Is Montessori Ready for the Obama Generation?

Montessori Life, 2009 by Powell, Mark

"Your wonderful country is one of the hopes of the civilized world. The feel of youth is in the air and soil. You will rear here the greatest race the world has ever known. It is in your blood. The mixing of the peoples of the earth will produce a great prosperity. No country has the heritage to leave its children like the heritage of the American people."

- Maria Montessori, quoted in the New York Times, December 24, 1913, cited in Kramer (1988, p. 202).

Hope

One of the great strengths of the United States has long been its relative tolerance for diversity of opinion - its willingness to question its assumptions and to reinvent itself. This is a relative strength that varies over time and distance, and whose focus settles on some issues more comfortably than others. This rejuvenating potential has once again become unmistakable with the election of Barack Obama.

The groundswell of passion and anticipation aroused by Obama's run for the presidency in 2008 was in some ways reminiscent of the excitement surrounding Maria Montessori's first visit to the United States in 1913. Montessori - female, foreign, and Catholic - arrived at Carnegie Hall in New York to a triumphal welcome and standing-room-only crowds. The press had fanned the flames of interest in the Italian woman whose classroom methods with young children promised to change the world (Kramer, 1988, p. 194). Contemporary accounts painted Montessori in messianic terms: "the creator of a system of education that will within a few years modify all existing education systems and theories and as it is developed, take their place, thereby evolving a new and higher type of thinking and acting man" (Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 7, 1913, cited in Kramer, 1988, p. 192). In Washington, DC, Montessori met with prominent government officials, including Philander Claxton, the U.S. Commissioner of Education, who later stated that he supported the introduction of the Montessori system into public schools (Kramer, 1988, p. 193). The nation seemed eager for the revolutionary changes her methods promised.

With a family of color residing in the White House, the United States will never be quite the same again, politically. Reforming education, where there are many more entrenched interests and perhaps less willingness to question assumptions and reinvent traditions, may not be so black-and-white. The Obama administration's education agenda recognizes that "Am erica faces few more urgent challenges than preparing our children to compete in a global economy/' and has expressed an interest in looking outside the box for ways to "restore the promise of America's public education, and ensure that American children again lead the world in achievement, creativity, and success" (The White House, n.d.). In his Education Agenda, President Obama proposes a three-point agenda for meeting this challenge (ibid.):

* Identifying and promoting successful schools by giving greater emphasis to school reform and accountability, while at the same time providing the funding needed to carry out those reforms;

* Placing greater responsibility on parents for their children's success; and

* Addressing the lack of experienced, quality teachers in schools and reversing the drain of new teachers (30% of whom leave the profession within their first 5 years of teaching).

As part of the first point of his education agenda, President Obama has committed to doubling the funding for charter schools in states that improve accountability, allow interventions in struggling charter schools, and help successful charter schools expand to serve more students (ibid.). The new administration's interest in identifying and promoting educational methods that show themselves to be effective in practice - and in closing schools that aren't - may represent a new opportunity for Montessorians to bring greater national attention to a system that offers answers to many of the challenges plaguing American education. Whether the Montessori system receives the attention it deserves during the Obama presidency will probably depend, just as it did when Dr. Montessori herself was on these shores, less on the value of Montes so ri's ideas themselves than on how the Montessori community in this country organizes itself to present those ideas.

Crisis

The crisis informing Obama's Education Agenda has become more evident as the relative position of American students among developed industrialized countries continues to slide. According to the most recent triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "While the U.S. had, well into the 1960s, the highest high school completion rates among OECD countries, in 2005 it ranked, with a high school completion rate of 76%, 21st among the 27 OECD countries with available data, followed only by Spain, New Zealand, Portugal, Turkey, and Mexico. Similar trends are visible in college education, where the U.S. slipped between 1995 and 2005 from the 2nd to the 14th rank ..." (OECD, 2006, p. 1). Relative U.S. college graduation rates are particularly low - just over half those of Australia, Finland, France, and Korea (ibid.). In high school science, U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 21st among 30 OECD countries, down from 19th in 2003 and 14th in 2000 (ibid., p. 2). There has been a similar slide in mathematics performance: U.S. 15-year-olds ranked 25th in 2006 among 30 OECD countries, down from 23rd in 2003 and 18th in 2000 (ibid., p. 20). The PISA report noted that the U.S. has a large proportion of low-performers in science and mathematics, and that socioeconomic disparities are a large part of the reason for this weakness (ibid., p. 8).