montessori ed

It has been 6 weeks since I last posted, and in case you were curious about this long silence, I have been very busy job hunting.

15 months ago, Emily (my wife) and I decided to move to New Zealand in 2009.  I have been investigating and filing paperwork and researching for several months, but the pace intensified a few weeks ago when I began arranging to visit Auckland and interview with schools.

I am happy to say that I have accepted a position in Auckland and will be moving to New Zealand to teach within the next few weeks (depending on New Zealand immigration).  I am looking forward to exploring Montessori in New Zealand and sharing my experiences with you, starting now.

While discussing Montessori with a veteran teacher and administrator from Dunedin, she referred to the AMI/AMS tension in the United States and explained that this type of tension or conflict between teachers of different trainings is not common in New Zealand.  New Zealand does not currently have training centers (although AMI is opening one in Auckland) and is therefore a melting pot of various trainings from all over the world.  An individual school may contain teachers from several different trainings. 

I am intrigued that working in close proximity may increase understanding and decrease tensions.

Whilst stumbling through the interweb, I discovered an article entitled “Return of Montessori”, originally published in TIME magazine, Monday, February 3, 1930.

The passage of time has created its own distance between contemporary citizens and Dr. Montessori, and the Montessori community has deepened this distance through the awe and revere we create.

For these reasons I enjoy reading articles written, published, and read during Dr. Montessori’s lifetime.  They often provide a glimpse into the thinking of the time, such as these concluding paragraphs

Criticism. Most U. S. educators, jealous of the fame of John Dewey, are quick to point out that Dewey, in 1902, was working with auto-education in his University of Chicago-school. The interpretation of his philosophy in the education of young children also emphasized the importance of correlating the infant’s use of its hands to its brain.

The system, derived from Dewey philosophy, now used at Columbia University Teachers College, differs from the Montessori plan in that it stresses the child’s supervised intellectual growth rather than its undirected development. At Columbia the pupil is taken to see a hangar full of airplanes which he is encouraged to copy in clay, wax or crayon in the classroom. Under the Dewey method, the child has opportunity for creative expression which the less plastic Montessori equipment does not allow.

As trained Montessorians, we can see the inaccuracy of describing the Montessori method as “undirected”, or “less plastic”.  Yet, at the time of its publication in 1930, in a major news magazine, how influential were this opinions on the US public.