Ready to learn
Happy Friday, everyone.
In Montessori and early childhood spaces more broadly, we talk a lot about developmental readiness. We want to present opportunities for a child to learn things when she can most readily capitalize on them. And we don’t want to push or pressure her to learn something before she can benefit.
Pushing learning too early is often a recipe for misery (for the child and us) and incentivizes mimicry over true understanding.
But how do you know when a child is ready for any particular skill or concept?
The most common answer I see outside of Montessori is that a child is ready to learn when she can do so quickly and easily. Take, for example, this excerpt from a podcast with Jodi Mockabee, author of “The Whole and Healthy Family”, often used as a popular audio for Instagram reels:
People throw their kids in preschool at the age of 2 and they’re just like monkeys putting these flashcards in front of their kids. It takes a kid 6 weeks to learn what an ‘A’ is. ... Well, [if you] wait until the child is 6 or 7 or just cognitively ready, it will take a minute for them to learn what the letter ‘A’ is. So, it seems like a lot of wasted time.
From an adult perspective, this makes sense. The faster and easier things are, the better. We want Pinterest recipes ready to eat in 30 minutes or less. We want tap-to-pay and fast battery charging and podcasts at 2x speed. We want efficiency!
One of Montessori’s most revolutionary discoveries, however, is that this is not the child’s perspective.
When you observe a toddler lift and carry a heavy jug or push a piece of unwieldy furniture from one corner of the room to the other—often doing so over and over again—his goal is not ease or efficiency. Indeed, the child’s goal seems to be to make things as difficult for himself as possible.
He is never content to gain a skill and then rest on his laurels, but seizes every opportunity to add a new challenge. As soon as he learns to stand, he wants to climb and to reach for things on tiptoe. As soon as he soon as he learns to walk, he wants to run or to walk while carrying something large or heavy.
As Montessori describes it:
The child does not follow the law of the least effort [like adults], but a law directly contrary. He uses an immense amount of energy over an unsubstantial end, and he spends not only driving energy, but intensive energy in the exact execution of every detail.1
Through intense concentrated effort, or “maximum effort” as Montessori refers to it, a child builds her character. She learns to have self-control, to persevere, to focus on details, to set and pursue her goals, to re-think, re-calibrate, and seek more knowledge when she runs into challenges.
When a young child in Montessori, typically aged 2.5 - 3, learns the letter ‘A’, she learns in a way that requires her to stretch herself, in a way that demands she use the utmost of her potential. But in doing so, she learns far more than just the letter ‘A’. She is crafting her soul.
When a child aged 6 or 7 learns the letter ‘A’, she may learn in a way that is quick and easy, it’s true. But that’s all there is to it. She learns the letter ‘A’ and nothing else.
A child is not ready to learn when a skill is so easy that it asks nothing of her. A child is ready to learn when the skill presents itself as a mountain worth climbing. And when we observe a child closely, she is constantly leaving clues about all the vistas she’s desperate to reach.
A 2.5-year-old, for example, is a brand-new communicator and obsessed with language. The idea that you can break words down into individual sounds, that you can pair each of those sounds with a symbol, and that, using those symbols, you can communicate with others in a whole new way is all a revelation to her. It’s a profound and enticing new power, a new way to experience mastery over herself and her world.
Attuning her ears to the sounds in words, recognizing each of the letters, and composing and decoding words is a tremendous challenge. It requires the child’s full concentration and intense effort.
A child who is presented with this challenge at this age is eager to conquer it. She might spend hours upon hours joyfully and effortfully practicing until one day, with the surprise of a prospector discovering gold, and just like the children in Montessori’s first classroom, she exclaims, “I have written!” or “I can read!”2
A child’s goal is not to get things over with as quickly and easily as possible. “To become a man of twenty, he must take twenty years,” as Montessori so eloquently puts it.3
A child’s goal is to build himself as a person. There is no shortcut and no easy path for this construction work, but he isn’t looking for one. No one can take his place or do the work for him, but he prefers to do it himself anyway. In all his endeavors, the child is merely striving to become someone who can say, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”
Enjoy your weekend!
Samantha Watkins
Content Marketing Manager, Higher Ground Education
Montessori, Maria. The Secret of Childhood (Montessori series Book 22) (p. 162). Kindle Edition.
Another example is young toddlers joyfully learning to put on their own coat:
Montessori, Maria. The Secret of Childhood (Montessori series Book 22) (p. 162). Kindle Edition.
For clarification, I would posit that the child’s actual goal is to understand the “thing” as thoroughly as possible based on the former state of knowledge and the possibility of more new information.