On Writing

Maria Montessori's methods stood heavily on the idea that writing comes before reading. Her little schools were made famous by the "writing explosion" that took place among the four-year-olds as they spontaneously began writing words on all the surfaces they could find. She started by teaching them their letters, but they taught themselves to put them together to make written words. Before they had even seen a book. Not only that, but within a few months of learning to put letters together and make words, they could put words together and write epistles. By themselves. A group of four-year-olds whose parents were mostly factory workers.

This is completely opposite to the approach taken in most schools. In kindergarten, kids are taught their letters and how to write their names, but the first goal is to introduce them to books.

It may sound strange that an obsessive lover of books such as myself might advocate against their use, but I think Montessori had an important idea. Not only does it operate on the assumption that tactile activities promote more thorough learning, but words mean the most when we use them to communicate with others, not when we use them to understand others.

People, especially children, are the center of their own universe. Why would a kid want to learn to read someone else's thoughts before learning how to write his/her own? Some people say it's because it's easier, and therefore comes as a step in a natural progression. But according to Montessori, children don't think of the world in terms of what is easy and what is hard. That is something that they learn later—in my opinion, later is whenever they begin to rank pop culture above their own intellect. In other words, I think laziness of any form is something we learn, not something we unlearn.

Maybe it's a good thing I don't have kids, because I would always be testing unconventional, experimental methods of education with them. I do that with cooking, too, but there's a big difference between a child's mind and a dinner dish. And even though most experimental cooking comes out rather nice, there's no guarantee that a kid wouldn't be warped by someone who used educational methods and theories that are not part of the established canon of "research based, data-driven" packages that vendors love to sell to traditional schools.