Comment by deathclassic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by deathclassic | Hacker News Reader

I was put into montessori preschool at around age 4 after my mom caught daycare workers abusing me. I liked it, was a fun time and I figured out how to read at around a 4th grade level at 5. The issues started when I got taken out of that environment and put into a normal one when I started grade school. You see, my preschool teacher noticed that I had ADHD, but that didn't really matter in a Montessori environment. But in traditional school, this means you get in trouble a lot, get terrible grades, and I've been almost kicked out of every school I've been to. I found the transition to traditional structured school traumatic. This was in early grade school too, I can imagine the experience of going from Montessori school to traditional school in later grades to be impossible, like trying to socialize a feral cat or something.

Look OP, if you think school is about your kids learning you've got it very wrong. Wikipedia and arvix are for learning. School is state subsidized daycare, and social conditioning. Industrial society requires discipline, structure and obedience. Those values are not driven into a child's head in the Montessori, model. Do your kids a favor and get these things drilled into their heads early, before you have a bunch of intellectual bums laying around your house. Don't send your kids to Montessori school.

Wow, this is terrible advice.

You have to put in the effort yourself to teach them those values (if you can even call them that...) and that life is not all fun and games. That said, Montessori model schools are great for your children, even if they're just "glorified daycares" instead of school. Children need to play, it's how they learn everything, including how to enjoy life. Do not immediately throw them into a life of "discipline, structure and obedience". That's not what life is about.

I’m helping to manage a Montessori preschool, so I’m immersed in Montessori at the moment.

There’s a pretty consistent underlying structure to the day, and the kids are taught to eg sit quietly for the class gathering (“circle time”), so I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the kids are taught no discipline. The periods that they’re asked to sit for aren’t very long, it’s preschool. But if you go an observe a class, they’re actually extremely well behaved. During their work cycles, they go and get their work, they sit individually to complete their work for a bit, then they return it to the shelf as they found it. And they’re learning relatively advanced reading, spelling, and math at 4.

One thing to be aware of is that many Montessori schools, especially nowadays, are “Montessori-inspired”, they don’t actually go through the effort (and the hiring requirements) it takes to be accredited by AMS. It’s more expensive to hire actual Montessori teachers, but the difference can be pretty incredible.

It sounds like your experience was traumatic and that’s really unfortunate. But, your experience is far from universal for either school type. Today, particularly with Section 504 plans, many schools are much more adept at accommodating ADHD and a number of other challenges. Kids who have slow handwriting development can use keyboards or text to speech. Kids who get extremely overwhelmed can take breaks in the hallway. Others who are bored by the offered curriculum are given access to Khan Academy. It’s not universal and it can require some parental persistence to both create the plan and enforce its use, but it has helped a lot of kids.

Public school taught me physics, calculus, history and a smattering of other topics I wouldn’t have delved into on my own (for example, reverse polish notation.) It did not teach me discipline, structure or obedience (I was actually spanked by a grade school teacher, which seems unfathomable now.) As such, I was wholly unprepared for higher education. Some of this stuff might require direct intervention from the parent instead of simply relying on a school to take care of it.

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