Montessori & Dewey

Montessori's child development plan consists of kids being allowed the opportunity to learn for themselves. Children are naturally curious and will seek out new knowledge and learn it better because they have sought it out. It's no surprise that adults attempt to place restrictions and milestones for child education because we have a lack of curiosity and favor hard stats on a child's progress. Montessori has mentored and taught enough children to know exactly how children learn best and it is certainly not happening with the schools we have in place.

We have put kids in restrictive seats that allow them no personality, freedom, or ways to experience things. Most people learn better through experience, using the senses to provoke memorization. Montessori knows that school desks immobilizes the children and deprives them of freedom and consequently their knowledge.

Dewey's Thinking in Education attempts to show the importance of actually thinking for learning. He means people being challenged by real or relative problems that have an end goal of being solved instead of ones that are artificial. Dewey, like Montessori, realizes that that places at which children learn are not conducive to the learning they need. He believes that people need to experience and reflect on things which requires an environment that they can interact with the things they are learning. It also requires people to not force upon kids a quota of knowledge with the end goal only being the test but instead fixing the problem for the sake of challenge. Since people learn through experience and reflection it requires a problem to solve. These problems must involve a certain amount of familiarity so that they can be solved but also an amount of mystery. When they solve these problems they become their accomplishments and will commit better to memory.