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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
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.
Hey I live in the Netherlands. That’s why I am asking, as there are a ton of them around. I didn’t grow up here so missing some of the cultural nuances. Could you please explain to me why, even though these are all free enrolment public schools afaict, Montessori attracts a better crowd?
Parents who don't care will put their kids in the nearest "openbare school", as that's the easiest option. Parents who do care might send their kids somewhere else. That leaves the public schools with the kids whose parents don't care. As a result it's somewhat of a stereotype that the "openbare scholen" have all the misbehaving children in them. And less than a third of kids actually attend an "openbare school".
There are also a lot of religious schools around, though most of them are so in name only. Montessori schools are not religious but are still separate, so they attract the kind of crowd who don't want to send their kids to an "openbare school", but also not to a nominally-but-not-actually Protestant or Catholic one because of the implication. (And "Montessori schools" might also be Montessori schools in name only.)
A big difference between the "openbare school" and the others is that the others are allowed to kick children out relatively easily, or refuse to enroll them, as there's always the "openbare school" to fall back on. The "openbare school" can't reject children because children have a right to education no matter how tokkie they and/or their parents are, and so they are, again, left with all the troublemakers.
That's not to say the "openbare school" is necessarily bad though. I attended one. It mostly depends on your area and on how much other choice there is. In my case it was in a rural area and the only other option was an actually fundamentalist religious school a couple of villages away, so in that case almost everyone attended the openbare school, except the fundamentalists.
Is the actually fundamentalist religious school bad, though?
In the US they teach almost identically to secular schools, except that in K-12 they do not teach evolution. This washes out as basically public schools with very strict behavior codes- anyone who needs to know evolution in later life needs to attend college and take college level biology classes which will teach it.
As far as education goes, no.
But in the Netherlands, there is a subsect of Calvinists called the "bevindelijk gereformeerden" who are famously very insular (to the point where there apparently isn't an English term for them). They make up ~3% of the population. They have their own schools, in the case I was referring to, it was one of those. You wouldn't send your kid there unless you actually belong to that group. I think you technically could, but it would be very weird.
"Normal" Protestant or Catholic schools are nigh-indistinguishable from 'true' public schools in what or how they teach. They're basically just historically Protestant or Catholic at this point. Indeed, in some areas, often rural areas, such a school is the only school and everyone sends their kids there.
In the US catholic schools are not in general particularly religious, but they are mostly distinguished from public schools by their higher quality(a big chunk of that is just peer group from it being all kids of high income married parents). There are separate ultraconservative catholic schools that require actually practicing families, but maintain the same quality. Actual-fundamentalist religious schools exist, are basically just public schools that don’t teach a normal biology curriculum and have tuition. They’re open to the public and sometimes used as a reform school.
What you’re describing sounds like our orthodox Jewish schools- I mean, technically, they’re willing to admit gentiles. But in practice, no gentile wants to go.
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