Montessori Method and testing

Tom raised some good questions about the Montessori Method in the comments to “Stupid in America”. Since I have not studied much education theory in general, mostly the Montessori Method, my answers may be a bit biased. My love affair with the Montessori Method is more philosophical than empirically based. However, there are several studies, now going on 70 years or more that demonstrated how phenomenal her method was in educating children. From what I’ve seen, many pre-schools and elementary schools have adopted portions of her method, so it may be difficult to differentiate between particular methods today.

Supposedly, education departments in major universities do research exactly along the lines Tom proposes. This research first started with Maria Montessori, when she established Scientific Pedagogy. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, she developed her method by trial and error and found that she could increase the average IQ and the average reading ability of children the world over by double-digit percentages (read any of her books for particulars). Granted, these studies were done many years ago and new educational methods may be able to produce similar results today.

Without going into too many particulars about the method, let me state that the teaching style she advocates is one where the teacher is more of a scientist or guide for the children, rather than a leader or lecturer. The primary purpose of the teacher is to facilitate the child toward their natural learning inclinations. Most children want to learn and absorb as much of their surroundings as possible. It is the teacher’s job to give the children the best tools for accomplishing this learning.

Success in the learning environment is measured by the child’s ability to live independently. In other words, the only standard of measure worth its salt is life itself. The best learning environment provides a child (or adult) with the abilities to cope with living in this world. Can a standardized test measure a child’s ability to cope with the world? The best it could hope to capture is a child’s ability to think, since reason is our only distinct biological advantage. It is only with rational thought that we separate ourselves from the beasts. It is only by rational thought that we have developed the great wonders of our age. If we are to test how we can best survive, indeed flourish, we need to measure our ability to think.

Yet herein lies a problem, the Montessori Method does not stress standardize testing. This is mostly due to a focus away from comparing ourselves with others and more toward comparing ourselves with our self. In other words, it focuses achievement inward, towards reaching new goals and obtaining new values within the framework that we set. The Montessori Method encourages independence of the mind by providing the tools to enhance thinking and learning. This is the brilliance of the method.

As this is the case, standardized tests may only partially capture the strength of the method. Whereas one method may produce good short-term results through drilling and memorization, the long-term results could be disastrous, as the child never learns how to apply that information. Another method may show a child how to problem solve in a particular context, but the child never learns how to apply it to other contexts.

Again, I must stress that the standard for measuring an educational method is the long-term success of that individual in life. The idea that a test can capture that trait is limited at best. It might be able to capture particular aspects of a successful life, but many individual values are optional and have different significance to their lives. Capturing attainment of those values and their resulting happiness is extremely difficult if not impossible.

Stupid in America

Last Friday, 20/20 aired another John Stossel special title "Stupid in America". In an email to myself and some friends, Tom Hockett asked us what we thought of it. My response was as follows:

Stossel's report...Is right on. While some of us had the liberty of going to school in good suburban schools, most people in America receive a crappy education. Education research has shown that there are far better ways of educating individuals (Montessori method in particular) than are currently employed. By high school, most students have lost any desire to actually learn, something that used to excite us as young children. And teachers are not motivated to help the students learn in a manner that is inspiring or exciting.

As a good friend of mine once reported...
"After teaching railroad safety to thousands of students from kindegarden to high school, I witnessed a slow degradation of interest in school. The grade school students were bright eyed and excited to be learning. Every day was an adventure. Middle school students had lost some of that passion, though there were still sparks here and there. But by high school, they all looked like they had been beat down into submission. None of them were excited about being in school."

Because schools don't have to compete with each other, there is no motivation to push for changes or to challenge the status quo. Teacher unions compound this lack of action. There is little hope that public schools will change on their own. It will require outside intervention to make it happen.

The only problem I have with Stossel's report is his advocacy for vouchers. While vouchers do have positive short term results (as isolated tests have shown), its the long term consequences I'm worried about. It never fails that if government money is offered to private enterprises, those enterprises will come addicted to that money and will eventually submit to greater and greater controls and restrictions. In time, these "private" schools will come to resemble the "public" schools in every respect, till they become indistinguishable.

The only real solution is total dismantling of the public school system (or conversation to a private system). I know this will never happen in my lifetime, but it is the only thing that will work. Perhaps vouchers could be used as an intermediary step toward a private system, but politicians would never advocate such a radical plan and most special interest groups advocating vouchers don't emphasis enough that vouchers is only a step toward total privatization.

So in the end I'm not hopeful toward any proposed solution. That is why Brenda and I will never send our child to a public school. Either we'll find a good private school or we'll home school.

This email sparked some good conversation about our school system; some of the limitations with it, some of the limitations with the Stossel special, and what is the most appropriate solution.

Justin Deal sums up the problem:

And, the crappy schools just keep churning out more idiots who will continue to lack objective reasoning. And thus, we are probably screwed.

I'm probably not as pessimistic as Justin, but he makes a good point. Parents that grew up in a poor school system indoctrinate their own children with I don't care attitude. Teachers working with such children become frustrated and give up trying to fix the parenting miscreants. Either the teachers lack of effort or the administrators lack of support further exasperates the situation. A war starts where everyone starts pointing fingers at everyone else for their lack of responsibility. It becomes much easier to attack others than to assume responsibility for their own actions. They don't think objectively about what the child needs nor what they can do to best help that child to succeed in life (not just school). As Justin also says:

I didn't know about logic till Logic 101 in college. For Christ's sake, 18 years go by, and you don't learn about logical thought? No wonder so many people are braindead.

No wonder indeed. School has become a place to indoctrinate children, not teach them how to think critically. That for the most part is because it is a public institution.

As for some of the limitations of the Stossel special, Tom Hockett had some insightful comments:

I know Stossel cited the results of the 2003 PISA -- Programme for International Student Assessment, but give me some context. Are there other, similar tests that support or refute the results of PISA? Also, I've heard/read there is more than one international measure of K-12 student creativity, ingenuity, independence, etc. (all attributes that I personally value near the same level as I value base intelligence), and I've read/heard that U.S. students smoke the competition using those measures. Why didn't Stossel attempt to report those findings, a.k.a. the "good news?"

I commented back that despite our supposed poor education, we still produce some of the most productive and happy adults in the world. Why is this ignored in his report? Well, like Tom noted, Stossel had a agenda. It brought an alternative educational funding initiative to the forefront of national debate. Surely, the are improvements that can be had in our education system, even if it ranks highly in multiple areas. But I still believe that the issue should be more fundamental than "what works best".

I am not a pragmatist. I am an objectivist. I want the objectively right solution. I want total privativation of our educational system because the government has no right to steal my money for any cause. The fact that the education may be substandard is irrelevant (although sad none-the-less).

Transforming news as we know it

RSS (Really simple syndication) is not entirely new. For years now, techno-mavericks have been extolling the wonders of XML. XML was to be the wonder format for sending and exchanging information. Of course this caught the attention of the news media, as they desire their own articles to be read the world over. RSS was Netscape's solution, an XML based description of the news.

As more and more news organizations started creating RSS feeds, the monstrosity of the Internet reared its ugly head and overloaded any one person's ability to read all the news available. Hence the need for RSSreaders. These readers organize and allow searching on the volumes of RSS feeds. Now users of these readers can search on new news items that are of interest to just themselves, much like how search engines allow users to search websites for information relevant to just them.

So what have I to add to all of articles and comments on RSS?

Just this...RSS is transforming how our society views news. Now we can easily find news items about any subject, from any location, and at any time. No longer are we dependent on newspapers and the 6 o-clock news to push their version of what's important down our throats. Now, more than ever, we can seek the news we want.

Web sites specializing in particular topics was the first step down this path. Now, with RSS, we can compartmentalize even further and search for only new news items about much more specific topics. Forget having to wait. Forget have to pour through hundreds of websites. Now we are immediately notified of anything of interest. It's not quite a push technology and not quite a website search engine, but rather a combination of those concepts.

All in all, news organizations will have to learn to adapt or they'll go out of business. As web users learn of the power of RSS and web developers learn how to better optimize news dissemination and aggregation, news stories will become more specialized and written by fewer journalists and more first hand eye-witnesses. The popularity of blogs is just one manifestation of this change, as many already employee RSS feeds.

This change will force many people to dig deeper into any statement they hear to verify its truth or falsehood. No longer will news be taken at face value, especially if contradictory evidence is readily available. Individuals will either learn to question news in general and think rationally about stories told, or they'll force themselves into a world of contradiction and depression. All the more reason why critical thinking skills and the development of a strong self-esteem are essential for our children.