world. Their environment.
When people think of learning, and especially when people think of education or school, they most naturally think of instruction or study or exercises. What comes to mind are teachers and lectures, textbooks and problem sets, homework and labs. And I should say immediately: none of these things are bad. Even homework, which I am quite critical of as a standard tool, has its uses. Lectures for older students and grownups are, if anything, underrated. People do, in fact, learn from all of these things.
But if those exhaust one’s techniques of learning, then one has lost the plot. The most fundamental thing to understand about human beings, including human children, is that they are independent actors in the world. They move about, see and touch things, manipulate things, make active mental connections, deliberate voluntarily, set and pursue goals. And these things are all related to one another: making mental connections, for example, is supported by a broader context of self-directed activity.
If the child is an agent in the world, the big implication for education is that educators can do their work not first and foremost by direct communication, but indirectly, by modifying the world. We can tell the child what to do, and direct activity that way—but it is much more effective to offer the child a place with a whole suite of activities. If children learn from the world, we should make it as suitable for learning and growth as possible. If agency is fundamental, then our immediate question as educators should be: what sort of world is optimized for the child’s agency? As Montessori put it:
It is on the environment that we must set to work to enable the child to manifest himself freely.
As valuable as communication is (e.g. textbooks, lectures), as valuable as repetition is (e.g. study, exercises), the fundamental thing is the child interfacing with the world. Textbooks are one small (if important) part of the range of things that worlds afford; standard school exercises are one small (if important) part of the range of activities one can perform in the world. We can do more to prepare the environment than filling it with such things, especially for small children.
The concept of “environment” is quite precise. An environment is a part of the world, when we consider it it as a space surrounding a person (or an animal). The psychologist J. J. Gibson wrote that
No animal could exist without an environment surrounding it. Equally, although not so obvious, an environment implies an animal (or at least an organism) to be surrounded. This means that the surface of the earth, millions of years ago before life developed on it. was not an environment, properly speaking. The earth was a physical reality, a part of the universe, and the subject matter of geology. It was a potential environment, prerequisite to the evolution of life on this planet. We might agree to call it a world, but it was not an environment.
What it means to think of the child as independent, as active, as an agent, is to think of the child as actively interfacing with the world. The part of the world that surrounds the child, that the child has the potential to interface with, is the child’s environment. An environment contains an interrelated set of opportunities for exploration and action; an environment for children is optimized to give children great opportunities to exercise their powers, to practice and grow by navigating and acting in a complex surrounds.
A Montessori environment is an environment in this sense: a highly engineered surrounding for an active child. It enables children in a million ways. It makes certain competencies possible to them, which makes certain choices possible to them:
It has somewhere between dozens and hundreds of learning materials—how many being dependent on the age range of the classroom.
Each material affords a child a course of action that would not otherwise be available.
Each material is related to the affordances of the other materials in the room: there are sequences of materials, and using one things makes other things more enticing and usable.
All these materials are arrayed in shelves that enable a child’s access and understanding, with tables and chairs nearby that enable a child’s work, in a logical and sparse way that enables a child to maintain order and cleanliness (another important affordance).
These materials have diversity of opportunity, centered around high-value opportunities: a child can do everything from prepare a snack, to practice skip counting, to set a table with beautiful flower arrangements, to mastering the foundations of political geography. All the art is a child’s eye level, enabling them to see and contemplate it.
Not all environments afford children even half-decent opportunities for action. The Montessori environment affords children tremendous opportunities, in number and in quality, that reinforce one another, that contribute to the development of competence and character.
High agency education just is education by means of preparing environments. There is really no other way to do it. Our work, as Montessori educators and as educators concerned with nurturing the agency of children, is centrally about preparing and maintaining environments. Maniacally doing so. Elevating doing so to the level of a lifelong craft.
We have two big jobs as educators, with respect to the environment:
prepare an environment in which a child can thrive, and
help the child understand its affordances.
We call the latter work presentations or lessons, and it is important. But the former, preparing the environment—making everything in the environment ready, clean, available, perfect—is more important. Presentations connect a child to the world. But attempting to connect the child to a suboptimal or even disabling world—if the child needs sponges or beads or paper and cannot find them or use them—is useless.
I probably don’t have to tell you that the amount of work it takes to maintain such an environment, when it is constantly by small children, is considerable. But it is worth it. The prepared environment is the thing that enables choice, capability, agency.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Bateman
Higher Ground Board of Directors