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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2160 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

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.

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