AbstractThe Montessori educational method has existed for over 100 years, but evaluations of its effectiveness are scarce. This review paper has three aims, namely to (1) identify some key elements of the method, (2) review existing evaluations of Montessori education, and (3) review studies that do not explicitly evaluate Montessori education but which evaluate the key elements identified in (1). The goal of the paper is therefore to provide a review of the evidence base for Montessori education, with the dual aspirations of stimulating future research and helping teachers to better understand whether and why Montessori education might be effective.
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This is an unfortunately very uniform problem with "school", I'd say (in the US system / nomenclature) from about post-elementary up to "undergrad". Too much of the junior high school and high school classes end up as "piles of facts". The vast majority of attempts to improve education* never deal with this underlying issue, and, thus tend to just make the problem even worse. (Most likely, for various reasons including 'difficulty', attempts are made to avoid this issue.)
You can impose any standards you want - if all you're training on and testing for is ~regurgitation of facts, that's what's going to be optimized for - all of the forces at play will push even the best…
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of teachers (those who might try to provide something other than the driest most immediate-term "goal-oriented" course / experience) towards this terrible (minimum) "standard".
At this point, I highly doubt this will ever be fixed - and certainly, can't see that happening in my lifetime. In the past few decades, hostility, and outright MARKETING of hostility, towards education has increased dramatically. Education is perennially underfunded and massively inequitable from locality to locality (and at even "finer grained" levels). Most of the fights around education these days are so far removed from questions of SERVICE and ARE WE DOING THE BEST WE CAN FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS? that there's just no way to imagine any serious or appropriate attempt can be made to address the real inadequacies of our recent & current system.
It's truly a shame. We'd all be far better off if there was more investment in, respect for, etc. education, teachers, STUDENTS (our kids), etc. Partly, this is a generational issue that even gets at the voting power of generations ... It is possible that Gen X, in part by being a smaller "generation" and in part because of their own experiences of being comparatively ignored and pushed to the side by the priorities of other generations [particularly, the older generations] across their own "lifecycles", will actually help swing things back a little towards student-oriented service (so-to-speak). But, I'm not 'optimistic' either regarding intention or, even more so, actual action.
It's a kind of tragedy, blasting people IN THEIR FORMATIVE YEARS with piles of facts in such a way as to kill off INTEREST and the possibility of real UNDERSTANDING, guaranteeing we end up with a far less informed, engaged, and healthy COMMUNITY and PEOPLE than we might otherwise have.
* Most, seemingly, quite ill-advised, unfortunately. Ill-advised based on research and the experiences of people who have spent years studying (sometimes, even, with a methodical empiricism!) "pedagogy" and "child psychology", and those who have worked on and refined models that tend to have real advantages (e.g., "Montessori" comes to mind - the data is mixed but generally supportive of the benefits of this comparatively grounded in science method, see, e.g., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7). Part of this is because of various "stakeholders" engaging in the usual tug-of-war BS where only lip-service is paid to the actual target population this essential SERVICE is supposed to be CENTERED ON...
i am not aware of any studies unfortunately, i just found this though and it looks like a good start:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7 "Montessori education: a review of the evidence base"
but you just need to look at the montessori methodology to see how it works. it may not be as effective as pure one-on-one tutoring but it is certainly way more effective than regular classroom teaching.
keep in mind though that the name montessori is not protected and that there are many schools out there that are montessori in name only without actually having trained teachers.
the lack of good studies of montessori is frustrating to me. the montessori method is as…
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scientific as education can get, free of any ideology or philosophy, unlike eg. waldorf, and therefore should be easy to apply on a wider scale. the teacher training is not expensive (about a year) and could easily be integrated into any general teacher education. the teaching material is more elaborate than just books, especially for the younger age groups, but the high cost now is mainly due to a lack of scale.
My kids go to a montessori elementary school. We haven't seen those particular challenges, but I think a lot depends on the particular student and particular school.
There's not a lot of research on the outcomes for students who go to montessori, but what is available is mildly positive.
There is a survey of the literature published in Nature that concluded that the effects are somewhat positive, but since different schools apply the Montessori method in different ways, it's hard to say:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7
There's also a study from last year that says Montessori education is associated with positive well-being in later life. They control for a bunch of factors, but it's just association (not claiming causal):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34899465/
At the time I was selecting a preschool, it wasn't a specific study, however interpretations of various studies.
If it's helpful, this is a more recent one: https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.13575 which shows that Montessori preschoolers performed comparably to non-Montessori preschoolers in Kindergarten, though "disadvantaged kids" who attended Montessori schools performed better than "disadvantaged kids" who did not. (My interpretation being the correlation to performance is that the parents got their kids into a Montessori preschool despite economic disadvantages--biased because of what I learned in Freakanomics).
And a tangential analysis:…
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https://www.nature.com/articles/s41539-017-0012-7 that concludes that most studies around Montessori are not sufficient to draw any meaningful conclusions, however adapting Montessori methods into traditional classrooms appears to be beneficial.
Regarding your upcoming decision--if I can offer my advice: find a preschool that best meets your families needs, and not worry too much about academics (at their age). If your children enters grade school with the abilities to succeed in the classroom that's great. If not, it's a great opportunity for them to learn early age how to overcome challenges--which will serve them well when they are adults.
Abstract If future net-zero emissions energy systems rely heavily on solar and wind resources, spatial and temporal mismatches between resource availability and electricity demand may challenge system reliability.