Human variance, unleashed
Happy Friday, everyone.
In a typical school, the question of what to do with children who are exceptional, with children who push the upper bound of some desirable characteristic or skill, is fraught.
Should they skip a grade? Sure, maybe. What if, with respect to the curriculum, they could skip 7 grades? Hmm—putting a third grader with tenth graders sounds like it might have some social drawbacks. Should there be a separate “gifted” track? Again, maybe. It’s not always easy to openly say what this implies about the students who aren’t on it.
In the face of these challenges, there are common questions available that lead to inaction: Do we really need to do anything here? Won’t these exceptional students be fine no matter what we do?
The comparison to what happens if a student is falling behind in a typical school is stark. The educators who teach those students are scrutinized. Special budgetary resources are allocated. Legislation is passed with great fanfare (e.g. No Child Left Behind) to address negative variance. No one wants their students to be behind grade level.
Education today is in a state where raising the floor is an overriding concern, and raising the ceiling is almost immaterial.
This is unfortunate for Montessori education, because raising the ceiling—enabling exceptional students to learn faster, to do more, to go further—is an area where Montessori excels.
To be clear, Montessori also raises the floor. Montessori became famous for teaching destitute children in the slums of Rome how to read and write at the age of 3. This was taken (correctly, in my view) as evidence of a newly raised floor: all children should be able to achieve early literacy. Montessori was an unapologetic universalist who over and over again made the case that all children can learn more things earlier than is commonly supposed.
But Montessori education raises the ceiling even more than it raises the floor. Montessori solves all the problems of how to support exceptional students:
Montessori is mixed age; the assumption of high variance in student abilities is baked into the social dynamics of the classroom. The notion of “grade level” is just jettisoned.
Montessori lessons are individualized, given to one student or a small group of students at similar ability levels (regardless of age), rather than to the whole class.
The Montessori curriculum allows for fully independent practice, with built-in control of error, enabling students to progress in their work without much educator oversight.
A student’s goal-setting, and a teacher’s lesson planning for that student, are individualized according to that student's talents and needs.
The Montessori curriculum is redundant across programs. The Children’s House curriculum and teacher training, for example, includes materials and lessons from elementary, just in case a preschool-aged student is ready to progress.
All of this adds up. Not only does nothing stop a student who, say, is rocketing ahead in math, giving that student rocket fuel is the natural thing that occurs. The curriculum is there. The teachers are prepared. Typical considerations of social awkwardness or tradeoffs with whole-class progression are simply not present. The normal classroom mechanisms of tracking and advancement carry the student forward.
The result is that, especially in Children’s House and beyond, there is more variance in student performance. Yes, the baseline level of performance is higher—the floor is also raised. But there will normally be some number of students becoming, say, a history whiz or a math savant, in ways that vastly exceed most of their classroom peers.
This point is, in my experience, undersold by Montessorians. Parents, especially parents today, often have legitimate concerns about their children being held back, about the material not being challenging enough, about the special intelligence or talents of their child being downplayed or ignored by the systems designed to educate them.
Not incidentally: it is not true that the exceptional children “will be fine no matter what”. Exceptional children can go very wrong when they are treated as interchangeable with their peers.
They might learn that they don't need to try very hard, that things are always easy, that a measure of laziness is fine. They might not learn the pleasure of stretching themselves, the habits of persistence and sustained effort, the feeling of coming up against their limits. They might conclude that school—and other like institutions in the world—are simply not for them, and develop the beginnings of alienation. They might learn to use their intelligence to avoid problems rather than to solve them.
Montessori enables children to excel, and, miraculously, it does so without major tradeoffs in resource expenditures or social development. It does so naturally, as a matter of course, without stigma or fanfare. This is a holy grail for any system of education, and it should be embraced and celebrated.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Bateman
Board of Directors, Higher Ground Education