Montessori and Heroes

Just thought I’d share something I wrote this week for the parents at my school. It’s about how our Montessori approach can help children build heroic habits. Ties in to the discussion at the end of today’s session about developing a secular religion of man-worship.

Mr. G’s Reflections, Volume 2

In Volume 1 of Mr. G’s reflections, I discussed how Authentic Montessori at Atlas Academy views your child’s mental health as the foundation for educational attainment.

This time I’ll try to explain another core tenet of Authentic Montessori. After reading, I hope you’ll see how this tenet prepares our students to succeed in life on the level of the world’s greatest achievers.

Here’s the tenet: Authentic Montessori is a “motivation first, skills second” approach; versus both the “skills only” approach of Traditional Education, and the “motivation only” approach of Progressive Education.

In a traditional classroom, elementary students learn and practice certain skills that are meant to prepare them to get a job later in life. In practice, this approach neglects the child’s motivation to various degrees. At its best, an amazing teacher is able to motivate a few students to want to learn and practice the skills. But, in its most common form, students are simply told that they have to learn the skills whether or not they want to. For the most part, traditional education sidesteps the issue of motivation, leaving it up to the teachers to attempt to motivate their students or not.

The trouble with this approach is that motivating a student is so incredibly difficult, that it actually needs to be the primary focus of education. I can illustrate this with an analogy. Imagine a gym full of adults exercising. Each of them are listening to their particular, preferred music, using their particular, preferred machines, for reasons that are very personal and particular to the individual (health, fitness, vacations, relationships, energy, etc.). Motivation is like a bullseye on a dartboard; it’s so narrow and particular to each individual. Given how hard it is to hit the mark, even for oneself, it’s not hard to imagine how nearly impossible it is for a teacher to find the motivational center for every student in the class.

Not only is motivation incredibly difficult, it also has tremendous potential which is unknown to the traditional approach to education. Young students are capable of such strongly motivated activity as would be unheard of in a traditional setting.

Take one of our Kindergartners who took it upon himself, as his own personal project, to write the numbers by 5’s up to 1,000, taping additional strips of paper when he ran out of space, persevering over the span of several days until he finally reached 1,000. Then, afterwards, he rolled up the long strip of many pieces of paper, and decorated it to give to his parents, showing immense pride in his work.

Or take one of our three year olds who became attracted to a material we call the “trinomial cube”. It’s a 3D puzzle which demonstrates, in visual form, the ratios of the cube of a trinomial. For a three year old, however, it’s more like a 3D puzzle. She took it up one day after receiving a lesson on it and persevered with it through many failed attempts. Even while her classmates cleaned up and gathered for a meeting and a song, this girl remained at her work. Not tiring, not getting frustrated; just calmly continuing to try to solve it. Days later she took up the work again, in the same way, finally achieving some mastery over it. Then, weeks later, after a vacation, she found her way back to the trinomial cube, only to find out that she had forgotten how to complete it. She took it up again that day, and several days afterwards, to master it once again. The trinomial cube held such a fascination for this little girl, that she found herself repeatedly attracted to it, practicing for several hours in total until she reached mastery, twice.

How hard motivation is, and the great heights it can reach if you really hit the bullseye, indicate that it needs to take a front position in education. Authentic Montessori is a “motivation first, skills second” education. Our first priority is to find work that interests a child. To hit the bullseye. Or at least get as close to it as we can. To do this we offer a wide variety of work that is as interesting as possible, and we do it in a way that attempts to stimulate interest, not teach skills. Maria Montessori describes the role of the teacher as “one who stimulates interest”; and she describes our curriculum as many “seeds of interest” which may or may not germinate in a child’s personality.

Immediately after saying this, I must let the other shoe drop, and distinguish our approach from the “motivation-only” approach of Progressive schools. These schools are not so common anymore, though they do exist. There are elements of the Progressive approach in both public schools and in many Montessori schools. This approach basically says that “anything goes” as long as the child is following his or her interests. It doesn’t matter if the child is learning, as long as they are having fun and enjoying school. This is adamantly not the Authentic Montessori approach at Atlas Academy.

Authentic Montessori values both motivation and skills. And we believe that putting motivation first is the way to get both. Because, if you put skills first, motivation tends to get pushed aside.

To help concretize these approaches, let’s consider what it leads to down the line, as adults.

The skills-only approach helps children to acquire the skills that they’ll need to get a certain job. It trains them in doing what they’re told, to get good grades, to get into college, to get a degree, to get a job. It’s a vocational approach.

The motivation-only approach has very few examples in its pure form, so it’s hard to tell what it leads to in adulthood. My guess would be that it leads to neither motivation nor skills; to an adult who is both uninformed and without strong interests.

Our approach–the motivation first, skills second approach–on the other hand, is the same pattern which can be seen in the world’s greatest achievers. The pattern of their achievement is: passion drives incredible effort, leading to unmatched skill attainment, leading to world-renown success. Love → effort → skills → success. Let me give you a few examples.

Steve Jobs was able to first put a computer in everyone’s home, and later to put one into everyone’s pocket. And for him it wasn’t about the money. He talks about how he was a millionaire at age 23 and a billionaire at age 25; but he didn’t care about the money. For him it was all about the product and the vision. He knew he had a better product than IBM, and he’d stop at nothing to turn his vision into reality. One of his most famous quotes is that “the only way to do great work is to love it.”.

David Blaine, the world’s greatest living magician, talks about how he always carried a pack of cards around with him as a kid because he just loved how it felt. The enthusiasm on his face and in his voice when he talks about magic is palpable. The incredible energy and research that goes into each and every trick is driven by an insatiable love of the trick. He has no problem trying tricks and failing hundreds of times before finally getting it to the level he feels comfortable with. All of his many decades of indefatigable energy which has propelled him to the top has been driven by his insatiable love of magic.

One more example. Jerry Seinfeld is one of the most well known comics of our time. He started out just trying to make enough money so he could afford to keep getting up on stage and telling jokes. The number of times he’s bombed on stage and got up the next night to try again is uncountable. He talks about how he spends “inordinate amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of a joke until it has this pleasing flow to [his] ear and then it becomes something [he] can’t wait to say.” Seinfeld talks about success as not being driven by some innate talent, but by hard work. He calls it a “game of tonnage” where it’s just a matter of putting in a ton of work over a long period of time. And for Seinfeld, the thing driving all of this hard work is his “love of the joke”.

The pattern of success seen here is: love drives effort leading to skill attainment, followed by success. Love → effort → skills → success. And this is the same pattern that we help children to build as a life-long habit at Atlas Academy.

The Kindergartner in my example above was motivated to write all the numbers by 5’s up to 1,000; then he put in the effort to accomplish that goal, thereby acquiring mastery of the skill. The three year old in my example above was strongly attracted to the trinomial cube and put in an inordinate amount of effort for a child that age to achieve mastery over it.

Our students, through the Authentic Montessori approach, build the habit of choosing interesting work, putting in effort, and acquiring skills. In other words, they build the habit of success. Authentic Montessori is the only educational approach to prioritize motivation; and therefore it is the only approach which leads to a life of passionate work. If other forms of education lead to getting a job or even finding a career; Authentic Montessori will help children to find a calling–a lifelong passion built-up from many years of engaging in deep, interesting work.