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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2179 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 8, 2026

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What is your opinion of "Montessori"? As a label for schools and kindergartens or a philosophy for parenting and education. My spouse is getting quite into those books and we are approaching the age when the kid will soon need some sort of teaching

I went to Monteessori-Kindergarten and Montessori elementary school. The Kindergarten was just regular Kindergarten, but the elementary de-emphasized regular sit-down-shut-up-and-absorb-frontal-lessons to such an extent that I was utterly unprepared for secondary school.

FWIW, Montessori does get fewer immigrants.

I went to one for a year and a half. No real difference in the effectiveness of the teaching method. The real difference is that parents who worry about the education of their kids sort themselves out of public schools and their kids are better classmates on average.

Pick a philosophy that involves direct instruction and a peer group you can put up with for primary school and, if you are a motteizean, look at dual enrollment/hybridized/etc schooling for secondary.

IMO, education is like dieting: Almost any deliberate choice followed faithfully will wildly outperform the Western standard. Everything past that is details.

Yeah and there's always going to be a ton of 'a bunch of 90th percentile quirky UMC-types decided to do X and produced 90th percentile quirky future-UMC types so we need to copy their methods' logic going on when it's more about the genetic baseline. I'm not against Montessori but in my experience it's a very high volatility way of educating children where most of the ones I've met are either geniuses or anxiety-ridden untermensch, but that also might just reflect the current societal and economic moment.

We have loads of these in the Netherlands and it's basically just a way for parents to avoid the "public" schools. (The Montessori schools are usually also publically funded so technically also "public" schools, but they sure do attract a different audience than the standard "public" schools.)

The kids do fine, but given that their parents are actively involved in their education to the point of caring what school they go to, that is what you'd expect.

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