Samantha is going to be a regular contributor on the Montessorium website, where we will host her existing Parenting Handbook content alongside new pieces. I’ll let her introduce herself, and one of her recent articles, below.

Have a great week,

Matt

Hi everyone, I’m so happy to be here and to have joined Montessorium, and Higher Ground more broadly. It’s incredible to get to work with such passionate people who all have a bright vision for how to transform education and help children reach their full potential.  

I discovered Montessori a few years ago, after I had already quit teaching and had given up out of despair of there being just such a positive vision. For years, I obsessively read blogs and watched videos of regular moms who were implementing Montessori at home with their children, with the hope that one day I would do the same with my own children. But it wasn’t until last year that I decided to sit down and read Montessori’s work for myself. There was no turning back after that—I was all in.  

In a quest to get a deeper understanding of her ideas and to share what I gleaned with others, I started the Substack that Matt mentioned. This first piece tells the story of how Montessori was just as startled as anyone else to discover the capabilities of young children. Namely, that the child and her true, normal characteristics had been hidden for millennia underneath a bulky array of adult-imposed defects.  

This discovery was what started Montessori’s journey to refine a method to help the untapped potential of the child fully blossom—the journey we at Higher Ground hope to continue and expand to every child across the world, from birth to adolescence. I’ve excerpted this piece, Montessori’s Discovery of the Normalized Child, below. If you’re interested, you can find the full piece, and the rest of the series, here.

Excited to be here and hope to share more soon!

Samantha

Montessori's Discovery of the Normalized Child

Written by Samantha Blaisdell on April 23, 2022

Originally published on The Parenting Handbook

Maria Montessori started her pioneering educational work in, what we would call today, special education and early childhood education. She first worked with children who were cognitively impaired or otherwise considered “ineducable” by society. Through her efforts, these children took the same academic tests as other children and, to the surprise of all, did as well as or better than them. Most people thought this was nothing short of miraculous. Montessori, however, was disturbed.

If these children, with all their disadvantages, could do as well as the “normal” children, then weren’t the normal children being held down to an artificially low level? What was happening in mainstream education to stifle children’s potential?

These questions spurred Montessori to dream of working with all children. In 1906, she got her chance when the owners of a tenement building in the slums of Rome approached her and asked if she would oversee the care and education of the children living there. These children lived in conditions of horrifying poverty—but they weren’t institutionalized. They were normal children at the very lowest echelons of society in Rome.

Thus, Montessori’s first school, known as the Casa dei Bambini or Children’s House, opened on January 6, 1907. It was here that she made incredible discoveries, later repeated with children all over the world. It was here that she developed her signature materials and method. It was here that she came to the startling conclusion that the true nature of childhood had been hidden by inadequate care, deficient environments, and centuries of prejudicial thinking about children.

The First School

Montessori believed that the unique environment of the first Casa was what made it possible to discover the true nature of the child. The physical space, the teacher, and the children were the opposite of what most educators and caretakers would have chosen as the ideal. It was not a place where anyone would have expected educational miracles or psychological breakthroughs. Yet, if any place existed where the raw abilities of children could be seen, this was it. Any success the children had here couldn’t be attributed to their parents, their school, or their teacher—it could only belong to them.

The school was in a tenement building in one of the worst slums of Rome: San Lorenzo. The tenement housed the poorest of the poor, the lowest strata of society. Depravity, despair, and routine violence were the chief hallmarks of these slums. The parents were uneducated and illiterate.

Montessori had little money with which to furnish her school and in this room, there were around 50 children, all between the ages of 2 and 7 years old. They were traumatized, malnourished, shy, and practically abandoned. Montessori hired the porter’s daughter to be the “teacher” and she provided toys and the same educational materials she had used in her prior work. She showed the teacher how to present these materials in a specific way but gave little direction otherwise.

Despite all the apparent drawbacks—the lack of a trained teacher, the poor and malnourished state of the children, the lack of culture and support the children received at home, the meager supplies—what Montessori did have was the mind of a scientist. She was a keen observer who noticed things about a child’s motivation that others would miss or misattribute. She had an active mind that looked beneath superficial behaviors to discover their causes. She was not satisfied with easy answers or the status quo. She was willing to admit when she was wrong and followed the empirical evidence over any prior ideas she might have had. She asked the children “Who are you?” and followed the evidence of her eyes to uncover the answer.

Click here to read the full piece on the Montessorium website.

The Great Rethink in Education is a series of small conferences aimed at filling a poorly served niche: pushing for an intellectual sharpening of education discourse. They are the joint brainchild of Joe Connor at Odyssey and us at Montessorium, the think tank arm of Higher Ground Education.

It’s a thrilling time for education, due to a convergence of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, a real wave of change in policy and political sentiment, the rapid maturation of internet technologies, and a century or so of discourse in pedagogy. It’s high time to use this opportunity to think, and especially to rethink, to question long-held assumptions and explore new answers from first principles.

Our first two (1, 2), both in New York, featured Dan Willingham, Leonore Skenazy, Ryan Delk, Kmele Foster, Michael Abello, and many more, with an equally sharp list of attendees. We just wrapped up the third, this time in Austin.

Highlights included:

• Kurtis Indorf presented the arc of Great Hearts Academies, a classical charter network also working on online offerings. Kurtis then led us in a discussion of C. S. Lewis (“Men Without Chests”) and L. M. Sacasas (“Narrative Collapse”).

• Keith Schacht of The Explanation Company presented an argument for why kids don’t get enough screen time, and how it can be leveraged for independent learning.

• Julia Richards and Laura Mazer presented and discussed the pedagogical model at The Academy of Thought and Industry Austin, the Montessori middle and high school at which the Great Rethink was hosted.

• Joe Connor (Odyssey) and Stacy Hock (Texas Public Policy Foundation, among many others) discussed the state of the art of education policy, nationally and in Texas in particular, including the ins and outs of specific regulatory changes, the players these changes have made space for, and the dramatic post-covid shifts in political sentiment about education.

• Michael Strong of The Socratic Experience spoke about the necessity of virtue culture in schools. He described several models for virtue communities, and noted the indispensable role that communities play in schools that are serious about deep outcomes, as well as virtue-infused practices like Socratic.

• Malcolm Collins presented the most radical ideas of The Collins Institute: meta-level assessment of curriculum using prediction markets, empowering high-agency students, and skepticism about values in education.

• Natalie Clark spoke about her desiderata for her next education project, and the lessons she learned at the Texas Education Agency and Alpha School on her quest for pedagogical innovation.

• David Kokorowski of Pearson spoke about how they navigate cultural controversies from a position of principle in their textbook business, and how it plays out in practice in particular political firestorms.

• Deb Ross of Kids Out and About discussed some data on parents as customers: what parents who enroll in private schools explicitly prioritize, including some surprising results (individual care beat standards, character beat academics).

• Greg Salmieri, a philosopher at UT Austin’s Salem Center, wrapped up by “bringing not peace but the sword”, highlighting some of the disagreements surfaced at the conference on epistemology and ethics, and arguing for the necessity of freedom in education, the freedom to figure education out and to persuade one another (or not) in the face of disagreement.

We’re planning on hosting in the late winter, likely in Miami this time. Email info@montessorium.com if you’re interested in attending.

More precisely, her answer was something more like: the question “is X educational or parenting philosophy better” is incoherent, for any X, including Montessori:

Broadly, I would say the question people have is “Is Montessori school better?” Or replace “Montessori” with whatever parenting philosophy you want. … [I]n fact, that question is unanswerable and makes no sense to ask. 

I’m actually sympathetic to elements of Oster’s arguments, and I recommend the piece. But I don’t think that they support the conclusion that Montessori isn’t better, or even more radically that parenting and educational philosophies are a wash. Here are her three main points, and my critiques.

1. The best elements of Montessori have been incorporated into non-Montessori education.

In the early 20th century, education was in upheaval. Progressivism in education was a major part of the cutting-edge of intellectual discourse. The social sciences were being birthed, along with developmental psychology and learning science; public health innovations like sanitation and hygiene were being extended by analogy; wider economic and cultural changes were driving change in primary and higher education; and innovative pedagogical work in what we now call special education was being generalized to normal populations.

Montessori had a special focus on the earliest years of development, and was part of this wave of radicalism. At the time, what she recommended was a stark departure from typical parenting and educational practices of young children. But, over the last century, the collection of distinctly Montessori practices has become part of the air. The same goes for the other early childhood pedagogies, such as Reggio Emilia and Waldorf:

Over time…preschools (and schools in general) have adopted versions of all of these approaches. Many schools use Montessori materials. Many schools even have mixed-age classrooms, even if they are not explicitly linked to Montessori. Many schools engage with a lot of outside nature time, even if they are not explicitly Waldorf. Many preschools have a lot of free, child-driven play, even if they are not explicitly Reggio Emilia–linked.

There’s a big element of truth in this. When Montessori started working, she had to work with carpenters to create child-sized furniture. Now you can buy child-sized furniture at Ikea, and it is ubiquitous in homes and preschools. When Montessori started writing, introducing learning materials to 3-year-old children was radical. Nowadays, you can’t buy a Fisher Price toy that doesn’t at least make an attempt to be developmentally enriching.

So the phenomena are real. There has been diffusion of better pedagogical practices from Montessori (and elsewhere), and this is a good thing. However, there are good reasons to think that their benefits when unbundled are vastly less than their benefits when conjoined.

One of the unique things about Montessori is that it really is a system. Some of the most important elements of Montessori education are achieved by conjoining elements. If you think, like I do and like Montessori did, that extended periods of concentrated work are uniquely developmentally valuable—how can you bring this about in a school setting? The way that Montessori environments achieve this is by conjoining, amongst other things:

• curricular materials and learning environments that can be used entirely independently

• a classroom culture that focuses on real purposes over pretend play

• a daily schedule that includes hours-long stretches of time for uninterrupted work

• an instructional and peer learning approach (specific educator practices, mixed ages) that is especially conducive to motivating independent work

These are not the only ways to facilitate periods of uninterrupted, voluntary concentration in small children. But they are, together, a very good way to systematically achieve that outcome. And none of the practices separately does so. And, in fact and in practice, most schools that incorporate only some of these elements fail to achieve this outcome and aren’t even trying to do so.

You could apply a similar analysis to many other elements of Montessori, such as the depth of understanding and facility that children get with mathematics and literacy.

We live in a culture, both generally and with respect to education, that is skeptical of this sort of system. It smells like dogmatism, and indeed, Montessorians are susceptible to unproductive dogmatism. But in my view, some of the most exciting and important outcomes in education are achieved at the systems level, by reorganizing each element of the core of education—and they are not achieved by a mix-and-match approach.

My general perspective on unsystematic diffusion of practices is that it raises the floor but lowers the ceiling. In one of her books, Montessori, as an aside, imagines a day when children have things like floating alphabet bath toys. Now these are ubiquitous. We can and should see this as truly great—while at the same time recognizing that there are deeper aims that require deeper pedagogical changes.

2. The data on Montessori is a wash.

I won’t rehash Oster’s argument here in as much depth, since I mostly agree with it.

There is a small but growing army of researchers who are looking into Montessori outcomes with the tools of social science. Unfortunately, it’s very hard to get a clear picture, mainly because it’s just damnably hard to empirically investigate what amounts to a whole philosophy of education and parenting without running into a thousand flavors of selection bias. As Oster says, “Yes, the kids who go to Montessori test better later, but they are also advantaged in all kinds of other difficult-to-control-for ways.”

Even worse, you might, like me, be skeptical that we are very good at measuring educational outcomes, period. Assessment itself is one of the areas of education that needs innovation. Unfortunately, education research is replete with attempts to shanghai the tools of the cognitive sciences (executive functioning scores, neuroimaging data) that are sexy but flawed. (This problem is, of course, not unique to evaluating Montessori.)

I think a holistic look at data is pretty favorable to Montessori. The best overview is Lillard’s frequently-updated book-length Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius. But I agree that it’s not conclusive; Lillard’s overall case relies heavily on philosophical priors. I think those priors are true, and that they comport with and are given some credence from evidence from the social sciences, but they don’t just follow from the social sciences as strong conclusions.

So, I guess I’m very mildly more bullish on the data-driven case for Montessori than Oster. But, unless you think that the data is really terrible for Montessori, I just don’t think it matters that much where you fall on that question. As a card-carrying philosopher, I don’t think the lack of well-designed RCTs is a dealbreaker for making strong judgments about parenting and educational philosophies. Education is a combination of philosophical judgments about the good life, ethnographic-biological judgments about healthy human development, and engineering judgments about what sorts practices are actually helpful in achieving the good life in a developmentally healthy way.

We haven’t figured out how to get a conclusive answer from the social sciences about issues that are on their face going to be hard for the social sciences to solve. This isn’t surprising but also needn’t make us shy about bold answers. (And, in practice, I don’t think parents or educators make many decisions based on data. There are notable exceptions, but not at the level of philosophical approach.)

3. Different parents just have different and equally valid educational goals for their young children.

I’ll just quote Oster at length:

With young kids…there is a lot more variation in what we are trying to teach or accomplish. A different focus will lead to different outcomes.

For example: imagine I started a preschool focused on marine life. Everything we did would be oriented around understanding fish and octopuses and other sea creatures. At the end of two years in preschool, my students would know a lot about marine life and would (I venture) perform very well on a test about sea animals. However, they’d do very poorly on a test that was about letters or, say, land animals.

Relative to some other approaches, Montessori education emphasizes letters, and also sorting and categorizing tasks. One of the key papers cited above shows that 5-year-olds who have had this type of education are better at a card sorting task. This shouldn’t be surprising—they’ve been in an environment with a sorting task focus! …

When we say “Is Montessori school better?”: “better” may simply be undefined. If your goal is letter recognition at age 5, Montessori could possibly have an edge. If your goal is nature knowledge, Waldorf might. For many of us, the goal of preschool is largely socialization, learning to exist in a classroom with others, fun, child care. For that, the preschool might matter, but its philosophy isn’t likely to.

This is related to some of the issues that came up when discussing data, above. What exactly are we evaluating? Some parents might prioritize creative expression in childhood, others academics, others developing niche interests. Can we really say, for any given child, that certain priorities are “better”? It gets even worse if what we’re evaluating has philosophical components at the level of big-picture values, as I think it does. Can we really say that some conceptions of the good life are “better”?

I think the answer to this is just yes. This is at the heart of why I think that Montessori is a better parenting and educational philosophy, and why I agree with aspects of Oster’s arguments but disagree with her conclusion. This is a fundamental difference in meta-level frameworks. Oster helps parents evaluate parenting and educational decisions from a more value-neutral framework, one that emphasizes individual differences and enables individuals to be informed agents. (If you’re new to my newsletters, you might not know that I love Oster’s work, and have used it in making many parenting decisions, so let me just state that here.)

My view is that we can identify fundamental needs across individual differences, that we can do so in early childhood, and that we can do so in a way that has implications for parenting and education. A big part of what Montessori did is help conceptualize the universal structure of healthy development.

I think to some extent this is a matter of fairly normal school things. In a part of the above passage from Oster the I elided, she notes that,

With older kids, there is typically a set curriculum within a school. This makes it easier to talk about differences in achievement: everyone is supposed to learn a particular set of math skills, so it makes sense to ask if some approaches allow them to do so more effectively. 

If all you believe is that literacy and math are important, there’s a strong case to be made for Montessori being better. You’d have to spell out more middle terms: that early childhood is an especially good time to learn literacy and math, that there are ways to do so that don’t trade off against (or are conducive to) other developmentally important outcomes, and that doing this dovetails with moving pedagogy in a Montessori direction.

But there’s much more to say about what children need. The argument for Montessori is that there’s a core competence as an agent that young children can develop. That there’s an independence that it’s healthy for them to develop. That many of the table stakes for living a good life—the love of effort, the love of understanding, the ability to act on one’s desires—are either supported or hindered in the first several years of life. The case for Montessori is that it is important—generally important—to develop independence, a love of effort, and core cognitive and practical competencies.

One can dispute either that these things are foundational components of a good life. One can dispute that the approach we take to early childhood matters for their development. One can dispute that Montessori schools are good at achieving these things. But each of these claims is plausible (and, I think, true). Underlying many individual differences, there is a foundational structure to healthy development. And parenting philosophies can be evaluated on the extent to which they lock onto this structure and take it seriously.

Montessori is a philosophy, an educational worldview with a take on what is important. For Montessori,

It was not a question of giving children more freedom, more activity, more material to play with: what interested her was this spontaneous emergence of spirituality and the shedding of frivolity for the sake of work which only a few took in consideration. (Mario Montessori, “The Yellow Letter”, 1963)

This claim is hard to parse, and even harder to evaluate, but it should be taken seriously. I think it would better to say “Montessori is wrong” than to say “it’s true for some families and not for others”.

One of the main risks I think we currently face as educators is that we continue along in the vein of “well we all sort of vaguely agree on what’s better and differences in pedagogies are mostly a wash”. There’s a need to deepen thought, sharpen disagreements, and be more ambitious about engineering better learning.

4. Evaluating a specific school.

One last point, and one that moves me a bit closer to Oster’s approach in practice, is that I definitely don’t think you should pick a school just because it’s Montessori.

The state of Montessori education, and education generally, is such that most of the variance in the quality of a classroom is explained by the individual teacher. Philosophy does matter. I think a classroom run by a great Montessori educator is very likely to be significantly better for most individual children than a classroom run by a great educator with a different approach.

But part of what makes a great educator great is that they do well by the individual children in their class. And, another big but, great educators are hard to find.

My recommendation for parents is that they use the Montessori framework to understand and evaluate the development needs of their children—to see the critical importance of developing core competencies to think and act at a characterological level—with the understanding that in many circumstances this will lead you to pick a program that is not Montessori.

When it comes to your child, you have to look not just at schools but at individual classrooms and teachers. The Montessori pedagogy is a competitive advantage—ceteris paribus; mutatis mutandis, other factors can dominate, even by Montessori standards.

The premise of the conference: there is a need in education for more intellectual depth and clarity, more philosophy of education, more engineering from first principles. You can read my remarks at the first conference here for a full statement of where I think we are in the history of education and why this sort of discussion is critical. Or, in Ray Girn’s more concise words:

The sessions were fantastic:

• Kmele Foster spoke on the culture wars and education. He argued that school choice was a good way to provide some badly needed de-escalation to the culture wars—and explained why he chooses education that prioritizes the individual and offers guardrails against totemization.

• Michael Abello talked about the work of Bezos Academy, with a special emphasis on the kinds of innovation that are needed to increase access, on both the supply and demand sides, to pedagogically radical education.

• Emily Lawrence walked through a few hundred years of the history of concert dance, especially the evolution of ballet, and showed how tied the art form was to pedagogy: its conservative classical forms are coupled to rigid classical pedagogy in studios, and its more modern evolutions are coupled to progressive pedagogy in higher education.

• Kerry McDonald surveyed six decades of alternate education in the US, noting, among other things, that what started as a small, radical trend is increasingly mainstream and big tent.

• Vriti Saraf spoke about web3 and education, arguing that both the technology itself was promising for education and that the ethos and culture around the technology dovetail nicely with better pedagogical trends.

• Luc Travers offered a pedagogical demonstration of his approach to the visual arts. Luc’s approach deemphasizes technical and historical context and instead centers on explicating and relating to the narrative implicit in the visual arts. (Luc also provided tours at the Met.)

• Caleb Hicks discussed his work bringing real problems and experts from industry into high school education, and ran a workshop demo of his pedagogy as well.

• Joseph Connor looked at the types of education policy shifts that are occurring in many states, and offered both a taxonomy of the types of organization that is emerging to

• Ray Girn and I provided bookends to the conference, arguing that inadequately philosophical pedagogy is a blocker to education reform, and that we shouldn’t be shy about providing more controversial rationales for heterodox positions.

We’ll be hosting again in Austin in the late fall; email info@montessorium.com if you’re interested in attending.

Back in February, I had the pleasure of joining Vaden Masrani and Ben Chugg on the Increments podcast. It was an incredible conversation and probably my favorite podcast I’ve recorded.

The full conversation covers more than I can include in this post:

• How structured is a typical Montessori day?

• What is the Montessorian take on unstructured play?

• What’s so special about the Montessori method of teaching children how to read?

• What are some key differences between a Montessori school and a traditional preschool?

• Are there effective ways to incorporate Montessori principles and pedagogy into non-Montessori classrooms?

• How should a parent judge the quality of a Montessori program?

• Where does technology fit in the Montessori classroom?

• Does a Montessori education specifically equip children to handle challenging or unpleasant tasks?

• Why are grades bad? What’s the alternative, if you’re seeking a valuable assessment of student progress and mastery?

• What does Montessori look like for older students?

• How could we change higher education for the better?

Instead of our typical newsletter format, I’d like to share some highlights from this discussion. I’ll publish the complete transcript soon, and the full episode is absolutely worth a listen. Here are some highlights:

Ben: So, is the case that it [Montessori] is simultaneously sort of more structured and less structured than, maybe like the status quo system? More structured in that it posits a developmental sequence that children should follow in order to learn things and that this sequence has the children learn different things at different ages? But, also less structured in that once you set up this sort of synthetic environment in which they can operate, you kind of just let them loose in this environment for long periods of time so they can explore their own curiosity. Is that a fair way to put it?

Matt: That's extremely accurate. So, the structure of the Montessori day starts with a three-hour work period. And this is a period where children are free to choose work off the shelf that they have been introduced to: to get it out, to set it up at a table, to practice it. And they could work on it for anywhere from like, five or 10 minutes if it's a younger child or a child who's just not that into it and who decides they want to work on something else, to hours. Part of the reason to have a work period like that is that there are a lot of specific skills that Montessori is optimizing for that underlie all of the materials.

The deep thing that Montessori is optimizing for in early childhood is extended periods of concentrated work. And the idea is that if a child is interested in something and they're working on it, they've got that little furrowed brow on their head—it’s not just like they're running around and they're excited and they're happy—there's a look that a child gets where they're into something and they're working with their hands and they're trying to do it over and over. You do not interrupt that, that is sacred. You protect that. To use a metaphor that I don't like particularly well, the child is building all sorts of kind of mental and characterological muscles, and exerting effort trying something over and over that is difficult for them. You need an extended period to get them into that state. They need to be able to choose something, even choose multiple things and feel out what they want to do, and then get lost in the work. And then when they're done, return the work to the shelf.

You need a long period. So, whatever you do for a living, imagine a day without meetings. And then one thing shows up on your calendar at like, 11:30. Fifty percent of your productivity is cut, just like that. That's the kind of idea behind the work period. It's like, stop messing with the child! If the child is expecting something to happen, like circle time, or having a snack or whatever, you’ve got to give them a period where their expectation is, “It's my job to get lost in something.”

The beating heart of the day is the work period and being able to choose work and get lost. And what you asked in terms of what they do with that time: is it just like free play? Or what is it? They're working with these materials, either the cognitive, academic learning materials, the exploratory learning science materials, or something in practical life—they could like, wash some tables. And if you get it at the right age, children love doing that.

One other thing that you said, is that Montessori thinks that there's a kind of developmentally-optimal time to introduce things. That is true, in broad brushstrokes. It's not this kind of Piagetian view that first, children are in a sensorimotor or concrete operational period, and then you introduce them to these materials It's a little bit broader than that.

The idea is that there is a time when children will naturally find certain things interesting and challenging. And then, after that time, they will not find those things naturally interesting and challenging. So, it's almost like a motivational aspect.

There's a cognitive aspect too. Just to take a simple example: putting on a jacket. Most people learn how to put on a jacket when they're like three, four, or five, maybe even a little bit older. And if you think about putting on a jacket, like it's nice when somebody holds the jacket for you, because it's frickin' hard to put it on. Like, even as adults!

And for like, a one-year-old, an older one-year-old, or a two-year-old, putting on a jacket is really hard, and they actually want to do it themselves. They kind of push you away when you get in their face. But they can't do it yet. And so it's just this frustrating thing for them. But there's this method, some people call it "flip flop over the top", some people call it the Montessori Coat Flip, where if you lay out the jacket upside down and open in front of the child and teach them how to line their feet up with it. Then they can put both of their hands on it and flip it over their head.

So why do this? Clearly, you don't need to do this to learn how to put on a jacket in life. This is not about teaching a practical skill. Everybody learns how to put on a jacket, and everybody's pretty good at it, everybody's roughly the same level of good. But if you get them doing it when they're like 18 months old, two years old, it builds something that speaks to them. It's like, "I can do it, I can do it myself." It builds their confidence, it does something to their soul. Whereas if we teach them how to do it when they're four, it doesn't do anything to their soul. And that kind of consideration, if you kind of magnify that out with self-care and work and language and math, like when can you get to the child so that the speaks to them? And if you miss that window, it's like yeah, now you have to learn how to write cursive when you're nine years old. And that's a chore and it's just drilling. Is there a way to do it when they're three or four, so that they're actually genuinely intrinsically motivated by it?

And that's kind of what the development is about. It's not so much like, “Are they cognitively ready?” It's like, “What is the challenge? What is exciting? What speaks to this age?” At any given age, there's a set of problems that are challenging but solvable with enough effort. But that set will be continuously changing. And you want to kind of give the child the opportunity to solve these problems.

Ben: I wanted to align everything that was just said with the fact that Maria Montessori got such excellent results teaching children to read, because I imagine putting on a jacket is very different than spending a couple of hours going through a book.

Matt: So, what's hard about reading? Think about what's hard about reading for a child. There's a lot that's hard. So, just to take a laundry list of simple things: one is, most of the words in most books, you don't know what they are. You've never even heard them spoken before. Even if you get a kind of simple children's book, you're going to encounter vocabulary that you don't know—the whole graphene system of writing, it's hard to learn and memorize. There are these symbols that only differ from one another in subtle ways. It’s just hard for a child to wrap their head around it.

But even if you can recognize the letters, it's very hard—just fine motor control-wise—extremely hard to produce it yourself in an accurate way. Like the best three and four-year-olds, no matter how brilliant they are, no matter how much work you do with them, they're just not going to be that precise. They've got these stubby little fingers and their brains are just not that developed in terms of fine motor—this is what they're working on. And the whole alphabetic system is designed for adults who have extremely refined fine motor capacities. There are other things too, but those are just a handful of things.

So what Montessori did is she tackled those difficulties, she isolated and solved for them. So, here is the scope and sequence, a sketch of it, of reading and writing for children. First of all, there are a number of things that children do motor-control-wise to build the writing muscles that have nothing to do with writing. The way that we teach children how to wash tables builds the motion of being able to hold your arm like this. A lot of the materials have these little pegs on them, puzzle pieces, for example. And the way to best use those pegs uses the same methods and muscles that you use to control a pencil. So, you haven't even gotten to writing yet, these are just things that children are interested in doing.

Then on the language side, there's a sequence where first, you have children play these phonic sound games. So, "I'm looking around the room, what starts with a "ss"?" You don't even say the letter name. It's just like "ss" or "ca" or "ah"—you're getting the children to notice different sounds. After a lot of games like that, and a lot of vocabulary-building that also happens in Montessori with cards with pictures, you start to associate those sounds with what's called the sandpaper letters.

The sandpaper letters are written letters where the letter part of it is rough on the card, and you can trace it with your finger. Again, you don't introduce the letter names. It's just like, “this is the ‘ss’”. And then after you get good at that it's like, "What is the ‘ss’ card? What objects does it go with?" And after this, they start to match ‘ss’ with a snake and, you know, a square, and other things that have a ‘ss’, just visually. Then you introduce them to a moveable alphabet, which is just the letters kind of in wooden block forms. You have them very slowly and gradually start sounding out things that they want to say. For example, if the child has a cat at home, like "What's a ‘kuh’, what's an ‘ah’, what's a ‘tuh’? Can you find those letters in the moveable alphabet and spell them out?" And all of a sudden, the child is writing. And they haven't had to hold a pencil, even though they're practicing and preparing for pencils, and they haven't had to read a book. It's writing without writing, and it's writing before reading. It’s this brilliant sequence that tackles the problems one by one.

If children are writing first, they never encounter a word that they don't know; a priori, every word that they want to write is a word that they know. If children are writing using a moveable alphabet, they don't have to use pencils yet. It's important to learn how to write with a pencil, and they're working on it. But you don’t have to rush—that can come later. First, you're learning how to put letters together. They haven't even started reading. There's this rethinking of language, its scope and sequence, and relating it to like, “What can children actually do, what are they actually interested in? How can we make each step as inspiring as possible?” And if you do that, you get brilliant results, and children love it. It feels like play to them, even though it's work and learning.

Vaden: What's the relationship between Montessori and technology? Because I imagine that as you get a bit older, one of the primary ways that people think and explore is using a laptop on the internet.

Matt: Obviously, this is an area where if you’re a Montessori educator, you're going to have to do first-principles thinking. The world has changed. It is interesting to note historically (Montessori doesn't get enough credit for this, and the Montessori movement is actually a little bit allergic to this), but she was very interested in early video technology. She was like, “What, you can show children a video of an elephant? Holy crap! That's way better than seeing the picture. And most children are never going to be able to see an elephant in real life. So, we might as well show them this video that will be so inspiring to them.” She had in mind like, little carousels with pictures that you would spin, movies in the original sense of “movie”. Moving pictures.

We do a lot with technology in our schools, especially in the upper-elementary age, including introducing children to things like typing, internet research, and internet searches.

I mean, my daughter knows how to use an iPhone. She is 21 months old and she can actually control it. Like, we gave her the phone to watch a movie of herself and walked away and came back two minutes later last night, and she had pulled up a YouTube video of The Sound of Music somehow. We were like, “How did you do that?” And she was rearranging our apps on our Apple TV. Like there are things on our Apple TV where I don't know how she did that, but we don't know how to undo it.

Children in the developed world get a lot of exposure to technology. And I think that has to be part of your thinking as an educator, in terms of, “What am I adding here? What am I adding, where there are these risks but also great potential benefits?” One of the main risks is that if you engage in technology before you have a certain kind of social/cognitive maturity or self-control, you get sucked into popularity contests and you get addicted. So, a lot of our thinking around technology is like, “How do we build this core character such that children learn to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks?” But some of it is actually about learning skills—research skills and typing skills are two really, really big ones.

There are some people—not Higher Ground people, but Higher Ground-adjacent people who are working on really interesting things in terms of how much great stuff there is on the internet for children. I mean, think of how much children can learn from just YouTube. Forget about dedicated learning technology, YouTube is the best learning resource ever created. I say that despite being a diehard Montessorian and despite the fact that YouTube is not typically thought of as ed-tech. You can learn anything on YouTube. It's still a little bit hard for children to use it independently. Often, especially if you’re three, four, five, six, seven-year-old, you've got to go to your parents and ask them to help you search for things. You need to help them curate their experience if you really want it to be optimal. I know people who are working on that problem, like how do you make it so that children themselves can interface with the internet in a really productive way? That's unsolved.

Nobody has yet worked out the Montessori scope and sequence of computers. And you can think about that, both from the perspective of understanding physically what a computer is, and more abstractly, the kind of logical computer structure. There are kind of different levels in terms of, you know, the Turing state machine, the different layers of abstraction for logic that you can have, how that interfaces into anything. Regardless of how they use it, my goal is that children understand conceptually that computers are a combination of math and machines that implement that math, such that humans have figured out how to make math do almost anything that humans wanted to do. And that is a magical thing.

There you have it, three highlights selected (with difficulty) from over an hour of engrossing conversation. If you found any of the above content interesting, definitely listen to the full episode, follow Vaden Masrani and Ben Chugg, and subscribe to Increments. If you’re curious about other podcasts I’ve recorded, check out Montessorium’s bi-weekly podcast, Philosophy of Education.

Have a great week,

Matt

Children need benevolence like they need food and water. They need material from which to form foundational, soul-level, implicit beliefs about themselves, about human beings, about the sort of world they live in. The young child who can become benevolent—who has a deeply positive view of her relationship with the world, who starts life with both self-love and an expansive view of herself—is poised to find meaning, develop virtue, love greatly, and live a full life. A core benevolence is a foundational pillar of good character. It underwrites all thought, all action, all relationships. It’s the ultimate “secure attachment”.

This is what school shootings threaten.

The phenomenon of school shootings presents a safety challenge and a policy challenge. But the more profound challenge is philosophical. They present a worldview challenge. They are an overt attack on benevolence, on meaning, on making any sort of moral sense of anything, on life itself.

The pattern of periodic school shootings in the US, of which the slaughter of elementary school children in Uvalde was the latest awful exemplar, is so atrocious and so senseless that it is profoundly disorienting. It is morally and philosophically disorienting. It creates cognitive dissonance at the very basic level of being able to make sense of the human condition.

I think it’s plausible that this is part of the motive for school shootings. The more intellectual shooters write telling, nihilistic screeds that paint a black picture of life as meaningless, culture as an offensively hollow lie, and children as in need of salvation by murder. The less intellectual ones manifest these ideas in the patterns of their lives. American gun culture is not new; men who allow their dispossession to metastasize into wickedness are not new. What is new is the depth of our meaning problem and the vast surface area that our culture offers for indulging in its worst aspects.

I don’t know how confident I am that this is an accurate diagnosis of the cause of school shootings. But I am confident that their effect, their most salient function, is to cripple benevolence. How can one maintain an openness to the world and a belief in humanity in the face of the utterly senseless atrocity of the deliberate mass murder of innocent children? It is as though school shootings are meant to present an argument against maintaining our benevolence, and goddamn if that “argument” isn’t difficult to refute.

That is our primary challenge, as educators and also as a culture. In the immediate aftermath of Uvalde, Matt Yglesias fired off this tweet:

It was ratio’d and widely criticized as, at absolute best, tone-deaf. (He later apologized for it.) I found myself in a very small minority of people who thought the tweet was healthy and good. It was a raw attempt to simply assert that idealism and benevolence. It was a brute force reorientation towards the good and the intelligible.

In the long run, one can’t brute force benevolence. It needs an intellectual, philosophical defense. We need an account of the goodness of human beings and also an account of our dark side, and they need to be integrated and held in a way that allows us to think and act. Ultimately, we need a society that can actually solve these problems. That requires legal and policy resources, which might help at least some. More than anything, it requires cultural innovations that can draw on a true philosophy of human nature, that can keep moral despair vastly more marginal than it has become today.

But even absent that full defense, raw affirmation of the conviction that benevolence is important is itself valuable.

It’s especially valuable for educators. Part of the immediate reaction to school shootings is always to harden schools against these atrocities. School shooter drills, armed personnel, limiting and securing egresses, reinforcing doors.

These measures buy safety, or at least the appearance of safety (their effectiveness is a matter of debate, and I’m on the skeptical side). But they pay for that safety with benevolence. They loudly proclaim to the school community that it is under threat, that it could be attacked at any moment, that the wolves are at the door, that one must prepare to be murdered. They instance the nihilist pattern: the world is not intelligible, human beings are not good, your best hope is to be prepared to barricade the world off at any moment.

This is a far greater challenge than the safety challenge. School shootings are horrific, and for their victims, lethal. As a matter of raw actuarial risk, though, they are not an especially major threat.

The threat is that they are harder to orient around than the Yellowstone supervolcano. It’s easier to make sense of a geological catastrophe than a moral catastrophe. In the former case you need predictive science, and to gradually work towards science-fiction-esque preventative geoengineering capabilities. In the latter case, you need… what? Better gun policy, which seems fraught and unlikely? A better approach to mental health, which seems nebulous and elusive? A better moral culture, which would require who knows what? It’s unclear what to do, and so we panic. We lock down. We turn schools into hard targets with brittle souls. And then we send our children there to incubate their souls.

The job of schools is to instill love, confidence, even vulnerability—a term that I normally dislike, but that is usefully charged in this context. Children need, literally need, to be able to look out and be entranced and excited, to wonder and to venture forth. They need to fall in love with humanity, with their own humanity and the humanity of others.

To harden schools against school shootings is to design for a meaningless world. Education is always soulcraft, whether we recognize it or not; a school environment that is designed around atrocity preparation is soulcraft for preppers. On the margins, at least directionally, it soulcraft for more school shooters.

In terms of school policy, I think what is needed is some Yglesias-like spunk. It’s to assert our benevolence.

It takes thought and courage to not do things that would be worse than nothing, in the face of understandable and tremendous pressure to “do something”. But one should not apologize for being uncompromising with respect to benevolence.

In terms of a deeper school philosophy, precisely what we need are schools that have a pedagogy that is robustly integrated with a philosophy of benevolence. And this is precisely what Montessori provides. Montessori pedagogy is designed to create strong selves in the sense of strong valuers: an individual who loves, whose love suffuses her every thought and action, who has the agency to imbue meaning into everything.

The Montessori approach is not designed to fend off nihilism, but boy does it. Montessori herself had no conception of school shootings, but she did live through both World Wars and did grapple with the unspeakable horrors of her own time.

“…peace-loving men, men endowed with the best intentions, have earnestly tried to create a world where peace could reign. And they have not succeeded. Think how hard humanity has worked towards this ideal of peace, how many moral guidelines they have laid down…

“Humanity is a monster when adult—bloodthirsty, indulging in continuous slaughter.”

What’s her solution? She has a whole pedagogical answer to this, but first, at the level of orientation, it’s the aesthetic point again: to reassert benevolence. We center ourselves on man’s horrors,

“[b]ut man is great. We have only to look at civilization to realize the greatness of which man is capable. But we are focused on his errors and mistakes, not his greatness. The fault lies with us…

“Therefore, I say, we must refocus our hearts. We must put the creations of man at the centre, and not his defects.”

Everything in the school, from the very design of the environment—which Montessori thought should be roughly the opposite of a barricaded, properly drilled school—to the teachers, who need first and foremost to undergo the perspectival shift just gestured at—everything is designed to help impart this focus on meaning, on humanity, on moral vision and confidence to children extremely young.

She did consider this a bulwark against atrocity. Her son (and closest collaborator) wrote of the citizens of evil social systems:

“But had they been helped during childhood to incarnate, besides the reality of the functioning of the world and of society, a feeling also of gratitude towards the anonymous benefactor who works for them—and which is the whole of humanity—then I have no doubt, if some fanatic of new ideologies were to tell them ‘follow me to glory’ (meaning: follow me to war) they would stop to think.” (Mario Montessori, “The Human Tendencies and Montessori Education”)

I’m not sure how fully I believe that schools themselves can solve the problem of a culture where moral decay manifests as random violence. I’ve written before about the limits of an education system to solve problems like war. Education is part of the answer; it’s a transmission belt to children of something that we need to tackle at adult levels as well.

But if schools can do anything to help, it’s doing the job of soulcraft right. Schools should help foster children who repudiate senselessness in the patterns of their own lives. To do that means not letting the nihilism of school shootings creep into our educational approach under the rubric of operational safety policies. It means, more broadly, taking ownership of issues of meaning and character in development, a job many educators simply eschew. It means an education that is benevolent without compromise.

Two great pieces this week, one on project-based learning, the other on work-life balance.

Against project-based learning

I was musing on Twitter about the in-practice defects of project-based learning…

…and someone clued me in to this phenomenal piece by Jimmy Koppel from 2018:

• The practice is not the performance: why project-based learning fails

Koppel is writing about teaching adults computer science, but he draws on examples from many other learning domains: mathematics, martial arts, music theory, and more.

It’s time to stop looking for panaceas and shortcuts and realize that deliberate learning and deliberate practice—as a separate activity from the everyday doing—is the only way to mastery. As famed gymnastics coach Chris Sommer puts it, the fastest way to learn is to do things the slow way. Studying the fundamentals may seem like a distraction keeping you from getting your hands dirty making a Rails app using the Google Maps and Twilio APIs, but when you do get there, you’ll find there is less to learn if you’ve already compressed the knowledge into concepts.

There’s much more to say about what it means to “study the fundamentals”, especially in primary school, when students aren’t necessarily by default coming to their learning with clear goals, long-term or otherwise. One of the arguments for PBL that Koppel doesn’t address is that projects aren’t just “real” in the sense of being more ecologically valid learning contexts, they are real in the sense that they have real motives built-in.

But I’m in broad agreement with Koppel: the skeleton of an educational program should be highly designed learning paths designed to enable learning—really learning, not just sort of learning—the most comparatively fundamental and powerful concepts in an efficient, reliable way.

The whole premise of education, in my mind, is that there are ways to support this learning that are better, far better, than just “figure it out as you go”. The ecological validity of real work is important, especially in primary education, since primary education must not skew a child towards a misbegotten notion of work or life or problem-solving. But, for education to be effective, it must have threads and patterns that draw out and scaffold more fundamental concepts and skills.

Against work-life balance

I’m skeptical about the notion of “work-life balance”. Not that there aren’t questions about how to integrate work into one’s life, or concerns about over-prioritizing work over other elements of life. It’s that I think the frame of work-life balance is unhelpful:

1. “Life” is the wrong contrast for “work”.

2. “Balance” is the wrong metaphor for how to relate the different elements of one’s life. Your life is not some sort of precarious scale that needs to be evened out.

3. Relating those two points: what is the scale even supposed to be? It’s not your life, because “life” is an element to be weighed on the scale.

More from me here on Twitter, but Scott Kennedy wrote a great personal reflection that I think speaks to the inadequacy of the metaphor:

• Why I left Google: work-life balance

Kennedy actually explicitly uses work-life balance in his piece, so it isn’t a critique. But what he actually does is extend the metaphor:

Somebody once described balance to me as three buckets filled with water. One for career, a second for physical health, and a third for social and family life. At any point, one bucket might be running low. But as long as the overall water level is high enough, things should be fine.

Importantly: the water represents your level of satisfaction, not the hours you spend.

He has three categories that are more precisely named, not two. And rather than just balancing the two, it’s about the amount of water in each bucket, and the overall amount of water amongst all three buckets—a complex thing that isn’t just a matter of time spent.

He concludes by describing his improved state:

I work more hours. I’m more likely to be working in the evening or on the weekend now. But what I do makes a difference that I can see. Progress feels 10x faster.

Most surprising is that I have more energy. It’s easier to find motivation to get back in the gym. I have more energy in social situations.

When one bucket fills, it can overflow.

Kennedy’s metaphor is good precisely because it eschews a simple notion of balance in favor of an overall abundance of energy and motivation, which is much closer to how I think about it. An apparently lopsided life can actually be more “balanced”, that is, integrated and fulfilling.

One more notion that names the problem and the solution more precisely than work-life balance: Mission without Martyrdom.

At Higher Ground, Montessorium’s parent organization, Mission without Martyrdom is one of our core values. It’s an identification of what to seek—a sense of mission, of joy and meaning in chosen work—and what to avoid—a sense of martyrdom, of grinding through an unchosen obligation. It’s abstract enough to accommodate a variety of different possible answers to the question of what specifically the good life consists in, e.g. how much time one spends working, with family, and so on.

Ray Girn had a lovely staff note last week that touched on this notion as well as one major way to maintain that joy and meaning: consciously seek out inspiring performances.

Matt

Jason Rheins below examines the educational implications of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Jason reviews the Allegory in the Republic in some depth, and relates it to Plato’s views of education: the need to not just acquire knowledge but overcome misconceptions, Plato’s educational elitism, the challenge of orienting the soul towards virtue, and more.

Plato has a plausible claim to being the first thinker to bring a system to philosophy and to rethink education from philosophical first principles. He advocated for a complex system of education designed to sort people into classes, produce a small but critical supply of philosopher-rulers, and bring harmony among the parts of the city. Plato recognized that the basis of that education is to be found in epistemology and ethics, in deep questions about knowledge and virtue.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week. But please enjoy Jason’s synopsis of this most influential idea.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave

By Dr. Jason Rheins

Introduction to the Allegory

Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is arguably the most famous passage in the Western philosophical canon. It occurs at the beginning of Book VII of his Republic, just after the famous “divided line” and “analogy of the sun” at the end of Book VI. Socrates introduces the allegory as a way of characterizing the effects of education or its lack on human nature. In doing so, he relates the theory of levels of knowledge and reality proposed in the previous two analogies to the system of government and education in the Republic’s ideal state and clarifies his overall vision of the meaning, purpose, and challenges of education.

True education, it turns out, amounts to reorienting the entire human soul, but its intelligence most of all, away from the shadows of the visible, mundane world and toward the light of goodness and a higher, intelligible reality. As we will see, education involves at least two kinds of shock or disorientation—that of the darkened mind of the ignorant to light and that of the illuminated mind readjusting to the darkness in which the uneducated dwell. In this series of posts, I’ll provide a running commentary to explain what is going on at each point in the allegory, and in the final post, I will identify some worthwhile lessons in the passage that are worth keeping even if we reject Plato’s overall view of knowledge and reality. In this first section, though, my aim will be to explain the basic idea of the allegory and Plato’s comparison between us and the prisoners of his cave.

Republic VII.514a-515c

“Next,” said I, “represent our nature with respect to both education and the lack of education through this experience. Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a path along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet-shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets.”

“All that I see,” he said.

“See also, then, men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent.”

“A strange image you speak of,” he said, “and strange prisoners.”

“Like to us,” I said; “for, to begin with, tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?”

“How could they,” he said, “if they were compelled to hold their heads unmoved through life?”

“And again, would not the same be true of the objects carried past them?”

“Surely.”

“If then they were able to talk to one another, do you not think that they would suppose that in naming the things that they saw they were naming the passing objects?”

“Necessarily.”

“And if their prison had an echo from the wall opposite them, when one of the passersby uttered a sound, do you think that they would suppose anything else than the passing shadow to be the speaker?”

“By Zeus, I do not,” said he. “Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.”

“Quite inevitably,” he said.

To begin, we should understand the basic image that Socrates asks his interlocutors to imagine. The cave in question has a long entrance; at 515e we further hear that “the ascent” up out of the cave “is rough and steep”. The key persons in the allegory are the prisoners, who are bound by neck and foot so that they cannot even turn their heads. They must stare ahead at a wall opposite them. Above and behind them a fire burns, and between them there is a wall with a raised path. The wall is used just like a puppeteer’s screen, for behind it, men walk past carrying implements–solid images in the shapes of men and animals that stick out above the top of the wall. Some of these image-bearers speak and others keep silent, but the light of the fire casts shadows of the objects that they carry on to the wall the prisoners gaze upon. [See the image below].

Glaucon reacts that this is a very strange image and very strange prisoners, but Socrates insists that they are like us. The prisoners have no other knowledge of their own bodies or those of their fellow prisoners than the faint shadows that they might cast. When they refer to the shadows they see passing on the wall, e.g. saying “horse” when a horse-shaped shadow passes by, they would take themselves to be referring to the actual objects, i.e. they would think that “horse” just means a horse-shaped shadow, not the animal itself that we know of. Likewise, hearing the echoes of the image-carriers, they would take the shadows to be the speakers of these echoes. Socrates sums up that, “in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.”

But, how does that make them like us? Like us, they are confused about their own nature, taking their shadows for themselves. This may be Plato’s suggestion of the way that people identify more with their bodies than their souls and more with the lower parts of their souls (their emotions and appetites) than with their reason. More pointedly, Socrates is building on the theory of reality and knowledge laid out in the previous two books of the Republic as well as some of Plato’s earlier works such as the Symposium and Phaedo. In these, Plato’s Socrates distinguishes between sensible “becoming” and intelligible “being”. The world revealed by sense perception is an ever-changing realm of appearance, where many things temporarily and imperfectly imitate or partake in real, intelligible beings. These timeless and perfect beings are what Plato calls the “Forms” or “Ideas” (among other things).

For instance, you see a flower that is beautiful, but it is only beautiful in some ways, not others. And it will only be beautiful for the brief time between when it blooms and when it starts to fade and decay. It never is “beauty as such”, since Beauty itself is never ugly; it only comes-to-be or “becomes” beautiful for a time and then ceases to be so. However, we can recognize that beauty itself is never ugly. We can know this. Where do we get this knowledge and what is it about?

First, it cannot be knowledge about sensible objects (bodies and their images) perceived through the senses. Cognition, for Plato, is only as good as its objects. Certain knowledge requires unchanging realities, while the objects we perceive through the senses are constantly changing. As such, they can only ground opinions. For example, one can have true opinions that ‘this flower is beautiful’ or ‘this flower is not ugly’. They will be true in some senses (not others), for some time, but they will not always be true, and they will never be unconditionally true. On the other hand, if knowledge is something timeless, then knowledge cannot be about visible, “becomings”. The world of the senses is too unstable to bear the weight of knowledge. One might be able to have opinions that ‘this flower is beautiful’ or ‘this flower is not ugly’ which are true in a sense, for a time, but they will not always be true, and they will never be unconditionally true.

But what about when we say that Beauty is never ugly and Ugliness is never beautiful? This is certain, timeless knowledge, but it is not about the temporary and imperfect beauty in any sensible object. The ideal thing that we talk about when we know that Beauty is the opposite of Ugliness or that Beauty is good is instead an intelligible thing. Beauty itself, (aka the Form of Beauty, aka the Idea of Beauty) is not something grasped with the eyes of the body, but with the “eye of the soul”, that is, the intellect. Abstract things like Beauty, Justice itself, Courage itself, Flower itself, the Double, the Triple, and so on are, according to Plato, “really real” beings and the true objects of proper knowledge.

The Forms cannot be grasped with the senses, but they do have sensible reflections or shadows. A beautiful painting reflects or partakes in beauty. Contemplating it and asking the right kinds of philosophical questions might even spark in the immortal part of our soul a recollection of the Form of Beauty or awaken the intellect to it. But the most beautiful flower, or painting, or human face, or sunset is still only a shadow of Beauty.

How then are we like the prisoners in the cave? Like them, most of us take the physical objects we deal with on a day-to-day basis to be real reality. We think that words like “beautiful” or “flower” actually refer to this lily or that rose. But in this, Plato thinks, we are much mistaken. Sensible objects are only the dim shadows of intelligible beings, “flower” properly refers to the Form of Flower, not this temporary shadow of it that will soon wither in my vase. To the extent that we take the sensible to be what is most real and either fail to recognize the intelligible or regard it as some kind of less real abstraction, we are prisoners of ignorance, so benighted as to think shadows more real than what casts them, and darkness more illuminating than light.

Is Plato’s comparison a fair one? If we reject his view that the visible world of physical objects is a poor reflection of the realm of Ideas, then it certainly seems less apt to think that everything we think is real and knowable is mere shadow and echo. But even if we do reject Platonic metaphysics—as I think we should—there still is a salient point. Living in ignorance does not present itself as a total absence of discussion or concerns, but as immersion in a demimonde of chatter about ephemera, superstition, conspiracies, misinformation, and magical thinking. We take these things not only for real but for really important, and may remain in ignorance about how our physical and social world really works.

In the next section, we will examine what Plato has to say about the transition from darkness to light and the resistance that enlightenment faces.

Looking Outside

The result of a life without access to any other kind of experience than the shadows on the wall they are forced to face or the echoes of voices bouncing off that same wall is that these prisoners take these shadows to be true and primary realities, or, as Socrates puts it: “[I]n every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects (515c).”

In the previous section, we also discussed why Socrates claims that the prisoners are very much like us. For Plato, physical objects disclosed by our senses are “becomings”, ephemeral and imperfect imitations of the real, intelligible beings, i.e. the so-called “Forms” or “Ideas”. Furthermore, if the sensible world is a shadow or imitation of the Forms, then the stories, pictures, and speeches that depict the sensible world are the shadows of imitations just like the images on the prisoners' cave wall.

So, Plato has made the incredibly provocative suggestion that nearly all of humankind is completely unaware of what is fully real, and is ignorant to the point of metaphysical delusion. In this post, we will look at the next part of the allegory and examine what Plato thinks will happen if and when someone begins to “leave the cave” and become aware of what is really real. This introduces us to two further aspects of Plato’s thoughts regarding education. In particular, we will see 1. the impediments to enlightenment he attributes to prior ignorance and illusion and 2. the role of mathematics in training would-be philosophers during their ascent to transcendent truth.

Republic VII.515c-e

“Consider, then, what would be the manner of the release and healing from these bonds and this folly if in the course of nature something of this sort should happen to them: When one was freed from his fetters and compelled to stand up suddenly and turn his head around and walk and to lift up his eyes to the light, and in doing all this felt pain and, because of the dazzle and glitter of the light, was unable to discern the objects whose shadows he formerly saw, what do you suppose would be his answer if someone told him that what he had seen before was all a cheat and an illusion, but that now, being nearer to reality and turned toward more real things, he saw more truly? And if also one should point out to him each of the passing objects and constrain him by questions to say what it is, do you not think that he would be at a loss and that he would regard what he formerly saw as more real than the things now pointed out to him?”

“Far more real,” he said.

“And if he were compelled to look at the light itself, would not that pain his eyes, and would he not turn away and flee to those things which he is able to discern and regard them as in very deed more clear and exact than the objects pointed out?”

“It is so,” he said.

“And if,” said I, “someone should drag him thence by force up the ascent which is rough and steep, and not let him go before he had drawn him out into the light of the sun, do you not think that he would find it painful to be so haled along, and would chafe at it, and when he came out into the light, that his eyes would be filled with its beams so that he would not be able to see even one of the things that we call real?”

“Why, no, not immediately,” he said.

Things do not change, at least at first, if the light we consider is the true light of the Sun and the objects are the real things outside the cave. Socrates' question suggests that a prisoner might have to be dragged forcibly up and out of the cave and into the daylight. The path from the imprisonment of ignorance to knowledge is a long and steep one. For another thing, the prisoner’s eyes are still weak, the light above is even brighter and more painful, and its objects are even harder to see and harder still to believe.

Seeing real things outside of the cave and in the light of the Sun corresponds in Plato's own metaphysics and epistemology to grasping the Forms with an intellectual understanding. At first, before one is used to reasoning about intelligible beings, one cannot grasp even a single Form. One might be able to recognize beautiful faces, beautiful skies, and beautiful songs, but one would have no comprehension of Beauty itself, nor would one be ready to believe or understand that Beauty itself is far more real than the many so-called beautiful things available to the senses. In general, Plato suggests that a soul needs to become strong enough—sufficiently oriented towards intellect and away from the senses—to be ready to actually achieve any true knowledge.

Republic VII.516a-c

“Then there would be need of habituation, I take it, to enable him to see the things higher up. And at first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likenesses or reflections in water of men and other things, and later, the things themselves, and from these he would go on to contemplate the appearances in the heavens and heaven itself, more easily by night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than by day the sun and the sun's light.”

“Of course.”

“And so, finally, I suppose, he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water or phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place.”

“Necessarily,” he said. “And at this point he would infer and conclude that this it is that provides the seasons and the courses of the year and presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some sort the cause of all these things that they had seen.”

Obviously,” he said, “that would be the next step.”

Here, Socrates continues the allegory by describing the process of habituation by which a former prisoner could gradually come to see and understand the things of the upper world. The light of the Sun would be too bright to look upon directly, and even objects in that light would be hard to see. So, at first, the former prisoner would grow used to looking at the reflections in water and shadows of the things in the upper world. The shadows and images of the real things in the sun-lit world correspond to the study of mathematics in the divided line at the end of book VI.

The divided line represents various levels of cognition and reality. The line is divided into a 1/3 and a 2/3 segment. One of these corresponds to sensible becoming(s), about which we only have opinions (doxa), and the other corresponds to intelligible being(s), about which we can have knowledge (nous, epistēmē). Then, these two sections are each subdivided in the same proportion, so that the 1/3 segment is now 1/9 and 2/9, and the 2/3 section is now 2/9 and 4/9.* Opinion concerning sensible becoming is subdivided into belief (pistis) about bodies (i.e. visible, tangible things) and imagining (eikasia) about the images, shadows, reflections, and other likenesses of bodies. Knowledge of being is subdivided into understanding (noēsis) of the Forms and thought (dianoia) based on intelligible hypotheses (which knowledge of the Forms renders non-hypothetical). As shadows or reflections are to the bodies that cast them, so hypotheses are to the knowledge of the Forms. Moreover, this level of “thought” (dianoia) corresponds in Plato's mind to mathematics, at least for mathematicians who do not know about the Forms themselves.

Following the analogy, the objects carried before the fire are like bodies and their shadows are mere images. The light of the fire inside the cave is like opinion, while seeing in the sunlight is like knowledge. The real objects in the upper world are the Forms, so learning from their reflections and shadows is like studying mathematics. In fact, Socrates will go on to describe how years of training in the mathematical sciences is the only way to prepare future guardians for grasping the Forms and mastering the ultimate science of reality, dialectic.

Republic VII.517a-c

“This image then, dear Glaucon, we must apply as a whole to all that has been said, likening the region revealed through sight to the habitation of the prison, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the sun. And if you assume that the ascent and the contemplation of the things above is the soul's ascension to the intelligible region, you will not miss my surmise, since that is what you desire to hear. But God knows whether it is true. But, at any rate, my dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this.”

“I concur,” he said, “so far as I am able.”

In the Sun analogy in book VI, Socrates makes clear that what the Sun is to vision and the visible world, the Good is to understanding and the intelligible world. Vision is not the same thing as light, but light makes vision possible, and the thing most visible but hardest to see, the Sun, is itself the greatest source of light as well as the preserver and ruler of the whole sensible world. Likewise, knowledge and intellectual light, as it were, are not the same, but the intellectual light of the Form of the Good renders all the Forms intelligible to the soul. Like the Sun and the eye of the body, only the strongest eye of the soul can fully look upon the Form of the Good. In other words, only a fully enlightened philosopher is fully capable of grasping the ultimate Being. However, once a philosopher has grasped the form of the good, she is able to see how everything else is related to it and depends upon it. It is for this reason that Plato thinks philosophers are uniquely qualified to rule: they alone truly grasp what is Good and only they see how all other things relate to the good or not. Therefore, they have real insight into truth and value that Plato thinks no other human beings have.

This part of the allegory of the cave shows Plato’s profound insight and his profound epistemic elitism and anti-empirical rationalism. Plato’s allegory emphasizes a profound challenge with respect to education and enlightenment. There are real “epistemic sinkholes”; some the results of mere ignorance and others deliberate misinformation, in which not only is the truth unknown but apt to be resisted as unreal and contrary to familiar misconceptions. In other words, while ignorance fundamentally is a lack of knowledge, in its fullness in an adult community it is not just an absence, but also the presence of misconceptions, distractions, and distortions that impede communication of the truth.

Furthermore, Plato thinks that education is transformative. It not only introduces the learner to more things that are like what she already knew, but to wholly new possibilities that were not even conceivable in her state of ignorance. Unfortunately, Plato understands the world of the senses and the so-called “knowledge” we have about it to be at best a mere shadow of knowledge and at worst an illusion and distraction. Only a tiny number of intellectual elites, he thinks, actually have any idea of what is real and what is really important. The political consequences of this in his ideal state are staggering levels of paternalism and control.

* It is unclear whether knowledge is the larger section (2/3) and understanding the smallest sub-section (1/9) or the reverse (knowledge = 2/3, understanding = 4/9). It has been much debated by students of Plato since antiquity.

Leaving the Cave

In this, the third part of our discussion of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we will see the character of Socrates discuss how and why those who have ascended to daylight and seen the sun will return to the darkness of the cave and its prisoners. In terms of the Republic’s ideal state, the Kallipolis, this amounts to an account of how and why the city’s rulers will turn (some of the time) from philosophical contemplation to the mundane task of governing their benighted fellow citizens. We will see that Plato thinks that abstract knowledge about the intelligible ultimately does prepare one for dealing with things in the sensible world, even though it alienates one from the ephemeral and mundane concerns that occupy and distract the unphilosophical. Dialectical training prepares and disposes philosophers to private philosophical reflection, but education indebts the educated to society even while it gives them the means to best serve by ruling.

Republic VII.516c-517a

“Well then, if he recalled to mind his first habitation and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow-bondsmen, do you not think that he would count himself happy in the change and pity them?” “He would indeed.” “And if there had been honors and commendations among them which they bestowed on one another and prizes for the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences and co-existences, and so most successful in guessing at what was to come, do you think he would be very keen about such rewards, and that he would envy and emulate those who were honored by these prisoners and lorded it among them, or that he would feel with Homer and “‘greatly prefer while living on earth to be serf of another, a landless man,’” [Homer, Odyssey 11.489] and endure anything rather than opine with them and live that life?” “Yes,” he said, “I think that he would choose to endure anything rather than such a life.” “And consider this also,” said I, “if such a one should go down again and take his old place would he not get his eyes full of darkness, thus suddenly coming out of the sunlight?” “He would indeed.” “Now if he should be required to contend with these perpetual prisoners in 'evaluating' these shadows while his vision was still dim and before his eyes were accustomed to the dark—and this time required for habituation would not be very short—would he not provoke laughter, and would it not be said of him that he had returned from his journey aloft with his eyes ruined and that it was not worthwhile even to attempt the ascent? And if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him?” “They certainly would,” he said.”

Here Socrates considers the attitude of the enlightened person who has seen the sun toward their former status in the cave. At first, they struggled to see. They were confused by and even doubted the reality of the brighter, solid things that they saw as they ascended up and out of the cave. But once they had become accustomed to the daylight world with its real objects instead of shadows or idols and direct sunlight instead of the reflected glow of flame, they would come to regard the shadows and idols as mere imitations and cast-offs of the real things. Likewise, they would regard the interest and pursuits of the prisoners in recalling and guessing the shadows as pitiful. Plato quotes a famous line from Homer’s Odyssey, where the shade of Achilles tells Odysseus that it was better to be a poor man’s slave than king of all the dead. The prisoners are like shades in the underworld, and the enlightened is like one who has ascended back into life. (At 521c he goes further and likens philosophers to those who have ascended from Hades to the heavenly gods.) So, they would lose any ambition to achieve fame for such games and honors, which they would now regard as worthless.

For no short time, the enlightened would struggle in such games, though; just as their eyes were ill-prepared for the light when they were first liberated, so now their eyes would struggle to make out shadows in the gloom. As they struggled in these tasks they might provoke mockery from the prisoners. Their tales of sunlight and physical objects would seem like incomprehensible nonsense to the prisoners. The prisoners would likely conclude that the journey upward had ruined the sight (and mind) of the ascended and rendered them hostile to the pursuits valued by the prisoners. If they were free to do so, the prisoners would put the enlightened to death.

What Plato describes raises important questions for education and educators. The more one learns, the more remote one becomes from one’s prior state of ignorance. For example, we typically forget what it was like when we were children and had to struggle to learn something that we now accomplish or comprehend effortlessly. Learned teachers must readjust to the ignorance of their students, presenting what they know in context-appropriate manner. This is not so much readjusting to see shadows, as Plato has it, but rather learning to communicate to those in darkness. This is less of an issue for Plato, who does not think that the majority of mankind is capable of attaining real knowledge, but he does recognize the need for philosophers to communicate certain true opinions to them.

Republic VII.517a-c

“This image then, dear Glaucon, we must apply as a whole to all that has been said, likening the region revealed through sight to the habitation of the prison, and the light of the fire in it to the power of the sun. And if you assume that the ascent and the contemplation of the things above is the soul's ascension to the intelligible region, you will not miss my surmise, since that is what you desire to hear. But God knows whether it is true. But, at any rate, my dream as it appears to me is that in the region of the known, the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the Idea of Good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this.” “I concur,” he said, “so far as I am able.”

This recapitulates the “symbolic economy” of the allegory. The cave is the realm of sensible becoming, while the surface world is the intelligible world of being. Just as the sun rules, illuminates, and maintains the sensible world, so the Form or Idea of the Good reigns in the intelligible world, and thereby all that exists. This is the ultimate object of the philosophers’ pursuits.

Republic VII.517c-518b

“Come then,” I said, “and join me in this further thought, and do not be surprised that those who have attained to this height are not willing to occupy themselves with the affairs of men, but their souls ever feel the upward urge and the yearning for that sojourn above. For this, I take it, is likely if, in this point too, the likeness of our image holds” “Yes, it is likely.” “And again, do you think it at all strange,” said I, “if a man returning from divine contemplations to the petty miseries of men cuts a sorry figure and appears most ridiculous, if, while still blinking through the gloom, and before he has become sufficiently accustomed to the environing darkness, he is compelled in courtrooms or elsewhere to contend about the shadows of justice or the images that cast the shadows and to wrangle in debate about the notions of these things in the minds of those who have never seen justice itself?” “It would be by no means strange,” he said. “But a sensible man,” I said, “would remember that there are two distinct disturbances of the eyes arising from two causes, according as the shift is from light to darkness or from darkness to light, and, believing that the same thing happens to the soul too, whenever he saw a soul perturbed and unable to discern something, he would not laugh unthinkingly, but would observe whether coming from a brighter life its vision was obscured by the unfamiliar darkness, or  whether the passage from the deeper dark of ignorance into a more luminous world and the greater brightness had dazzled its vision. And so, he would deem the one happy in its experience and way of life and pity the other, and if it pleased him to laugh at it, his laughter would be less laughable than that at the expense of the soul that had come down from the light above.” “That is a very fair statement,” he said.

Above, in referencing putting the enlightened to death, here again, Plato is relating his allegory to the fate of philosophers in their difficult encounters with hoi polloi. Philosophers, who know about eternal, intelligible truths, lose interest in the ephemera that most humans fixate upon: gossip, popularity, power, wealth, etc. Their doubt and disdain aggravate those whose values they question. The philosophers’ disinterest or unfamiliarity with such matters can make them seem out of touch, impractical, or “lacking in street smarts”. This includes Socrates, who Plato depicts in the Apology or the Gorgias as unable to defend himself in a law court or the court of public opinion, but able to defend his soul.

Philosophers’ discussions of abstruse theoretical topics sound like so much gibberish to the ignorant masses. Socrates’ focus on definitions or Plato’s Forms, for example, might strike them as incomprehensible. Philosophical wisdom, then, would appear to be a liability, even though philosophers would sooner die than live without it. However it may seem, in reality, it is better to suffer the disorientation of the enlightened in darkness than the benighted in light. Philosophers see this and, like Socrates, they avoid public affairs and instead focus on the elevation of their minds.

Republic VII.518b-519b

“Then, if this is true, our view of these matters must be this, that education is not in reality what some people proclaim it to be in their professions. What they aver is that they can put true knowledge into a soul that does not possess it, as if they were inserting vision into blind eyes.” “They do indeed,” he said. “But our present argument indicates,” said I, “that the true analogy for this indwelling power in the soul and the instrument whereby each of us apprehends is that of an eye that could not be converted to the light from the darkness except by turning the whole body. Even so, this organ of knowledge must be turned around from the world of becoming together with the entire soul, like the scene-shifting periact in the theater, until the soul is able to endure the contemplation of essence and the brightest region of being. And this, we say, is the Good, do we not?” “Yes.” “Of this very thing, then,” I said, “there might be an art, an art of the speediest and most effective shifting or conversion of the soul, not an art of producing vision in it, but on the assumption that it possesses vision but does not rightly direct it and does not look where it should, an art of bringing this about.” “Yes, that seems likely,” he said. “Then the other so-called virtues of the soul do seem akin to those of the body. For it is true that where they do not pre-exist, they are afterwards created by habit and practice. But the excellence of thought, it seems, is certainly of a more divine quality, a thing that never loses its potency, but, according to the direction of its conversion, becomes useful and beneficent, or, again, useless and harmful. Have you never observed in those who are popularly spoken of as bad, but smart men, how keen is the vision of the little soul, how quick it is to discern the things that interest it, a proof that it is not a poor vision which it has, but one forcibly enlisted in the service of evil, so that the sharper its sight the more mischief it accomplishes?” “I certainly have,” he said. “Observe then,” said I, “that this part of such a soul, if it had been hammered from childhood, and had thus been struck free of the leaden weights, so to speak, of our birth and becoming, which attaching themselves to it by food and similar pleasures and gluttonies turn downwards the vision of the soul—If, I say, freed from these, it had suffered a conversion towards the things that are real and true, that same faculty of the same men would have been most keen in its vision of the higher things, just as it is for the things toward which it is now turned.” “It is likely,” he said.”

Socrates now relates the foregoing parts of the allegory to the original stated theme: education. Education—say in various trades or areas of expertise—might appear to be putting knowledge into the empty vessel of a soul. In fact, true education consists in reorienting the soul in the proper direction. The soul possesses a kind of vision, an intelligence, but whether it looks upon the world of becoming or true being depends on its orientation. Those with the greatest intelligence can be the most dangerously evil if their cleverness is turned to the wrong ends, but given the proper direction in a good city with philosophical education can instill, they would have the keenest vision of the Good. The soul, bent by birth and the changes of the world of becoming, must be hammered straight again, turned back—returned—to its true and proper aim. (Plato’s late dialogue, the Timaeus, similarly speaks of the contemplation of higher objects straightening out the twists and bends in the soul caused by becoming and birth.)  Education is the art that turns the soul in the right direction, toward the proper objects, redirecting it from sensible ephemera to the Good.

Other excellences of the soul, e.g. temperance or courage, seem more like they are acquired through practice and training, just like strength and other excellences of the body, but the basic power of intelligence is in the soul, ready to be directed or misdirected. However, redirecting the soul’s intelligence to its proper objects involves the training of the other virtues in as much as the improper objects for intelligence such as the pleasures of food and sex are the very sorts of things that are desired when one lacks moderation and other developed excellences. Thus the training of the character of the Kallipolis’ citizens, and its guardians especially, must begin with the kind of education discussed in Books II-IV. (In a future post on Education in Plato’s Laws, his last and longest dialogue, will discuss its definition of education; it has a somewhat different emphasis, but it too stresses the point that education is the inculcation of the soul for virtue.)

A downside of Plato’s view here is that it seems to take the power of one’s intelligence to be innate and fixed. Plato’s Kallipolis is highly elitist; only those with both the requisite mental capacities and decades of education are allowed to take part in the city-state’s governance. Occupations are assigned and more or less fixed for life. The city has a eugenic breeding program to make sure the right number of people are born with the capacity to be philosopher kings. One’s future occupation is not set solely by one’s genealogy—the genius child of laborer parents would be raised to be a guardian—the selection of guardian candidates is made early. (See my earlier piece on the education of the Guardians in Plato’s Republic.) Plato has what today would be called a “tracking” system. Leaving aside the injustice of this system’s totalitarian coercion, it is also easy to see how differences in the pace of development or forms of expression could lead to talent being lost or ignored in such a system.

Republic VII.519b-520a

“Well, then,” said I, “is not this also likely and a necessary consequence of what has been said, that neither could men who are uneducated and inexperienced in truth ever adequately preside over a state, nor could those who had been permitted to linger on to the end in the pursuit of culture—the one because they have no single aim and purpose in life to which all their actions, public and private, must be directed, and the others, because they will not voluntarily engage in action, believing that while still living they have been transported to the Islands of the Blest.” “True,” he said. “It is the duty of us, the founders, then,” said I, “to compel the best natures to attain the knowledge which we pronounced the greatest, and to win to the vision of the Good, to scale that ascent, and when they have reached the heights and taken an adequate view, we must not allow what is now permitted.” “What is that?” “That they should linger there,” I said, “and refuse to go down again among those bondsmen and share their labors and honors, whether they are of less or of greater worth.” “Do you mean to say that we must do them this wrong, and compel them to live an inferior life when the better is in their power?” “You have again forgotten, my friend,” said I, “that the law is not concerned with the special happiness of any class in the state, but is trying to produce this condition in the city as a whole, harmonizing and adapting the citizens to one another by persuasion and compulsion, and requiring them to impart to one another any benefit which they are severally able to bestow upon the community, and that it itself creates such men in the state, not that it may allow each to take what course pleases him, but with a view to using them for the binding together of the commonwealth.” “True,” he said, “I did forget it.” “Observe, then, Glaucon,” said I, “that we shall not be wronging the philosophers who arise among us, either, but that we can justify our action when we constrain them to take charge of the other citizens and be their guardians. For we will say to them that it is natural that men of similar quality who spring up in other cities should not share in the labors there. For they grow up spontaneously from no intention of the government in the several states, and it is justice that the self-grown, indebted to none for their breeding, should not be zealous either to pay to anyone the price of its nurture. But you we have engendered for yourselves and the rest of the city to be, as it were, king-bees and leaders in the hive. You have received a better and more complete education than the others, and you are more capable of sharing both ways of life. Down you must go then, each in his turn, to the habitation of the others and accustom yourselves to the observation of the obscure things there.” 

The Kallipolis is a city ruled by philosophers and organized from top-to-bottom so as to cultivate character and produce new philosophers. Kallipolitan philosophers, like all philosophers, will want to reside in the “Isles of the Blest” as much as possible. That is, having found the glory and wonders of the intelligible realm they will not wish to quit it just to return their attention to mundane concerns. In other words, the philosopher-kings will want to spend their time as philosophers, not kings. The founders of the Kallipolis must persuade them to “return to the cave”, as it were.

In other cities, where the education is neither organized by the state nor properly arranged to produce philosophers, however few, those who do emerge as genuine philosophers are autodidacts, geniuses who managed autonomously to attain knowledge of true reality and the despite their culture and its “education”. As such, they exist in a society that is likely hostile to philosophers; at the same time, they owe no debt to society for their singular intellectual and moral achievement. Is natural for a Socrates or Plato in Athens not to wish to bore, soil, or endanger himself with its politics.

This is not the case for Kallipolitan guardians, though. Were it not for their carefully managed city, almost none of them would have managed to become true philosophers. (Indeed, given their innate intelligence, many might have ended up as sophists or tyrants.) Thus, while more contemplation would make them individually happier, the well-being of the overall city can be preserved by appealing to the debt that the guardians owe to the city that so carefully nurtured them.  (A similar argument about the debt of lawfulness one owes to one’s city and its laws occurs in the Crito, an early dialogue where Socrates defends his choice of accepting the execution Athens has ordered for him.) For Plato, the best rulers are those best able to rule but least desirous of power. Thus the Kallipolis will persuade its guardians to take turns philosophizing and ruling in order to preserve the state that has enabled them to savor the joy of knowledge.

As always, Plato raises important questions even if we disagree with his overall view. Do these guardians really owe political service to the state? Some believe that one owes a duty of obedience to one’s parents, being indebted to them for one’s life and upbringing. What do the young owe their teachers and educational institutions? Obedience? Gratitude? Attention? Does it matter that children cannot and do not make the decision for themselves to be born or raised and educated in a particular way? These are themes we will explore in future Montessorium posts.

Republic VII.520c-d

“For once habituated you will discern them infinitely better than the dwellers there, and you will know what each of the ‘idols’ is and whereof it is a semblance, because you have seen the reality of the Beautiful, the Just, and the Good. So, our city will be governed by us and you with waking minds, and not, as most cities now which are inhabited and ruled darkly as in a dream by men who fight one another for shadows and wrangle for office as if that were a great good, when the truth is that the city in which those who are to rule are least eager to hold office must needs be best administered and most free from dissension, and the state that gets the contrary type of ruler will be the opposite of this.”

It is often asked how knowledge, which is of the intelligible Forms, enhances the ability of philosopher-kings to manage the affairs of the Kallipolis, here in the visible, spatio-temporal world of change. Here Socrates at least suggests that once their eyes adjust to the darkness, the enlightened’s knowledge would enable them to better identify the ‘idols’ that imitate real objects and that cast shadows on the cave walls. Ultimately, knowledge of the Beautiful itself, the Just itself, and the Good itself would both give philosophers the proper motives (e.g. goodness, not power) and the ability to discern what would be for the best. Plato does not have Socrates elaborate on how this would work, and in another middle period dialogue, the Parmenides, Plato himself inaugurated the long tradition of questioning how his theory of Forms is supposed to work including how (knowledge of) the Forms could relate to (true opinions about) sensible things.

As it relates to education, this is a form of the issue commonly known as “transfer”. More precisely, this is the issue of whether and how one learns to apply wide concepts and broad generalizations and principles to narrower domains or particulars. The problem is especially hard for Plato: his metaphysics and epistemology hold that the objects of conceptual knowledge on the one hand and those of perception and opinion on the other, belong to two distinct and entirely separate ontological realms. Even without Platonism, there is still a question of whether studying “the Good” or “the Beautiful” generally makes one any better at discerning what would be good or beautiful in practice. The best education would prepare students both to comprehend universals and apply them to particulars.

Related Reads

• Moral Education in Early Plato

• Education in Plato’s Republic, Part I: Censorship and The Education of the Military Class

About the Author

Dr. Jason G. Rheins is a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. In 2003 he received his BA with honors in Philosophy and Classical Studies from Stanford University. In 2010 he earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught or held professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, UNC Chapel Hill, St. John’s University, and Loyola University Chicago. He has published articles and book chapters on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, and metaphysics. He is currently completing a monograph on Plato’s theology.

• Jason Rheins on skepticism about classical education in the classical period

• Kerry Ellard on the so-called “factory model” in education

• Kerry on the early and very conflicted reception of Montessori in America

Today I’m indulging in highlighting one of my own essays. It’s a reflection on one of Montessori’s views that I think has mostly faded in the short history of the Montessori movement: that individual human development is an achievement akin to the achievements of industrial civilization—that we take both of these kinds of achievements for granted—and that we do so for similarly prejudicial reasons.

Human Achievement and Human Development

by Matt Bateman

It is well-known that Maria Montessori views child development as a self-directed process. When children learn, whether it’s to grasp or to walk, to count or to write, to classify plants or to empathize with others, it is done by the child’s activity. Educators and caretakers can and ought to help children learn and grow in a variety of ways, by providing content, structure, opportunities, encouragement, and more. Fundamentally, though, those are all inputs for the internally driven, self-activated processes of learning and growing up.

But Montessori’s view goes deeper than that. Her view is that human development is in significant part an act of creation. The human child is similar not just to a budding plant or infant mammal—who also grow and learn according to internally driven processes—but to a novelist or an inventor. The child, in growing up, learning, and creating herself, is achieving something, is creating something new: she is gradually creating her adult self.

In Montessori’s view, there is continuity between the progress of civilization and the development of each individual child. The invention of the printing press, the idea goes, is fundamentally similar to learning how to walk.

Moreover, appreciating these achievements is itself an achievement. Whether we’re talking about an adult invention or a child’s hard-earned milestone, there is a risk of interpretation: that of taking achievement for granted. We can come to see the products of human creativity as things that are just sort of there, as part of the furniture of the universe. We can even become cynical about them; we can see them as flowing from ill motives or causing more harm than good.

Montessori is worried that we’ll take fail to appreciate the inventions, achievements, and creations of civilization—and also that we’ll take for granted a child’s process of growing up. She sees these mistakes as connected and is concerned to ensure that educators do not make either of them.

Here I’ll explore both halves of this idea in turn as well as the whole view that emerges from them.

The Achievement of Civilization

In the first of her 1946 London Lectures, Maria Montessori makes the connection between the creative adult and the child explicit. She writes that our “interest must centre on the achievements of the child” (p. 5), and then immediately offers an exhortation to consider humanity—not children in particular, but mankind as a whole—from a certain perspective. Quoting her at length:

We have only to look at civilization to realize the greatness of which man is capable. But we are focused on his errors and mistakes, not on his greatness. The fault lies with us. Think how many things man has created—the wireless, to mention but one. Look around at all we have—small, great or beautiful—whatever it is, it has been created by man. But while asking for more and more of these marvellous inventions, we never think of the man that created them. We do not consider him at all. Although we try to do everything we can to enhance our comfort, we do not consider the greatness of man, we only consider his defects. We do not consider man, the creator. Therefore I say we must refocus our hearts. We must be the creations of man at the centre, and not his defects. We must adopt the same attitude towards the child. When we see the miracle of a child walking, we take no notice because it is a daily occurrence. And yet we correct all his small peccadilloes. How much fuller and richer life would be if we saw the child in all his greatness, all his beauty, instead of focusing on all his little mistakes? These are so great in our eyes that they lead us to despondency because we see baseness all the time. Our aim is to study the child from this new point of view. With this change in our hearts we will want to study him in all his different phases, to study all his miracles, to realize how man reaches the stage of man through the child that constructs him.

Maria Montessori (1946) pp. 5-6

The reverence for the adult creator is a current that runs throughout Montessori’s work. In the passage above, she references the creation of the wireless (likely a reference to radio communication), and earlier in the lecture she more generally mentions the adults “who have and will produce (through multiple centuries) all the marvelous things that have ever been created to form civilization” (p. 4).

Her discussions of education for older students, elementary and beyond, are shot through with reminders to “never teach the various scientific subjects—geography, history, etc., without relating the passionate endeavors of the men who, with their work, their dedication, their sacrifice, brought light to new truths” (SRL 2, p. 21). She writes that we should teach, by example, that “every achievement has come by the sacrifice of someone now dead” (TEHP 3), and includes in the set of achievements the infrastructure of literacy (books, writing utensils, the alphabet, etc.), explorers who created maps, and the aforementioned scientists and investors. As a pedagogical point she is worried that children will be incurious or ungrateful about the amazing creations around them, and her antidote is always the same: a proper approach to history education, one that emphasizes the twin facts that the world did not always have such things and that these things were brought about by human creators.

Montessori is unabashedly positive about human civilization, and does see it as an achievement, as something fundamentally new. She writes of the importance of “the feeling that human life is triumphant over the cosmos: humankind should feel itself king of all that has been created, transformer of the earth, builder of a new nature, collaborator in the universal work of creation” (FCTA C). That she links human creation to divine creation shows how profound she considers the human achievements to be.

What about the argument that these many supposed human achievements are in fact ills in disguise, or motivated by petty selfishness, or achieved by exploitation?

While Montessori doesn’t address this sort of narrative at length, what she does say about it is quite damning. “A great obstacle to what I call the cultivation of humanity,” she writes, “is the prevalent opinion that men are selfish” (SRL p. 18). In the same lecture she notes the globalization and advance of the world’s economy is a major instance of human solidarity (p. 16), one that creates interdependencies (pp. 13ff), solidarity, and “human progress” (p. 19). Instead of being cynical of these things, what we should be doing is morally elevating our view of these things, becoming conscious of how they are amazing, morally great achievements. She thinks this is true of helping children become conscious of them in this way, but also of ourselves: “If our educational task is to enhance the intellectual and affective faculties of children, we must first enhance our own” by ensuring that we see the heroism in mankind; if we do not, “our spirits will become arid, as will those of the little ones we are striving to educate for life” (p. 21).

While it is never a great idea to speak for the dead, it’s worth reflecting on how her views on these things might apply today. It is easy to encounter the view that civilization is in a state of general decline or significant depravity; that there is at least some category of technological innovation that represent, at best, a double-edged sword and at worst a civilization regression; that supposed “progress” is coupled with environmental destruction, increasing materialism, the destruction of our attention spans, our communities, and our willingness to connect with one another.

While there are real concerns here, at least some of which I personally share, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that Montessori’s immediate processing of World War II, the horrors of which touched her personally, is not to question but to double down on the greatness of human civilization. Her first lecture in 1946 begins by reflecting on “the sad times that have just passed” (p. 1), which notably include adults who are “crueler than the monsters in films”, “bloodthirsty, indulging in continuous slaughter” (p. 3). But she ends her lecture with the diagnosis quoted above, to “look at the civilization to realize the greatness of which man is capable.” The problem is that “we are focused on his errors and mistakes, not on his greatness. The fault lies with us” (p. 5).

For Montessori, the fundamental is human greatness, and greatness lies in achievement, in creation. The point isn’t to be a Pollyannaish optimist, or to ignore horrors. The point is we are surrounded by the evidence of mankind’s capacity for progress, achievement, creation, and improvement—and that we routinely ignore it, fail to properly valorize it, paying no heed to creators and taking their creations for granted.

The Achievement of Development

This sort of failure of awareness—ignorance of the source and value of the human goods—is a double failure for educators.

In part, this is for reasons already alluded to above. If we take for granted the achievements of mankind, we then inevitably convey—by modeling—that take-it-for-granted attitude to the children in our care. We not only make our own spirits arid, but those of the next generation.

Again, the point here is not to shelter children from the real struggles and failures in human history. The point is rather to emphasize how these struggles have been gradually overcome. The older children she worked with, Montessori writes, “were particularly interested in the difficulties these men had to overcome, the prejudices they had to fight, the privations they had to suffer in order to discover the secrets of the unknown world and of the mysterious forces of nature” (SRL, p. 20).

Human achievement is always a struggle, against both nature and the worse elements of our natures—but it is possible. She was actively engaged in a curricular project that made achievement morally central, particular more morally central than moral flaws and corruption:

Beyond everything I should work to inspire a faith in the greatness of man, the greatness that has been proved by enormous progress. Make clear to them [viz. children] man’s place in the world as an improver of the environment of nature, how he has always struggled on, despite being weighed down by so many moral defects. Help them to face up to and understand these moral defects that have crept into all the wonderful things that he has created. They do aspire for something fine, they have a faith in life; but each year that they live in the world they see these institutions of man to be so full of corruption that they attempt to disregard or destroy them. Instead we should help them to see how wonderful is the essence of the truth that lies beyond them, help them to understand exactly where the moral corruption lies, and then they can do their best to be free of it.

Maria Montessori (CSW, p. 104)

So there is the achievement-oriented stylization of disciplinary content. But there is a deeper pedagogical point to be made: that all of human development is an achievement. “We need to change our attitude” towards humans not just to understand the great achievements of adults, but to “see the greatness of the child’s achievements” (1946, p. 5).

Montessori’s view is that every adult represents the result of years of work of a developing child. It is not just the case that children turn into adults, a truism, but rather that children actively create the adults they turn into. A child both teaches herself to walk and talk, and gradually comes to a view as to what this means in terms of her independence. She gradually builds her capacities, both her willingness to flourish and participate in human life, through her own efforts.

Each stage of human development represents work. We see children effortfully struggling to move, attentively observing and imitating human sounds, practicing basic motions and cognitive exercises, seeking out certain experiences and interactions. It is not an exaggeration to say that Montessori’s core point about these activities is that they are effortful activities of the child that are key to producing the developmental milestones in that child. It is clearly not the case that children learn to speak by anything resembling adult language instruction. But it is also not the case that children learn to speak by a passive process, simply internalizing the linguistic nutrients of their surroundings. There is an observably effortful process—one that is simultaneously the expression of and development of the individual agency of the child.

Montessori thinks that in the same way that we are liable to look at a radio while being insensitive to the discoverers of electromagnetic waves and the inventors of wireless telephony—we are also liable to look at a toddler who is walking and talking while being insensitive to the true creator of those capacities. There is a deeply important respect in which it is neither us nor nature (though both are sources of important raw materials) but the child who gave herself her own powers. This is true of motor control, language, moral character—the whole stack of human powers gained over development. These are human achievements, each with a human achiever.

In those who tend to roll their eyes at the advent of material progress, Montessori sees those who tend to turn their heads at feats of human development.

It’s not an accident that, in the first 1946 lecture we’ve been considering, her contrasting emphasis is on the “defects” of the child. The wrong sort of attitude, one not centered on achievement, is most evident when we are frustrated with a child—when they are misbehaving, or not understanding something, or otherwise causing trouble for us. It’s precisely because we take basic, good adult behavior and capacities for granted that we are inclined to attempt to read them back into childhood.

In reality, good manners, self-regulation, and a capacity to fluently communicate and resolve conflicts are not naturally present in adults. They are achievements built gradually throughout childhood. It necessarily follows that children won’t have them in whole. The frustrating behaviors of children don’t really represent defects; most fundamentally they represent the absence of a hard-won achievement, one that is likely actively being worked on by the child. It can be frustrating to deal with a human who lacks basic physical self-control, emotional self-regulation, self-awareness, and has only the most miniscule capacity to communicate. But these lacks are the default state, not the product of some sort of defect or vice in the child. The child hasn’t achieved these momentous capacities yet; he is working on it and, indeed, needs our support.

That children create the adults they grow into is not just a biological point, or even a developmental one. For Montessori it means assigning the locus of control and responsibility to each child in a way that gives her real human credit for her developmental achievements, and gives each caretaker and educator the proper perspective, sympathy, and valorization of the effort that goes into the child’s achievements.

Conclusion

Montessori’s view is that in both the case of the child and the adult “we must refocus our hearts” and “put the creations of man at the centre” (1946, p. 6). And her view is that this is not an abstract point but a lived issue, one that colors our every interaction with the adult world.

For everyone, and particularly for educators, Montessori considers it important to sensitize oneself to achievement and to readily recognize it everywhere. This means a mindset that includes the following interrelated imperatives:

• Habitually identifying the achievers and creators, contemporary and historical, of everyday human values

• Not taking values for granted, whether material or characterological

• Taking seriously that disorder, frustration, and even danger is the default state, and that systematic departures from this state are achievements

• Taking seriously the chosen thought and effort that goes into every achievement

It’s worth noting, as a postscript, that not everything in development represents an achievement in the sense discussed here. While a child’s personality and character are fundamentally his achievements, there are aspects of his personality that are “native”, or perhaps developmentally canalized with respect to his effort (e.g. temperament). And while the coupling of a child’s capacity for action and his emerging conscious mind are achieved, there is an aspect of her basic neural and physical development that is given and that enables this development. Humans aren’t literally created ex nihilo, and it’s worth considering and separating out their achievements from the material that they have to work with. (There are further nuances worth exploring in terms of continuities of self-directedness with human and non-human growth, and differences between human child and human adult achievement.) Lastly, it’s also not the case that what the adults around children do has no impact on their capacity to achieve their growth. It does, and every advance in pedagogy is also a real achievement.

For Montessori, the point is that being achievement-oriented is an integrated perspective—an achievement in and of itself—that is culturally missing in general, that applies in spades to children, and that is there is, perforce, tremendous value in being a special area of internal focus for educators.

Montessori’s reverence for human beings is not an optional aside, or a peripheral motivator of her work. Loving humans—including adult humans, including material progress, including frustratingly ignorant children who are painstakingly growing themselves—is a critical part of her pedagogy.

Abbreviations

All citations above are from Montessori:

• 1946: The 1946 London Lectures

• CSW: Child, Society, and the World

• FCTA: From Childhood to Adolescence

• SRL: The San Remo Lectures

• TEHP: To Educate the Human Potential

Related Reads

• The Future of Education

• The Coming Golden Age of Pedagogy

About the Author

Dr. Matt Bateman earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2012 from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught and continued his research at Franklin and Marshall College in the Department of Psychology, on topics ranging from neuroscience to evolutionary theory to philosophy, before joining the LePort Schools as Director of Curriculum and Pedagogy in 2014.

In 2016, Dr. Matt Bateman became a founding member of Higher Ground Education. He is now Vice President of Pedagogy for Higher Ground and the Executive Director of Montessorium.

Today we’re back with Kerry, looking at the early reception of Montessori in America. Montessori has always had a grassroots flavor in the US, operating largely outside of the intellectual establishment, and at no time was that more true than her initial reception in the 1910s. She had a tremendous amount of popular support and enthusiasm—and a tremendous amount of academic opposition.

As late as 1915, Montessori’s “glass classroom” was the talk of the Panama Pacific World Fair in San Diego. By 1916, she was essentially vanquished from the US, her direct influence dropping to near-zero until after her death.

Kerry has collected and analyzed some remarkable passages in early newspaper coverage of Montessori, presented below.

Early American Newspaper Commentary on Montessori

By Kerry Ellard

A look at the early press coverage of the Montessori Method in America indicates that interpretations varied significantly. It was likely in part a case of seeing what one wanted to see, but it likely also had to do with the way in which people were introduced to the method, what they saw as the goals of education, and what methods they were contrasting it with. Additionally, people who had a vested interest in other education methods naturally tended to find the enthusiasm overblown. But they all seemed to have pretty similar general expectations about early childhood education, indicating the prevailing worldview among educators. Two newspaper articles from Washington, DC illustrate this dynamic.

In 1913, the Evening Star ran a piece on a group of locals who were urging that the city become the American “headquarters” for the Montessori method. The group was sponsored by Dr. Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, and it was to launch in a room at his home.

“If the efforts of a group of Washingtonians who are intensely interested in the Montessori method of child-education are successful, Washington will become the American center for the spread of this new method; its educational system will absorb the Italian psychologist's ideas, and the parents of the children who are now being educated … will be the sponsors for the awakening in America of this twentieth-century discovery as to the best way of getting the best out of a child. The parents of children who have been attending this "laboratory" since November met at Dr. Bell's home yesterday morning, determined to keep the Montessori center of America right here in Washington. It is more than a mere matter of having a small private school here: the movement has for its object a much larger thing. They want Washington to adopt the method for its educational system and to have the adopted system become the show piece of the nation, from an educational standpoint....There is something unique and of historic importance in the pioneer school in the Bell Home. It is important because the head of it is Anne George, the first American graduate of the famous Dottoressa Maria Montessori of Rome, the woman who upset all previous notions as to educating children and whose discoveries are fast getting out of the "fad" stage and are attracting the serious wonder and attention of the scientific world. Miss George is a pioneer in Montessori, and has always been a free lance in education, kicking over the traces of convention and seeking for the latest and best developments. She was in Chicago, a private school teacher, when she heard of Dr. Montessori in Rome. That was before the magazine writers had begun their assault of interviews on the doctor in Rome. Miss George went to Rome, saw that a new continent had been discovered in the world of educating children and went to work to conquer its difficulties..."The Montessori method," Bell wrote, "may be illustrated by the ordinary method of feeding chickens, which is to scatter the food on the ground where the chickens may get at it and then leave the chickens to pick it up for themselves." To read these notes of Dr. Bell's and to read what Miss Fletcher had to explain about the method is wonderfully clear in the light of having seen exactly what the children do, but it is probably true that a wider range of interest may be found by citing some bald examples of what the children accomplish without accompanying the citations by the scientific explanations, beyond the rather interesting observation that Dr. Montessori started out with the theory that education of children should proceed from a biological standpoint. The Froebel kindergarten methods are left ‘centuries behind,' in the opinion of the Montessori enthusiasts…The little Montessori-taught lads and lassies have a distinct air of independence, initiative, self-reliance, or call it what you may; there is none of the running to nurse or parents with a "What shall I do next?" query. That shows, the expert will tell you in scientific manner, what sort of an education is going on in the little life. They get a grip on the child, start him doing something in a manner that takes his whole attention, and before one realizes it, he is developing the manliness in him at a startling rate. Another odd and useful little Montessori-taught trait is the custom of these children to dress themselves at a far earlier age than the ordinary child...This latter bit is a part of the ‘exercises in practical life.’ All sorts of buttons and lacing and hook and eye effects are given to the children, and so interested do they become that they will not be satisfied until they have mastered the mysteries of all the fastenings that the human dress is heir to. This is not the end and ambition of Montessori--to teach a child to dress. By no means. It is but a single occupation chosen as an illustration Along the same lines do the children learn to read and to write before they know what they are doing. If the word auto-education can be used at all, it can be used for Montessori's methods... Whatever ‘it’ is, it seems to get children in a state where they attack their problems with a strength and firmness not seen ordinarily….”[1]

While the reporter’s own views and sensationalism may somewhat color the story, what can be taken away from it is this:

• There was much discussion over what the Montessori Method actually was, and whether it was new.

• It tended to be promoted by young female educators, usually socially connected and who had traveled to Europe, who had a passion for theories of education and innovative methods. One gets the sense Bell is charmed by their enthusiasm.

• Part of the attraction was the perception that it was based in “science” and “biology,” and that it was novel, with unprecedented potential.

• In education circles, there was an ongoing rivalry with the kindergarten crowd, and a feeling that there was no greater sin than being “behind” the times. (“The Froebel kindergarten methods are left ‘centuries behind’…”)

• There were a number of fads and ideals popular in education circles that were being compared with the Montessori method. The author’s references, somewhat playful, to “reading ‘out of the air,’” an “orderly, modern, scientific and far from freakish method,” “auto-education,” etc. It seems people were rebelling simultaneously against ideas seen as rather silly and against the older “pate de foie gras” method Bell spoke of.

• Both Bell’s chicken-feed comment and the emphasis on independence and manliness, especially the keyword “self-reliance,” reflect Emersonian philosophy, which permeated American culture. Emerson never proposed specific methods—he was not concerned mainly with education, and certainly not childhood education. He was concerned with cultivating individual judgment by observing the world’s operations. But it is clear that many 20th-century American educators were influenced by the 19th-century literary themes that Emerson represented. (Emerson’s writing is full of allusions to classical literature, history, philosophy, mythology, all major religions, and even scientific treatises, so many of these themes were “universal” or “timeless.”) These themes generally appealed to them, so they used a lot of the same language, but many believed Emerson’s unstructured individualist approach was wholly inadequate and that his ideas remained underdeveloped and unmodernized. 

A little over a year later, another DC paper looked into the ongoing debate over the Montessori method. The reporter interviewed Catherine Watkins, director of public kindergartens in the Washington public schools, who said that Washing kindergarten programs included “all the benefits claimed for the Montessori system, and comprises additional merits not included in the Montessori kindergartens.”[2] Watkins had studied the Montessori methods used in Chicago and Washington Montessori classes, the latter of which presumably included the school at Bell’s home.[3]

“The claims for the Montessori methods far exceed their actual value to education…And I make that statement with a full realization, that Madam Montessori has contributed much that will be of lasting value if it awakens Italy, and America, as well, to the needs of the young child… The use of the steps.... indicates one point of difference between the two systems. In a kindergarten the child climbs the steps unconsciously, for the purpose of coming down the slide. In the Montessori school they are encouraged to climb steps for the sake primarily, it is stated, of cultivating grace of carriage and correlation of muscles. But whatever may be true of the Italian child, we have not found it necessary to expend much thought on American children in that particular. They perform the act or climbing steps with poise and ease…” [4]

What stands out from this interview is that the characterizations of the Montessori Method are almost the reverse of the ones in the piece from a year earlier. From Watkins’ perspective, which is clearly invested in the kindergarten model, this is not at all “something entirely new,” although the interviewer paraphrased Watkins as saying that “light, easily moved furniture is required by both the kindergarten and Montessori methods.” She perceives the Montessori method as much more familiar and structured—she emphasizes the directed, almost drill-like tasks more than Bell does, to the point of explaining that Montessori students climb stairs to cultivate graceful movement, rather than “unconsciously, for the purpose of coming down the slide.” This does not sound very much like self-directed learning. But Watkins continued in a way that contradicts this, speaking of similarities between both systems. 

“Both believe in working with concrete material. Both encourage children in the care of material, in the performance of practical duties, such as cleaning the floor, in feeding animals, in taking off and in putting on their own wraps [shawls or coats]...Both systems observe the luncheon period in about the same manner, encouraging the children to help in its serving, and in cleaning and putting away the dishes… Both systems feel the child can be given ethical and mental instruction by a contact with natural phenomena…”

Watkins describes these tasks not as having a practical value in themselves or developing specific skills (i.e., learning to get dressed) so much as an expression of a child being allowed to interact with their natural environment and discern how to navigate it using one’s own judgment (i.e., putting on or removing coats as needed). Here is where she thought the systems differed:

“The Montessori system emphasizes the individual. The kindergarten, while providing abundant opportunity for individual development and variation, emphasizes the group. Thus the individual life is extended and enriched and a foundation is laid for those virtues which arise only through social relationships and social co-operation…Children, at play, tend to reproduce the life about them. This may be made a potent element in developing their sense of social relationships, if it is wisely directed. So far as I can see the Montessori system provides no opportunity for such group play. We have some interesting experiences in kindergartens by this inborn aptitude of children to formulate games from what they observe among adults. In a Montessori school the teacher merely is the silent observer of the child. In the kindergarten she performs that function, and also is the mediator between the instinct of the child on the one hand and the complex problems of modern living on the other."

Watkins told the interviewer that the observation role “involves either a lack of restraint or lack of incitement.” It was evident that kindergarten was seen as something designed to prepare kids for “the complex problems of modern living,” which had a heavy social component, as well as the cultivation of independent judgment that was admired about the Montessori method. Watkins’s next comments are significant: 

"The Montessori system subordinates imagination and language to the senses…Montessori materials are restricted to exact, definite uses, with little provision for creative expression. Kindergarten materials stimulate creative power in many directions. The kindergarten is cultural, the Montessori School merely aims to be scientific…Though modifications have been introduced in Washington schools, the simon-pure Montessori class room rejects, wholly or in part, all stories, pictures, songs and music generally. The rhythm work used in the Montessori schools here was introduced through Miss Alys Bentley, and is similar to that she gave to the kindergarten long ago, while she was director of music in the schools. "

It seems that Watkins perceived the method as overly literal and robotic, focusing on almost a sort of muscle memory rather than being a more cultured member of the social “body.” Something like today’s STEM v. humanities debate. This perception may have been simply due to what American Montessori proponents chose to emphasize, or due to the socioeconomic disadvantages of the students Montessori was working with. Watkins also said that while Montessori schools claimed the absence of punishment or reward is what distinguished them from other schools, this approach had in fact long been “in vogue” in kindergartens. 

"In the kindergarten there is no concrete letter or number work. It is believed that it is more natural to lead the child to the grasp of ideas before he is introduced to the symbols that express those ideas."

Watkins emphasized that “the Montessori and kindergarten ideas should not be antagonistic,” saying she believed that “the Montessori methods so far used are not so comprehensive as the kindergarten ideas,” but that “the Montessori system makes excellent provision for children from two to four years, while the kindergarten then could continue their development in their fifth and sixth years.” What Watkins said next was interesting, and may shed some light on confusing complaints that the Montessori method was both overly rigid and overly permissive.

"A kindergarten has been aptly described as a 'republic of childhood' The Montessori gives older children too little chance to express their own ideas; on the other hand, it gives them too much leeway in directions where they have not had sufficient experience to correlate things they observe to their own experience. The daily program of a kindergarten includes the morning hour for conversation and songs, wherein the teacher is brought into close contact with the children's viewpoint, and gets into close sympathy with them. They are given full opportunity to express themselves freely and frankly. The group relationships develop certain virtues which can be developed in no other way. These group relationships the Montessori system overlooks. I was impressed by an incident I noticed in a recent visit to one of our kindergartens. The children were arranging, at their own suggestion, to make a Jack o'lantern, later to be taken by them to the home of a child who was ill. I attended another kindergarten, where a girl, lame from an accident, had returned, and it was interesting to watch the spontaneous courtesy with which the boys treated her, quietly placing a chair near her as she moved about, and performing other thoughtful acts."

This is interesting because the previous piece emphasized that the Montessori method made the little boys more manly and able to socialize among themselves without assistance! Watkins concluded by saying that the lack of religious training in the Montessori system was one of the most serious issues she had with it. [5]

“In each kindergarten there is a morning prayer and hymn. We believe this is a valuable asset in character building. There is no set prayer. Children simply are led to the idea that the things in which they delight, the sunshine, the flower, and all nature's beauty. Is something for which they should give thanks to a higher power, and gradually they are led, in their own words, to utter a brief prayer of thanks for these things. Spiritual development of the child cannot be left to chance any more than his physical nourishment can be left to care for itself. I do not wish to be unfair to the Montessori system. But so far as I have observed, or read, there is no evidence that the Montessori school provides for this spiritual growth of children.”

This is a pretty Emersonian statement, but it is complicated by the fact that Emerson was always writing to self-reliant adults and urging them to develop their own judgment from observing Nature. It was a solo affair. How this relates to early childhood development is more complicated. [6]

Endnotes

1. Washington Star. (1913).

2. Hildebrand, J.R. (1914) “Kindergarten Expert Finds Ideas Long Familiar Here in Montessori Schools,” The Washington Times".

3. During the Progressive era, Chicago was one of the most fashionable cities, and the culture generally favored both innovation and female independence. This may explain why so many young women were introducing innovative education techniques in Chicago. 

4. Hildebrand, J.R. (1914)

5. At this time, anti-Catholic prejudice was strong in many circles, even among non-devout Protestants, and that could have had some influence on these sorts of remarks.

6. I do not think he denied the reality that children have to be raised and properly educated, even though he pretty much rejected the idea that adults should automatically follow anyone else’s system—some of his ideas on this can be gleaned from scattered comments, but he just did not focus much on how adults should educate children. In the community in which he grew up, the norm for children was a very strict religious education, but this was combined with a lot of free-ranging play and an exciting intellectual climate. It seems possible that he thought an old-fashioned classical and religious education was an ideal foundation for independent pursuits in adulthood, but he believed self-education could be entirely adequate for poor but motivated young men, and even superior to a university education.

Related Reads

• The First American Tensions

• Montessori’s Initial Reception in America

About the Author

Kerry Ellard earned a B.S. in Communication and a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. During school and after graduation, she worked in law, education, and government. Most recently, she has worked as a tutor, independent historian, and sociological analyst. Kerry lives in Boston, where she enjoys playing with her dog and attending concerts.

Jason Rheins, historian of ancient philosophy and Senior Fellow at Montessorium, below looks at the the dawn of education in antiquity—which, it turns out, coincided with skepticism about the value of education.

A great many of the critiques of modern education—that it is useless, that it imparts book smarts rather than real wisdom or practical knowledge, that it even has corrupting effects—were present at the very birth of education. Often modern critics turn to the classical world to understand the wisdom of the ancients, but the wisdom of the ancients included recurrent skepticism about the value of their canonical texts, the extent of their own wisdom, and about their ability to successfully impart either knowledge or virtue.

Early Skepticism about Education and Learning

By Dr. Jason Rheins

The emergence of a more codified education is coeval with the emergence of skepticism about the value of education.

These passages, going back to the 6th century BCE, are early indicators of this skepticism. They critique the notion of teachability of virtue, judgment, talent—the sorts of things that really count.

Theognis Elegies 429-438

“It's easier to get and raise a child
Than to put character in him. No one
Has ever found a way to make a fool
Wise or a bad man good. If god had given
the sons the of Asclepius the power to heal wickedness and the minds of awful men
How many and large the fees they would earn
And if intelligence could both be manufactured and placed in a man
then never would the bad come from good fathers
persuading with sensible speeches. But teaching
never makes the bad man good.”

The perennial question that is being answered negatively by Theognis is: can virtue be taught?

The elegiac poems and poem fragments collected under the name Theognis are difficult to date and cannot all be from the same original source, but by and large they belong to the 6th c. BCE and frequently express an elitist, aristocratic attitude distinguishing those who are excellent (and typically well-born) from those who are base and typically low born. First, he suggests that the good do not always have good children. More importantly, the goodness of one’s children cannot be vouched safe through education.

Having good children is much desired, which is why the Asclepidae would earn many and large fees if, per impossibile, they could heal wickedness. The Asclepidae (sons of the healing god Asclepius) were an order of ancient doctors. They cannot heal wickedness, nor can rationality be created and placed within a person. Because education was frequently claimed as a means of inculcating good values into pupils, this represents a skeptical challenge to the efficacy, at least the moral efficacy, of education.

One question that persists is this: if teaching never makes the bad man good, and if good men can beget sons who are not good, then what is it that accounts for the development of virtue or excellence?

[The elegiac poems and poem fragments collected under the name Theognis are difficult to date and cannot all be from the same original source, but for the most part they belong to the 6th c. BCE and frequently express an elitist, aristocratic attitude distinguishing those who are excellent (and typically well-born) from those who are base and typically low born.]

Pindar Olympian 2.86-8

“The man who knows a great deal by nature is truly skillful, but learners are obnoxiously garrulous, like crows chatter chattering in vain against the divine bird of Zeus.”

This is one of several statements in the odes of Pindar that natural excellence is superior to learning and that learning in fact is suspect. Here those who learn are likened to crows that chatter in the face of the divine bird of Zeus, that is, the eagle, against whom crows would be powerless. The idea seems to be that the garrulous chatter of those who merely have learning is as nothing compared to the skill of those with god-given, innate knowledge or wisdom.

This claim occurs in one of Pindar's many victory odes, this one composed for Theron of Acragas to celebrate the victory of his four-horse chariot team at the Olympian games, that is, the most prestigious event at the most prestigious of the four Panhellenic annual games. Therefore, one could take the poet’s comments to be directed at the innate athletic talent or skill of the ode’s honoree, but Theron was probably not the charioteer himself—victory was awarded to the owner of the team, whether he rode in the event or not. Moreover, in the immediate context of this line Pindar seems to be talking about those capable of understanding him, (which given his challenging style, was probably never a great number). For these reasons, and given the recurrence of this claim in several other poems of his, it may be best to take it more or less at face value.

So understood, the idea seems to be that some people are born with innate good sense and aptitude or even wisdom. Others can try to learn skills but “learning”, by which he most likely means what we would call “book learning” (and possibly some kinds of professional training), but this learning will never make them wise. Their learning will at best give them a semblance of what others have innately.

Heraclitus fr. DK B40

“Much learning does not teach a man intelligence, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras and likewise Xenophanes and Hecataeus.”

Here Heraclitus distinguishes ‘much learning’, polumathiē , i.e. learning in many things (“polymathy”) from intelligence (noos). Having the former—the result of being taught—does not teach the latter.

This is a good example of the distinction drawn by Greeks even in the 6thc. between learning (mathēsis) on the one hand and intelligence (noos/nous), wisdom (sophia), or good sense/rationality (phrōnesis) on the other. This is relatable to general skepticism about ‘learning’ and to the closely related question of whether it can make one excellent or wise. At the same time, some of Heraclitus’ criticism may be a more specific and idiosyncratic criticism of Greece’s most learned and supposedly wisest men, all of whom have failed to grasp what he regards as the most fundamental and universal truth, the unity of all things including (or especially) opposites [DK B108].

Some of Heraclitus’ criticism may be more specific and idiosyncratic than generic skepticism about learning. The examples of polymathy given here are: Hesiod, the epic poet second only to Homer in influence and prestige, famous for his Theogony and Works and Days; Pythagoras, the famous sage and religious leader who lived earlier In the 6th c.; Xenophanes, a poet and philosopher perhaps one generation earlier than Heraclitus, himself a critic of Hesiod and Pythagoras; and Hecataeus, a logographer or proto-historian/geographer, allegedly Greece’s first.

Take Hesiod [DK B57, cf B106*], the teacher of the largest number who is regarded by them as knowing the most. Heraclitus directly rebukes and questions him for treating day and night as distinct (Night begets Day in the Theogony) when they are really one thing. Heraclitus calls Pythagoras a plagiarist [DK 129] and an impostor [DK 81*]. (In his own century, Pythagoras, whom Xenophanes also attacked as a fraud, was known as a religious guru and cult leader; he was not, so far as we can tell, any kind of mathematician.) Heraclitus even claims that Homer failed to see what was obvious (DK B56).

These sorts of statements indicate that Heraclitus is challenging the wisdom and overall philosophical insight of the allegedly wise and learned, but not necessarily challenging learning itself. However, if none of the learned are wise, then it does tend to suggest that learning, or at least supposed learning, is insufficient for making men wise, or even that there are no qualified teachers of virtue or wisdom, even if, theoretically, it could be taught. These latter possibilities are themes taken up in Plato’s Meno.

*The authenticity of these fragments is uncertain.

Pindar Nemean 3.40-2

"A man with inborn glory has great weight; but he who has been taught is a man in darkness, breathing changeful purposes, never taking an unwavering step, he dabbles in countless forms of excellence with his imperfect mind.”

This is one of several texts where Pindar expresses skepticism or disdain for learning or supposedly learned excellence in contrast to innate qualities which he praises.

Here he specifically points out that inborn “glory” has gravitas, whereas the mind of someone with merely taught qualities is inconstant. This means that it is not steadfast in its purposes—perhaps implying its uncertainty—and that it is divided between many things; the merely learned “dabbles in countless forms of excellence” yet this mind is “imperfect” in any one of these things. So, learning is related to dabbling in many things—polymathy in other sources—and it is imperfect, uncertain, and perhaps unreliable.

Isocrates 2 (Ad Nicoclem) 42

“Moreover, this has been clear to me from the first, that while all men think that those compositions, whether in verse or prose, are the most useful which counsel us how to live, yet it is certainly not to them that they listen with greatest pleasure; nay, they feel about these just as they feel about the people who admonish them; for while they praise the latter, they choose for associates those who share in, and not those who would dissuade them from, their faults.”

In this speech, Isocrates—4th c. Greek orator, sophist, and educator—makes the point that while the power for moral edification is generally conceded to works of literature, men chose not to follow their lessons and guidance. This is analogous to the keeping of bad company, wherein one’s vices will be tolerated and indulged, rather than good company which is praised but still avoided because in good company one’s vices will be admonished.

Thus, this text relates to two familiar themes—the moral education and edification provided by literature and good social associations, respectively—and the contrary claim that these fail to have the ability to teach or make men good. As is widely recognized, literature and good associations do have the capacity to give moral guidance, but men choose to ignore their guidance to indulge in vice and avoid rebuke. Thus, this is a sophisticated position that integrates the educational potential of two recognized moral well-springs with the fact that many who drink from these waters still fail to become good.

Related Reads

• Spartan Education, Part 1

• Tutelage in Greek Culture

About the Author

Dr. Jason G. Rheins is a scholar of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. In 2003 he received his BA with honors in Philosophy and Classical Studies from Stanford University. In 2010 he earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught or held professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, UNC Chapel Hill, St. John’s University, and Loyola University Chicago. He has published articles and book chapters on the history of philosophy, the philosophy of science, and metaphysics. He is currently completing a monograph on Plato’s theology.

One of our major initiatives at Montessorium is a project to better-understand the history of education. We offer a course on its history going from the 6th c. BCE to the present, and we regularly publish pieces on the topic.

We see this work as one of our major intellectual investments in the future of education. It enriches our sense of what has been tried, and, more importantly, gives us context on the nature of the problems that face us now. Our practices of education and child-rearing are manmade, and it benefits us to understand their inadequacies and intellectual dynamics as part of the process of forging ahead.

This week we’ll be sharing 5 of the best pieces on Montessorium, one per day. Tomorrow we’ll look at the history of skepticism about the value and efficacy of education—going straight back to the Presocratics.

Today we’re sharing the below piece by Kerry Ellard, a Senior Fellow at Montessorium. It explores the question: did the industrial revolution influence education? In particular, did it influence it for the worse, by pushing schooling towards a “factory model”. She argues that the factory-model diagnosis of today’s ills in education is largely a historical mistake.

- Matt

Industrial Revolution and American Education

by Kerry Ellard

There are two Big Narratives in education:

1. Traditional education became the factory model, signaling, and oriented around obedience.

2. Progressive pedagogy destroyed the cognitive and social value of education.

Both are sort of right, largely wrong, and fatally imprecise.

In the second half of the twentieth century, it became common wisdom that American unity was rooted in shared pride at the nation’s #1 status, attributed to the maximization of industrial capacity required by modern warfare. Whether they thought this was a triumph or grounds for an anti-capitalist revolution, all American intellectuals agreed that industrialists—in America and everywhere else—had built modern society, arranging it in accordance with their own needs.

All also perceived something deeply wrong with the public education system. The first narrative, associated with “the left,” held that the system had been built by industrialists to create model factory workers: compliant, conformist workers who knew how to do little but memorize and follow instructions. The second narrative, associated with “the right,” didn’t talk so much about who built it or why, but were sure it had produced excellence-oriented innovators who were the backbone of modern industrial society…until recently. By the 1960s, the right also believed that the system was defective, and that their political opponents were the problem. Progressive educators had “dumbed down” the one-time engine of American success to the point where students learned hardly anything useful. Time to go back to basics, they insisted, at the same time progressive educators were insisting that we finally go beyond the basics.

To add to the confusion, in recent decades, the arguments have shifted. Many on the right have adopted a version of the left’s argument: the modern education system was built to supply the fuel for the industrial revolution, but the industrial era is over and we need a new, internationally competitive system that allows for more individualism and creativity. On the other hand, many progressives are now focused on making sure everyone gets access to the benefits of the system, presumably no longer seen as an inescapable force of disempowerment.

Everyone seems to agree that we need a new vision for American education. But first, we need to get straight on what the prior visions were. The best way to straighten this out is to reset the conversation.[1]

Boosterish narratives to the contrary, America did not have an education system standardized enough to be conceptualized as a national model until very recently.[2] Nothing that even resembled the modern American public school system existed until sometime after the Civil War. Before that point, America was not a single nation in the way we understand it today, so a national vision and plan were just not feasible.

“The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, by Dr. Cristina Viviana Groeger,” focuses on “the birth of what we might call the modern education system, in Boston, from the last 30 or so years of the 19th century to about the midpoint of the 20th.”[3] Crucially, the system developed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when America industrialized, not the late 18c and early 19c, when Britain industrialized. This later period is known as the Second Industrial Revolution, in contrast with the first, which was concentrated in Britain.[4] While industrialization was “well-established throughout the western part of Europe and America’s northeastern region” by the mid-19c, it did not spread to other parts of America until after the Civil War, and it was not until the early 20th century that the U.S. became “the world’s leading industrial nation.”

Industrialization did roughly coincide with the rise of the modern American school, which took place between 1880 and 1920, the period commonly known as the Progressive Era, which tracked the Second Industrial Revolution almost exactly.[5] Progressives built the modern education system, not industrialists. The latter had no need to do so—the connection between education and industrialization is deeply misunderstood.

“The phrase ‘Industrial Revolution’ was popularized after an Oxford lecture in 1884 by Arnold Toynbee and has consequently been used to describe Britain’s economic development from 1760 to 1840.”[6]

The entire American industrialization discourse, which dates back only to the Cold War, has been impaired by generalizing from concepts that are specific to a country and era. The creation of national plans for industrialization was a 20th-century practice.

From the Founding until some point after the Civil War, the American understanding of industrial development was shaped by a particular context:

• The only model of industrialization in existence was Great Britain

• The US defined itself in opposition to Great Britain

• The American South defined itself in opposition to the factories of the American North, which were also resented by the Northern aristocracy and farmers everywhere

• British industrialization did not require increased education (nor did that of any other country)

• British industrialization was not viewed as a marker of general prosperity; it was a brutal experience for the working classes. Industrialization was seen as an impressive symbol of power and resources, but this success was understood to most benefit elites, be contingent on certain national and historical factors, and bring great downsides with it. (Aspiring to industrialize did not become a fixation until the 20th century, when increased resources and social democracy made it more palatable to the working classes, following a period in which war mobilization made it a sheer necessity.)

• There was no plan by American leaders to replicate Britain’s industrial revolution. They did not see it as possible or desirable.

The conclusion from all this is that the American public school system, which did not exist until the 20th century, could not possibly have been designed in the antebellum US to produce “fuel for the industrial revolution.” It makes no logical sense.

Where does the idea come from? Well, something like this kind of happened in the mid-20th century U.S., at least in theory. During the Cold War, industrialization, a more universal change not particularly related to sophisticated knowledge, became conflated with specialized technical knowledge, which has always been an “elite” thing. An obsession with educated “human capital” as the key to national success, and consequent fear of falling behind other nations, led people to assume increased education “fueled” surges of development. This rhetoric served useful purposes, but a moment’s thought should lead to the conclusion that this was not due to superior mass education.

China and the Soviet Union may have been serious competitors at the national level, but their populations were not widely educated.[7] Nor was Britain a site of universal education at the height of its power. (For most of the 19th century, the appalling state of the British working class was regularly discussed throughout the west, with Horace Mann ranking it the lowest in western education in the 1840s.)[8] America has always educated more people, from more varying backgrounds, than other countries. While this claim may have stoked American ambitions, the false accusation of America’s backwardness was pernicious.

But this more positive spin on the “schools are here to produce fuel for industrial progress” myth only took off because Americans had gotten so used to hearing of America’s factory-style schooling. The origin of this myth will be described below.

Industrial Education

Post-Civil War, Americans became very interested in the European model of “industrial education,” but this did not refer to education for future factory workers. At the time, the term “industrialization” did not exist, and “industrial” meant something like “development-oriented” or “modernizing.” An industrialized economy and increasing democratic or at least broadly participatory social contract, with an increased need for technical or scientific training at the college level, and an increased need for socialization (to maintain political stability) and practical training (to procure economic reward) for those not destined for college. In Europe, the modern educational ideal was vocational training for the masses.[9] In America, the modern educational ideal was producing self-sufficient, politically active citizens.

So, during and after the Civil War, Republicans in the federal government set up agricultural colleges and trade schools with similar aims (self-sufficiency and meaningful community participation as a citizen) for children who had been born into slavery or to parents who had been, and Native American children, who were believed to be doomed if they stuck to traditional practices. While the latter were sometimes called industrial schools, they were designed to produce independent tradesmen who could modernize their communities—Navajo territories did not typically have factories.

But the post-Civil War urban high school exemplified the traits that would come to define the modern American education system.

The Modern American Education System: High Schools Preparing the Middle-Class For White-Collar/Office Jobs

A decade after the Civil War, community leaders in northeastern cities were lamenting the fact that the rapidly expanding system of high schools seemed only to produce middle-class strivers.[10] One 1874 lament shows that the American ideal of democratic citizenship-based education was coming to be seen as impractical:

“The farmer's boy who passes a few terms at the village academy goes home with a distaste for farming. He becomes a school teacher, a book agent, a clerk, an exhorter, a patent right vendor, anything rather than the tiller of the soil that his father was. In our towns, the boys of mechanics rarely follow the trades of their fathers. They go to our city high schools and come out of them with no thought of going to the shops to earn their daily bread. They throng the stores and offices for clerkships and agencies. They seem to prefer any thing rather than a trade...Instead of telling the boys of a school that in this great free country of ours they might some day get to be...president of the United States, I would tell them that the country needed good farmers and mechanics a great deal more than it did statesmen...”

A similar point has more recently been raised by Bryan Caplan, as shown in the following commentary from Robin Hanson:

“In...the Case Against Education...Caplan argues that school today, especially at the upper levels, functions mostly to help students signal intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity to modern workplace practices. He says we’d be better off if kids did this via early jobs, but sees us as having fallen into an unfortunate equilibrium wherein individuals who try that seem non-conformist...”[11]

This is what the factory-style schooling system complaint referred to. In March 1915, a telling John Dewey piece was published in Industrial Education Magazine.[12] It is a good example of how people saw the situation before the myth, associated with Dewey himself, arose. That it was much more complex than we currently assume is obvious from Dewey’s own words.

Dewey began by decrying the fact that no one was on the same page with regard to the need for industrial training in public schools. Advocates of such programs had advanced only an “indigested medley” of reasons for doing so: “the need of a substitute for the disappearing apprenticeship system,” “the demand of employers for more skilled workers,” making sure America could “hold its own in international competitive commerce,” and making education “more ‘vital’ to pupils.” Pro-reform interest groups were working at cross-purposes, and there was no conventional wisdom built up that could be used to engage the general public on specific policies.

Dewey also believed there had been a failure to distinguish between the circumstances, objectives, and needs of America and Germany, which was then seen to possess the world’s most advanced industrial education system. (Emphases added.)

“The oft-cited experience of Germany as to the importance of industrial education must be weighed in connection with the purpose which has dominated her efforts...Germans claim with justice that their systematized and persistent applications of intelligence to military affairs, public education, civil administration, and trade and commerce, have a common root and a converging aim. The wellbeing of the state as a moral entity is supreme. The promotion of commerce against international competitors is one of the chief means of fostering the state. Industrial training is a means to this means, and one made peculiarly necessary by Germany's natural disadvantages.

One does not need to grudge admiration for the skill and success with which this policy has been pursued. But as a policy it is extraordinarily irrelevant to American conditions. We have neither the historic background nor the practical outlook which make it significant. There is grave danger that holding up as a model the educational methods by which Germany has made its policy effective will serve as a cloak, conscious or unconscious, for measures calculated to promote the interests of the employing class...

It is natural that employers should be desirous of shifting the burden of [training workers in line with the specialized needs of large employers] to the public tax-levy...

But every ground of public policy protests against any use of the public school system which takes for granted the perpetuity of the existing industrial regime... with all its antagonisms...

[There is] a lack of enlightened public opinion as to the place of industrial training in the public schools in a would-be democracy...its aim must be first of all to keep youth under educative influences for a longer time.[13]

...[In the few places where attempts at industrial education have been made,] the aim has not been to turn schools into preliminary factories supported at public expense, but to borrow from shops the resources and motives which make teaching more effective and wider in reach.”

Dewey went on to argue that America’s circumstances demanded “efficiency of industrial intelligence, rather than technical trade efficiency,” the latter of which was the aim of the German system. Dewey was harsh on the “schemes for industrial education” that had been advanced by American proponents, saying that they “ignore with astonishing unanimity many of the chief features of the present situation.”

Dewey summarized these “chief features,” insisting that producing more technically skilled workers was not the main problem Americans faced. Trade unions opposed efforts “to recruit their numbers beyond the market demand,” and workers were more mobile. Rapid technological advances had made hyper-specialized assembly-line work and automation the norm. The industrialized world placed a higher value on workers’ adaptability than it did on accumulated knowledge, leading Dewey to conclude:

“Such facts cry aloud against any trade-training which is not an integral part of a more general plan of industrial education. They speak for the necessity of an education whose chief purpose is to develop initiative and personal resources of intelligence.

The same forces which have broken down the apprenticeship system render futile a scholastic imitation of it...the problem in this country is primarily an educational one, and not a business and technical one as in Germany. It is nothing less than the problem of the reorganization of the public school to meet the changed conditions due to the industrial revolution...”

Dewey’s point is almost the opposite of the factory training school myth, in all its manifestations. Significant social change has occurred, and that there is a jockeying of various interests. The deterioration of older apprenticeship arrangements, new theories of education, changing workforce needs caused by industrialization, and America’s entry into international affairs, had become chief matters of concern by 1915. Turning to the German model of “industrial education” was nonsensical, and Dewey worried that employer needs—including those of factory owners—would come to dictate the trajectory of American education if it is given a narrow technical focus, as only large employers would be able to partner with schools to systematically provide such training.

We can see that Dewey’s critique did not crystallize until the twentieth century when the Industrial Revolution was already triumphant, and this was separate from his concerns about the more traditional approach of many non-industrial public schools, which he saw as encouraging passivity. Yet for all the ink spilled over the issue, fewer than 10% of Americans graduated high school prior to World War I.[14]

The Real Story

Around 1940, however, this metric had risen to 50%.[15] The academic discussion of factory-style schooling was mostly focused on this period, roughly 1920-1970, when a relatively standardized modern high school system became the norm for the rapidly expanding American middle class. The world wars drove the model towards economic growth and mass mobilization. It responded to the practical needs and aspirations of this group and of large national interests organized around ongoing military competition, emphasized “memorization, punctilious performance of rote tasks, mastery of technical language—all of which factory-style schooling inculcated in preparation for work in the civil, military, and business bureaucracies.”[16]

The term factory-style schooling had nothing to do with toiling factory workers. Instead, it was used by people like Dewey to describe the tendency towards middle-class credentialism, which seemed to spit out identical widgets like a 20th-century factory assembly line.[17] It referred to the factory's products (interchangeable employees suited to modern office life in a society oriented around the needs of powerful interests), not their manually-skilled workers.[18] Since the 1980s, probably due to the famous Nation at Risk report causing a broad reassessment of the education system, the metaphor has been garbled in countless ways.[19]

The “factory” metaphors likely result from the prevalence of British liberals in the mid-late 19th-century debates over education reform, particularly those in prestigious English-language publications. Twentieth-century American academics relied heavily on these sources, where they would have seen mid-19th-century debates over how to remedy the plight of the British masses, toiling away in factories after the first industrial revolution.

Late 19th-century debates found the remedy in “industrial education,” which would train the public of the Western world to adapt to the needs of a society premised on innovation and national competition. These points were echoed by American intellectuals, who added laments about the “rote memorization” and “irrelevance” of America’s emphasis on the universal value of classical education.

Despite shared reformist ideals, 19th century Americans put their own spin on arguments advanced by British liberals, because they were dealing with a very different situation. Unlike Europe, America did not have a “permanent” working-class brutally exploited by industrialists with all the resources and political power. Many looked to Germany, which seemed less classist and more objective in its national ambitions, for inspiration.[20] They saw "industrial education” as of a piece with technical and scientific specialization at the university level and in government, resembling today's advocates of STEM education and deference to experts, including professionally-trained teachers.

In the early-mid 20th century, these debates merged with the concerns of humanist intellectuals like John Dewey and Harvard’s President Eliot that the modern school system neglected character formation and individual creativity, churning out career-focused conformists who could not participate in democratic political life.

By the late twentieth century, American academics synthesized all of this into a model of American public education with a vague connection to 19th-century factories, one that focused on rote memorization of useless information and churned out passively obedient workers. Naturally, such a model must be outdated and unlikely to serve the needs of modern students or their society.[21]

Eventually, Horace Mann’s fascination with the Prussian model of education, designed to create an army and populace loyal to the state, fused with this line of criticism.[22] Mindless obedience and outdated purposes were seen to define the American education system, as though Massachusetts, where Mann lived and instituted his reforms, was an educational desert, its educational culture shaped solely by Mann’s Prussian fantasies! Mann’s 1848 report to the Massachusetts Board of Education puts the lie to the whole story, showing his actual concerns and objectives:[23]

“According to the European theory, men are divided into classes,—some to toil and earn, others to seize and enjoy. According to the Massachusetts theory, all are to have an equal chance for earning, and equal security in the enjoyment of what they earn.

... The children of the [English] work-people are abandoned to their fate; and...no power in the realm has yet been able to secure them an education...

... By its industrial condition...[Massachusetts] is exposed, far beyond any other state in the Union, to the fatal extremes of overgrown wealth and desperate poverty.

... Now, surely, nothing but Universal Education can counter-work this tendency to the domination of capital and the servility of labor. If one class possesses all the wealth and the education...the [other,] in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former. But if education be equably diffused, it will draw property after it, by the strongest of all attractions; for such a thing never did happen, and never can happen, as that an intelligent and practical body of men should be permanently poor. Property and labor, in different classes, are essentially antagonistic; but property and labor, in the same class, are essentially fraternal.”

Mann then argued that while the people of Massachusetts understood that its exceptional success was linked its high-quality universal education, they seemed less aware it had also allowed two-thirds of them to be self-sufficient. Presumably referring to their relative political and economic independence, he said that without their history of unusual access to education, most citizens of Massachusetts would be "the vassals of as severe a tyranny, in the form of capital, as the lower classes of Europe are bound to in the form of brute force.”

“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men – the balance-wheel of the social machinery...it gives each man the independence and the means, by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich; it prevents being poor...the spread of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.”[24]

Massachusetts was the most industrialized state in the country, and Mann’s goal was not to create an obedient, permanent class of factory workers. He was not trying to fuel industrialization and catch up with Britain, but to avoid Britain’s fate by limiting the dominance of this model. Like Dewey would be more than half a century later, Mann was worried about class conflict brought about by the societal disruptions of industrialization and wanted an education system that aimed to counterbalance those volatile new forces. Keeping men able to hold themselves independent of a fixed class identity was of the utmost importance.

Nor did Mann disagree with Dewey’s point that the German system could not be suitably imported to America. Mann believed that a national system of education—what the Prussian system was seen to represent at the time—would bring social stability by establishing shared norms and fraternal feelings. This was the theory underlying the standardization desired by education reformers like Mann. Such uniformity was necessarily administered by a centralized government authority but was intended to reflect the character of each nation, not turn every nation into Prussia. And at the time of Mann’s efforts in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the states functioned almost as independent nations. While Mann did hope that the system he implemented in Massachusetts would spread across America, his primary concern seems to have been dealing with the immediate circumstances of Massachusetts, which was the only state capable of implementing such a centralized plan.

In other words, Prussian education was seen as a model of a function, not an ideology or set of practices. To say the modern school system is “Prussian-style” in its origins is merely to say that it is free and compulsory for all children, administered by the national government, and follows a standardized curriculum.[25] Of course, the form itself leads to a convergence upon certain ideological assumptions and practices, but to define education theorists from Plato to Dewey by a shared desire to create obedient subjects is simplistic to the point of meaninglessness.[26]

Conclusion

The persistent talk of a “factory-model school system” reflects inquiries into the purpose of the modern American system by asking who benefits, or once benefitted, from its design. Almost all such inquiries result in the conclusion that its design reflects the needs of someone other than middle-class parents, teachers, and modern employers. But the system was not built by greedy 19th-century factory owners. Middle-class parents and local business leaders pieced together the infrastructure in response to post-Civil War social changes.[27] This infrastructure was scaled up into a semi-standardized system by Progressive-era reformers (many of whom were from a new class of professionally-trained teachers) between 1900 and 1930.[28]

United by a focus on career training, economic growth, and maintaining social status, middle-class parents and business interests have continued to exercise significant influence as needed, which, along with changing socioeconomic factors, has prevented the Progressive plan—or anyone else’s—from being fully realized. The resulting incoherence of the modern education system, which contributes to these myths, will be the topic of an upcoming piece.

Clearing up the relationship between industrialization and education will make it easier to identify the purpose American education actually serves. And if changes are in order, we must have history in mind when deciding what changes to make and how to implement them. It's encouraging to know that we have more options than those recognized in the usual debates.

For Reference: Popular Uses of the Factory School Metaphor

Dewey objected to “the identification of education with the acquisition of specialized skill in the management of machines,” saying he was “utterly opposed to giving the power of social predestination, by means of narrow trade-training, to any group of fallible men,” meaning advocates of the technical skill- or career-focused “industrial” education model.[29]

Late 20th century scholars alleged that “mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to...pre-adapt children for a new world...in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock... assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory)…"[30]

Today, some intellectuals use the metaphor to describe the worldview of progressive educators, alleging that “public schools are a peerless example of the progressives’ conception of society as one big factory that can be scientifically managed with a kind of political (and moral) Taylorism...the factory mindset of progressives favors unified systems characterized by standardization and homogeneity.”[31]

At the same time, mainstream politicians and reformers use it to advocate for school choice or reform of the outdated public education system, which they describe as “designed as a one-size-fits-all factory model...in the 1890s to build a workforce for a factory-model economy,”[32] and “the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education,” with ”seat-time requirements for graduation “and teachers paid ”based on their educational credentials and seniority.”[33]

Endnotes

1. For helpful context on related intellectual debates, see Kyle Edward Williams, “Conserving Liberalism,” The Baffler, September 6, 2021, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/conserving-liberalism-edward-williams and Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago: ‎ University of Chicago Press, 1999).

2. Going back at least to the release of the “Nation at Risk” report in the 1980s, it has become common to see an alternate universe presented in which the New England Puritans, Thomas Jefferson, and Horace Mann all shared a vision of a public education system for the entire nation. In the last twenty years, there have been a number of works that paint a more realistic picture, but they are often still marketed to fit the myth of an antebellum national public school system. For example, Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, by Johann N. Neem, is promoted as telling “the inspiring story of how and why Americans built a robust public school system in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.” That “robust public school system” was actually a bunch of independent local schools, mostly in the northern states (one of Neem’s earlier books is called Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts.) Emphases added. See Review of Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, Bookshop.org, https://bookshop.org/books/democracy-s-schools-the-rise-of-public-education-in-america/9781421423210.

3. See Freddie deBoer, “Education Week: Review of The Education Trap,” Substack, June 24, 2021, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-review-of-the-education.

4. The Second Industrial Revolution is generally dated between 1870 and 1914 (the beginning of World War I). See Wikipedia contributors, "Second Industrial Revolution," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Second_Industrial_Revolution&oldid=1047279423 (accessed October 8, 2021). By 1870, Britain had ceased to be the world’s leading industrial power. Germany also rapidly industrialized during the Second Industrial Revolution.

5. Andrew J. Taylor, “The Expert in American Life,” National Affairs Journal, Fall 2021, https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-expert-in-american-life

6. Claire Garside, “The Effect of Industrialisation on Education Policy and the School System,” January 22, 2020, https://clairegarside.com/2020/01/22/the-effect-of-industrialisation-on-education-policy-and-the-school-system/. (Emphases added).

7. Tocqueville noted that “The Americans never use the word peasant, because they have no idea of the class which that term denotes...” See Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958, 3rd ed. (New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004); Vincent Kelley,”John Taylor Gatto Challenged the Ideas Inherent in US Mass Schooling,” Truthout, October 25, 2019, https://truthout.org/articles/john-taylor-gatto-challenged-the-ideas-inherent-in-us-mass-schooling/; F. H. Buckley, “The Next Republican Party,” National Affairs Journal, Fall 2021, https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-next-republican-party. See also Henry Geitz, ‎Jürgen Heideking, ‎and Jurgen Herbst, German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

8. Martin Cothran, ”Classical Education Today: Counterfeit or Real?,” Classical Latin School Association, January 28, 2020, https://classicallatin.org/exordium/classical-education-today-counterfeit-or-real/.

9. T. Dwight Thatcher, Address Before the Agricultural College: “Industrial Education,” June 22, 1874, Manhattan Nationalist, quoted in Kansas Farmer, July 8, 1874. Thatcher noted that ”the great masses of our people get no other schooling than that afforded by the common district schools,” and did not attend "the higher schools of our cities and larger towns.” See also “A Letter from Our State Chemist to Mr. R. V. Gaines, of Virginia,” Goldsboro (NC) Messenger, April 23, 1885. C. W. Dabney, Jr., was the North Carolivia State Chemist, and a native of Virginia. Gaines was the Commissioner of the Virginia Agricultural Society.

10. Robin Hanson, ”School Is To Submit,” Overcoming Bias, April 6, 2016, https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html.

11. John Dewey, “A Policy of Industrial Education,” Industrial Education Magazine: “Manual Training and Vocational Education,” vol. Xvi, no. 7, March 1915, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Industrial_Education_Magazine/o8IPAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq.

12. Dewey follows this with the comment that “Were it not for historic causes which explain the fact, it would be a disgrace that a large proportion of the school population leaves school at the end of the fifth or sixth grade. Irrespective of its causes, the continuance of this situation is a menace. Meager as are the efforts already put forth in adapting industry to educational ends, it is demonstrated in Chicago, Gary, and Cincinnati, that such adaptation is the first need for holding pupils in school and making their instruction significant to them.” What he is specifically referring to when he repeatedly speaks of “historic causes“ in the U.S. and Germany cannot be known for certain. In this line, he may be merely acknowledging that historically, the material resources and incentives for educating the majority of children past that age were not present, either in America or elsewhere. He seems to be saying that Chicago, Gary and Cincinnati made schooling seem rewarding on a practical, concrete level, thus changing the incentives and drawing students. He seems to be saying that the forces thwarting an ideal public education system are more practical than moral or ideological.

13. “The Myth of Civic Education,” The Week, Octoboer 9, 2021, https://theweek.com/politics/1005771/the-myth-of-civic-education.

14. “The Myth of Civic Education.” Accessed October 10, 2021. https://theweek.com/politics/1005771/the-myth-of-civic-education.

15. See Samuel Biagetti, “Into the Fairy Castle: The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism,” American Affairs, Fall 2021, https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/08/into-the-fairy-castle-the-persistence-of-victorian-liberalism/. (Emphasis added.)

16. See, for example, Kevin D. Williamson, ”Harvard Law Takes Aim at Homeschooling,” National Review, April 30, 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/05/18/harvard-law-takes-aim-at-homeschooling/.

17. See, for example, ”From the Factory to Student-Centered Learning: A Look at Education Theory,” Lexia Learning, January 25, 2018, https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/factory-student-centered-learning-look-education-theory.

18. This debate, like the ”Nation at Risk“ report, was unfortunately ahistorical in its assumptions, and though the scholarly record has since been corrected, many of the politicized talking points of that era have become conventional wisdom. Progressive critiques seem to define their model in opposition to the 1950s educational model, which they seem to assume had similar dynamics to 19th century factories. Factory workers in 1950s America had much higher living standards and more substantive education than those in 19th century Britain, but this is mostly irrelevant to the progressive focus on a perceived lack of creativity and personalization. Conversely, more conservative academics tended to idealize the 1950s education system, but increasingly used ”factory-style” to refer to past trends in American education seen to suppress individual initiative and excellence in favor of outdated or radical social agendas. The original “factory-style“ education debates grew out of parental and academic dissatisfaction with the school system in the 1950s, which explains the focus on that period. Many parents were upset with the perceived move away from fundamentals towards more progressive techniques, not the resemblance of schools to factories, but books like 1955’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” launched a larger cultural debate.

19. This sounds odd today, but in the 19th century, as Germany struggled to unify, the Prussian model was perceived as uniquely ”designed to build a common sense of national identity.“ See Joel Rose, “How to Break Free of Our 19th-Century Factory-Model Education System,“ The Atlantic, May 9, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/how-to-break-free-of-our-19th-century-factory-model-education-system/256881/. See also See Henry Geitz, ‎Jürgen Heideking, ‎and Jurgen Herbst, German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1995.

20. Audrey Watters, “The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education',” Hack Education, April 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model.

21. See ”Prussian model of schooling,” SuperMemo.guru, November 29, 2020, https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Prussian_model_of_schooling.

22. Horace Mann, “Twelfth Annual Report to the Secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education”, 1848. Mann is liable to criticism on other points, including being too defensive of the status quo and an embrace of statist or collectivist impulses that sounded more innocent in the 19th century. See ibid.

23. In this paragraph, Mann also remarked that ”Agrarianism is the revenge of poverty against wealth.”

24. Other related elements are the use of testing, professionally trained and state-accredited teachers, and the tracking of students in line with specific career paths. In practice, national education systems have usually started out as local education systems, but many reformers became involved with local schools with the intention to scale and combine them into a national system as soon as this became feasible.

25. For example, it is misleading to jump from the observation that centrally-administered social systems “foster dependence of the individual on the group and on the State “to the allegation that the modern American school system is run on the “Rousseau-Pestalozzi-Dewey" model of ”progressive education,” which aims to “accomplish the molding of the child without actually seizing him as in the plans of Plato or Owen.” Murray N. Rothbard ”Progressive Education and the Current Scene,” Education: Free and Compulsory, 1971, via Mises Institute, https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/html/c/27.

26. See Freddie deBoer, “Education Week: How is Power Distributed in American Public K-12 Education?: like everything in our education system, the division of power is historically contingent, ad hoc, and pretty weird,” Substack, June 21, 2021,

27. For an example of this ahistorical conventional wisdom, see the 2010 remarks of then-US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, quoted in Audrey Watters, “The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education',” Hack Education, April 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model.

28. Quoted in David Labaree, “How Dewey Lost,“ September 2, 2019, https://davidlabaree.com/2019/09/02/how-dewey-lost/.

29. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970 quoted in Audrey Watters, “The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education,’” April 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model.

30. Kevin D. Williamson, “What Are Schools For?,” National Review, July 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/07/espinoza-decision-victory-religious-schools/.

31. Jeb Bush, ”All public school students deserve to be treated fairly no matter what type of public school they choose to attend,” August 10, 2021, https://www.postbulletin.com/opinion/columns/7144974-Jeb-Bush-All-public-school-students-deserve-to-be-treated-fairly-no-matter-what-type-of-public-school-they-choose-to-attend.

32. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, 2010, quoted in Audrey Watters, ”The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education,’” April 25, 2015, http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model. For more details on the contemporary usage of the metaphor, see ibid.

Related Reads

• The History of American Education, Part 1

• The Misconception of Americanization in 19th and 20th Century America

About the Author

Kerry Ellard earned a B.S. in Communication and a B.A. in Political Science from Boston University, and a J.D. from Boston College Law School. During school and after graduation, she worked in law, education, and government. Most recently, she has worked as a tutor, independent historian, and sociological analyst. Kerry lives in Boston, where she enjoys playing with her dog and attending concerts.

The premise: to create a venue for deep discussion and debate about real substance. Too many education conferences tacitly assume that the big questions in education have been answered, or are uncontroversial, or even that the contours of the debate are clear. But in fact, education badly needs more philosophical thinking, more first principles debate, and an open, illuminating clash of big ideas.

Highlights included:

• Dan Willingham on endemic unclarity about the purpose of education

• Leonore Skenazy on bringing healthy doses of physical and social risk back into childhood

• Joe Connor on the new school choice policy landscape

• Ryan Delk on the goals of Primer and the ambitiousness that homeschooling can enable

• discussions on everything from new approaches to adolescent education, the history of classical education, discussions of diversity in the canon, access vs. innovation, the parent vs. the state, and more

The conference went incredibly well, which means that we’ll be doing it again. This first one was a sort of stealth experiment, but we’ll announce information on the next one here. So subscribe if you haven’t already.

Subscribe now

Below, find an abbreviated version of my opening remarks.

Effecting Enlightenment in Education, 400 Years Late

The Enlightenment never properly reached education.

We got the scientific revolution, an entirely new consensus about how to approach and understand the natural world. The industrial revolution changed everything about how we live, work, travel, build, and more. We got waves of social change: the replacement of the Old World with many interrelated New Worlds, political revolutions, new conceptions of universal citizenship, human freedom, dignity, and rights.

Education, though? It’s changed, but not that much. In many respects, we’ve regressed in terms of clarity.

For roughly two thousand years before the Enlightenment, education—especially what we would today call primary school, that is, roughly K8 education—was relatively stable. Its two main jobs were the language arts (i.e. literacy and rhetoric), and moral elevation through engagement with a cultural canon. It was drill and kill, with far more sticks than carrots. But you learned how to read, speak, and write, and you committed some things to heart that were supposed to improve it—Homer, or the Bible, or Pilgrim’s Progress, or other things depending on exactly where and when you were getting schooled.

The Enlightenment brought a culture-wide emphasis on fresh thought, an optimism about progress, a radical appreciation for discovery and experiment, a valorization of freedom as a moral ideal. All of these ideas have implications for education. Thinkers like Comenius, Locke, and Rousseau theorized about these implications—but not much changed in practice. Primary education remained largely classical for another three centuries.

It wasn’t until the late 19th century that it was blindingly, glaringly obvious to most everyone that education needed a change. But by this time, the Enlightenment had become more complicated and contentious. The clear direction of individualism, freedom, and discovery had faded. The preferred ideals about education had some Lockean flavors, but were mostly dominated by other ideas. Some prominent ones:

• a concern for a democracy that emphasizes collaboration and compromise as much as or more than freedom

• a desire for social reform and equality along the lines of culture, race, class, and sex

• a (now-condemned) bent towards social selection and control

• a need for vocational training in a rapidly changing economy

• a new understanding of and reverence for the psychology and biology of child development

• doubling down on the older tradition, on transmitting a civilizational core as the job of education

• making the knowledge curriculum much more science-centric

These ideas often conflicted, and even where they didn’t conflict, it was not clear which were most fundamental or how they were to be integrated. And this medley of ideals came to characterize the discourse on education precisely at the time that education was being universalized, scaled, and bureaucratized. The moment that we transitioned away from fragmented, one-room schoolhouses and towards something somehow different, was also the moment that the philosophies that underpin education were at their most unresolved.

The result of this dynamic is that our education system today is beset by two very difficult problems. There’s a philosophy problem, and an engineering problem.

The philosophy problem is the one I alluded to above: unclarity about the purpose of education. This is a philosophical problem because it’s a problem of ethics. There’s no way to answer this question of the purpose of educating growing human beings without some sense of the good life at which they ought to be aiming. Even on more delimited views of the purpose of education, e.g. to equip you for material success, you need at least some sense of what success means and why it is worthwhile enough to be devoting a large portion of childhood to it. Education is complicated, so if you lack that sense, you’ll end up at cross-purposes with yourself.

Another major area where philosophy comes up is epistemology: what does it mean to equip a child with knowledge, and how does one do this? Many Enlightenment thinkers coalesced around a view of knowledge being built from experience, and therefore gravitated to educational methods that took experience more seriously. The progressives also talked about experience, but meant this in a very different way, one that was more pragmatic and social. With the always-looming Old Way—you learn things from teachers and books—how does this work, exactly? Are there better and worse ways to do it?

And there are other philosophical questions. A big one is the nature and importance of choice, the sense in which children do (or don’t) need to be voluntarily active in their learning and growth.

So: volition, knowledge, values. What are their natures, and, for educators especially, what is their genesis in a developing person?

These are contentious questions, obviously, but the thing to note here is that these are difficult questions. Attempting to answer them takes hard work. It’s notable that, today, there don’t seem to be too many people interested in doing that work. In most schools, philosophical questions about the purpose of education are overtly eschewed, and even in schools where they are not, it’s uncommon to find formulations clear enough to provide direction and common ground.

Besides this thicket of perennial philosophical problems, there’s also what I call the engineering problem. Assuming you can articulate what’s important about human nature and life, how do you actually reliably help someone grow into it?

People tend to think of this primarily as a research question, and to some extent it is. But it has more in common with problems of invention, with product development. You need a method, which involves at least some curricular materials, learning exercises, best practices for teachers and related training, mechanisms for record-keeping and assessment, classroom routines and policies, and an architected learning environment.

Figuring all of this out is largely a process of design thinking: of trying things out, problem-solving issues, explicitly testing how well solutions generalize, making all the elements fit well together, and iterating this process continuously.

The greatest example of this type of work in the 20th century is Montessori’s approach. Drawing heavily from pioneering work in special education by Seguin, she spent years fleshing out a new approach to early childhood education in tremendous implementation detail. The Montessori approach is striking partly for its specificity. It’s a whole system and a finely tuned one, where the details matter as much as the big picture approach. Montessori considered herself a scientist. She was a scientist, with notable empirically grounded contributions to developmental theory. But the sense in which she was most a scientist is that she took a broadly scientific approach, a design thinking approach, to her pedagogical engineering.

Like philosophy, engineering is hard work. And, like philosophy, it’s work that, surprisingly, is rarely done in an ambitious way. At the level of actual implementation and practice, it’s rare to find a Montessori type. (Many of the more philosophically minded educators and educational theorists in recent history have seemed notably less interested in this sort of work. This has resulted in a massive theory-practice split between schools of education, which extol more progressive ideas, and actual schools, where it is often very unclear what it would mean to implement these ideas systematically.)

These two things—novel, clear philosophical thinking coupled with novel, broadly scientific methods of innovation—were the drivers of the Enlightenment revolutions in other domains. Insofar as education suffers today, it suffers because of this lack.

But even though it’s late, it’s not too late. And it’s definitely better late than never.

Actually, I am incredibly optimistic about the education landscape today. For all the ways that it is confused and all the ways that it causes harm to students, overall, I think it’s probably never been better.

The education system by and large is seriously problematic, and I think more harmful than most realize. But an honest look at the history of education reveals that it has never been great. Just for reasons of there being a low bar for progress in the field, probably even on average primary education is at a historical high point, or at least close.

But it’s definitely true that it’s never been better if you look towards the cutting edge. If you’re thoughtful and resourceful, there has unquestionably and obviously never been a better time to be a parent or educator. There are so many great resources and ideas to draw from. There is a wealth of theory, of practice, of materials, of technologies, of communities, of alternative approaches and schools. And, right at this moment, in 2022, all of this is on an upward trajectory. There are more homeschoolers and microschools and policy is becoming more friendly to both. Skepticism is on the upswing, not just about both the tired status quo methods but also half-baked alternative methods. There is a cultural openness to fresh thinking in education.

This kind of openness has happened periodically for the last hundred or so years. And the innovations of the last century, even if they are spotty and unevenly distributed, are real.

For those of us on the cutting edge, the opportunity is to finally do the work. It’s to do the philosophical thinking and pedagogical engineering to finally start a real educational revolution. It means not being content with mere criticism or incompletely articulated and realized ideals. It means follow-through of a kind that education has, I think, never seen.

And it means hard thinking. It means disagreement and debate. It means having real, serious product development cycles on long time horizons. Like the other Enlightenment revolutions, this is probably a 100-year process—but also like the other such revolutions, progress starts right away.

My selfish desire for this conference is to be a place that fosters this ambitious thought and work in education. Idealism and futurism are common in education, but serious ambition is not. And serious ambition thrives on camaraderie, on argument, on caring about the problem so much that we get clear enough to disagree on solutions.

Thanks for coming. I’m looking forward to a weekend of deep discussion.

Social media is a cesspool of anxious status games and polarizing misinformation. Perforce, we need to restrict its usage amongst teenagers and other developing humans. Or so goes a common and, I think, mistaken argument.

That argument has been getting a lot of airtime this week. Elon Musk’s ongoing attempts to acquire Twitter are resurfacing worries about misinformation and too-lax moderation. Coincidentally, Jonathan Haidt published a long, thoughtful essay comparing social media to the civilization-fragmenting Tower of Babel.

It’s striking how almost all of the substantiated hypotheses on social media, both in general and with respect to education and parenting, focus on its risks and downsides. Social media:

1. magnifies outrage, both authentic and performative

2. is a major driver and/or source of misinformation.

3. causes social-psychological harm by gamifying human connection and status

Jonathan Haidt has hit all these points for years. See also, of course, WSJ’s critical exposé last year covering Meta’s internal research on Instagram’s “toxicity” to girls. Or this story about how some Stanford professors are using their courses on psychology to try to educate students on misinformation.

When you look at the overall pattern of these takes, and particularly when we start to think about students, it’s hard to shake the feeling that something has gone wrong. We are being led into a protective, defensive mode—an understandable posture when it comes to children, but also often a very mistaken one. Some of the same people who are very cognizant of not overprotecting children from physical risks are convincing themselves to view social media with panic.

But what, specifically, is wrong with these takes? It doesn’t seem to be the particular points, which are all unfortunately plausible. At the level of culture, social media has majorly contributed to unhealthy fractiousness. At the level of individuals, everyone knows people for whom social media is a net negative, a source of stress, confusion, or demagoguery, or perhaps even a vector for abuse. As far as the youth go, their custodians struggle with social media policy for a reason, and we should all have deep sympathy for parents and educators on this front.

So let’s grant that the challenges are real. How should we think about them? What’s our basic frame of understanding? It’s here that a myopic focus on the challenges has led us astray, making inobvious the most relevant questions:

• Should the risks of social media lead us to a framework of risk-aversion? Or should we rather try to help people, especially young people, manage the risks?

• Why are these challenges coming up, anyway? Is it just an accident of business models and technologies, or are there fundamental issues of communication and connection involved? Is a larger dynamic at play, and if so, is there precedent for it in history?

• And, most importantly for our purposes, what is the educator’s job with respect to social media?

My view is that we’re in a new information-communication frontier, of the sort that occurs periodically throughout history. There are dangers and risks, but also tremendous benefits. Like any frontier, we can help our children learn to navigate it—not just to minimize the risks but to make the most of the opportunities. And like with any learning that aims at wise discernment and maturity of preferences, this is more a matter of a character than skills.

Here follow some thoughts conducive to a mindset shift.

Cost analyses

First, and most simply, we need to get out of the rut of tallying costs while discounting benefits.

I noted above that everyone knows people for whom social media is a net negative in their lives. But everyone also knows people for whom it is a major net positive.

These range from run-of-the-mill use cases, like staying connected to friends and family, to career-defining advantages, like landing a new job or even creating a new type of job. For every person who openly struggles with the negative dynamics of social media, there is a person who finds meaning, work, or just plain fun on social media. For every unfortunately memetic misinformation pattern, there is a new and interesting viewpoint that takes hold, or exposure of a heretofore ignored injustice.

This is an obvious point. It’s a point that many people understand, even explicitly, at least in bursts and in specific cases: when something wholesome goes viral, or when you can stay partially connected during the lockdowns of a global pandemic, or when social media is the go-to platform for spreading true information about a just cause and it helps fuel real change.

What is less obvious is the extent to which these widespread and significant benefits are discounted. These benefits are not small. They are the stuff of human relationships, of connection, of finding an audience for creative and intellectual work, even of envisioning a better society. But even as they are noted, they recede from the narrative. They are mostly on the periphery of meta-discourse on social media. The costs have an emotional reality, the benefits do not.

But, of course, everything seems fundamentally crappy if you just do a cost analysis.

The information frontier

Second, we need to take a wider view, to avoid tendencies towards ahistoricity, or, even worse, the temptation to pine for an imaginary golden age.

On a wider view, one can see that technologies and even social formats are part of an endless cycle of fragmenting and reconsolidating intellectual leadership, of exploring different modes of debate and human connection. This is true even of cafes:

What’s the alternative to an uncertain information landscape? A small number of trusted voices setting the terms of mainstream debate? Well, what are the downsides of that?

We are indeed in a period of lower trust and higher misinformation. But we’re also entering a period where the possibility space for discourse is being vastly expanded. When social media democratizes the ability to, for example, argue in a “public square”, as Elon recently described Twitter, it has historical analogs that I think many of us would see as Mostly Good Things. The rise of schools of rhetoric and philosophy in Classical Greece represented an elevation of discourse and was fueled in no small part by the increased learning ambitions of an emerging middle class. The Enlightenment was powered by the printing press, which enabled waves of continuously reconstructed discourse in the forms of books and pamphlets and periodicals. And there was coffee house culture, and 20th-century examples too, such as radio, and so on.

There may very well be real downsides to all of these trends. Maybe coffee houses did foment a disruption of wisdom as well as dogma, which might in part account for, say, the horrors of Robespierre. But an inability to see potential upsides is myopic. So is an inability to see any downside of the days when discourse was framed by a handful of Walter Cronkites.

A new narrative is needed, one that “refocuses our hearts”, to borrow a turn of phrase from Montessori, on opportunities rather than risks, that lets us maximally benefit from the world-historic upsides of these changes. Here’s one attempt of mine from a couple months ago:

Abnegating on our job as educators

If we shouldn’t fall into the trap of doing a cost analysis, we also shouldn’t fall into the trap of doing a benefit analysis. The opportunities don’t mean that there aren’t risks. Every advance leads us into a new problem space, and the problems of social media are acutely real. So, where does that leave parents and educators, the custodians of the long-term wellbeing of children?

If there’s one piece you should read on social media and education, it’s Angel Eduardo’s Newsweek column from a few days ago: Twitter Can Be Awful—But Also Glorious: The Choice Is Yours.

His piece isn’t about education, it’s more general than that: it highlights that we have agency in how we engage with social media. We’re not just passive victims of algorithms and likes and retweets and shares. We choose whether and how to use these things, and our choices shape our habits over time.

Even though his thesis isn’t directly about education, this is the essential point for educators. Education properly concerns the development of a child’s agency.

The question for educators is: given that social media has both potential psychological risks and potential personal rewards—given that the culture, via social media, is increasingly an information frontier teeming with novelty and uncertainty—and given that whether we lose or gain from social media is significantly a matter of agency and character—how do we help students become the sort of people who can wisely navigate it?

As Eduardo writes,

In many ways, we're living in a kind of technological adolescence. We've suddenly acquired immense power and freedom, and we have a duty to ourselves and each other to use it for our benefit rather than our detriment, to make a concerted effort toward technological maturity.

There are no doubt social-media-specific things we should be doing as part of a good education, things designed to serve as a developmental bridge between an emerging maturity and the application of that maturity to social media spaces. But the first thing is to recognize that the job-to-be-done of education is to foster the underlying maturity necessary to be a virtuous participant of the digital age—to have the self-mastery and affective dispositions to be able to use it, if at all, in service of the enduring good, as part of a life fully lived.

“Maturity” is not inaccurate, but the more morally and educationally precise term is “virtue”. We need to educate for virtue, for independence in the sense of thoughtful, competent self-direction. We need the Socratic perspective that wealth and power and social media and everything are advantageous in the hands of the virtuous and disadvantageous in the hands of the vicious. Think of the virtues in the Montessori system: persistence, independence, self-mastery, a love of good effort and good routines, a desire for independent understanding, a deep benevolence towards other human beings. All of these things should be fostered from birth, and all of these things help one be an agent rather than a patient with respect to social media.

The reality is that our children are growing up into a world characterized in large part by something like an untamed digital frontier. We do them a disservice by treating social media primarily as a source of anxiety and disinformation, something from which they primarily need protection. If you’re raising children on a frontier, you do need to educate on the risks—rattlesnakes and outlaws abound—but in the context of the opportunities. Why is the frontier exciting? Why are people drawn to it? What are the virtues of a good digital hinterlander? What does it take to foster those virtues?

It may very well be that it’s reasonable to have restrictive social media policies for children and teenagers. But it’s not reasonable to implement the policies as part of a framework of cynicism, victimhood, and panic about social media. Any limitations are temporary—they’ll obviously get access to social media sooner or later—and so limitations need to be justified as means of developing the maturity and self-possessedness.

The goal is of all education is virtue, and here it’s no different. We should want for the young that they come to have the sorts of souls that can independently navigate digital risks. We should be educating our students for the necessary magnanimity and love of wisdom such that, if they so desire, they can get the most out of this newest phase of social evolution.

Some other great reads this week:

• This one is related to the theme above: Sarah Constantin mulls the tradeoffs of various content moderation approaches in relation to the ways that social media is of value to her. Long, thoughtful thread:

• See also Yishan’s long thread on Elon and Twitter if you haven’t already.

• The Ukrainians teaching in a war zone (article): The Guardian summarizes the situation with education in Ukraine. Both harrowing and inspiring.

• I Quit My Job to Write a Book about Late Bloomers (essay): Henry Oliver has a wonderful essay introducing the topic of his book-in-progress. I’ve been thinking a lot about the different sorts of shapes that lives can take… partly because I’m about to turn 40. I may write more about this in the near future. :)

I’ve also been reflecting on some of the major themes of the conference. ASU+GSV is a (if not the) major conference for a certain thread within education, for educators of an entrepreneurial, near-futurist, technology-oriented bent. It’s also generally centered on theses in high school and higher education, and these theses are generally centered on how to break through the ossification here—credentialism, cost, access, arid or irrelevant subject matters, inefficiency, and so on.

If there’s one essay that really captures the spirit of the approach, it’s The Big Blur, a white paper produced by Jobs for the Future. The things that are being blurred are jobs, high school, and college:

JFF has a specific, institutional thesis about what this looks like, but there are many approaches that might fall into this family:

• Career-oriented coding bootcamps are one major class. Such bootcamps often have creative financing mechanisms like novel loans or ISAs that are tied to landing a job with a certain salary, and job placement is often baked into the programming. Bloom, née Lambda, is at least the most internet-famous of these.

• Another sort of example is Portal Schools, which is aiming to embed progressive high-schools-mixed-with-college in corporate environments; their pilot is colocated on Belkin’s Los Angeles campus.

• Still others explore specific aspects of this dynamic: Ender is a sort of distributed high school science/maker fair, Sora is an alternative high school with a project-oriented bent, and both have baked into their programmatic DNA the notion of building real, relevant things sooner.

These come to mind because they are interesting and worth your attention, but also just because of their proximity and who I spoke to at ASU+GSV. There are many, many others. It’s a vibrant space.

I’m very sympathetic to the spirit of these approaches. My own “Big Blur” hypothesis is that high school shouldn’t exist.

Eliminating high school would drive general education more squarely into primary (and early childhood) education, and drive optionality, including (but not limited to) more career-specific education, to the workforce and to a more diverse range of higher education offerings than exist today.

Even if you don’t buy that, I can perhaps convince you that the way we think of the vocational function of education is broken. I’m actually less worried about the seeming irrelevance of school for most jobs, since I’m more bullish on the liberal arts. I’m more worried about the fact that the liberal arts never properly internalized a humanistic notion of work. The mind-body split in education is between vocational training and liberal arts education. The right view is that liberal arts education should properly be engaged in a kind of soulcraft that fosters industriousness, dealienation, and agency with respect to work. This has implications for early childhood and primary education—and also, of course, secondary education and beyond. (Our high schools are an experiment in this sort of liberal arts take on the offramp from school to life.)

Some related content:

• My conversation with Bryan Caplan (podcast) on his thesis that there should be less education.

• On Becoming (essay): Higher Ground’s Arnaud Schenk has a lovely reflection on the processes of self-change and identity formation, and how they relate to truth and value-formation. It includes some tantalizing asides about how education often falls short here.

• A “Stunning” Level of Student Disconnection (article, free account required): A widely circulated article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that documents the post-Covid worsening of an already severe trend of student disconnection in college. This is consonant with my experience as a professor and pretty much every professor I’ve ever talked to: a majority of students don’t really know why they are in college and perforce are partially or wholly alienated from their education.

• The SAT Isn’t What’s Unfair (essay): Kathryn Paige Harden, who is a must-follow on Twitter by the way, discusses MIT’s decision to bring back the SAT as a college admissions measure. The modern debate over the SAT is largely a debate over whether or not the SAT contributes to the ossification of higher education, or if it’s one of the few tools that staves off that ossification. I’m actually pretty friendly to the SAT and standardized tests in general and am more inclined to locate the fundamental problems elsewhere in the system.

One more topic for the week, this one unrelated:

• If you’re a not a careful observer of the vanguard of the culture wars—which, really, is a fine thing not to be—you may have missed the escalation of the Florida Parental Rights in Education (e.g. “Don’t Say Gay”) bill to a full-blown populist-ideological critique of pedophilia and “grooming” in education. I couldn’t yet find any good neutral reporting on this topic. Here’s a very non-neutral summary from Bruni in the NYT that I think does a good job of surveying the state of play.
  
  My current take is that this is a pretty ugly moral panic. If there’s something interesting here, it’s the way in which this panic is epiphenomenal on a general social failure to offer a structure in which parents and educators can think about complicated issues in education, like how educators can and should serve as role models, how their mentorship relationships differ from and relate those of parents, and how all parties involve can have space to think and make decisions about these topics.

Have a great week, everyone.

Next week I’ll be attending ASU+GSV in San Diego. If you’ll be there, I’d love to meet up, so please reach out!

What we’re reading:

• A Builder’s Approach to Relationships (essay): Gena Gorlin argues that win-lose relationships are illusory: that human relationships are either win-win or lose-lose. This is among the critical fundamental social perspectives to impart in education: that both martyrdom and domination inflict tremendous characterological damage on everyone involved, and that there is always a non-zero-sum approach to loving human beings.

• Kids Have No Place in a Liberal Democracy (book review): A few weeks ago Elizabeth Bruenig reviewed Rita Koganzon’s Liberal States, Authoritarian Families.
  
  “And so it is that children actually spend a great deal of time with the state, and in a particularly contentious context. Because the purpose of public school is, in some sense, to make Americans out of children, public-school curricula and resources—whether overall learning objectives, specific lesson plans, or the books stocked on school-library shelves—cannot be agnostic as to what it means to be an American, and not just an American but a good American: a worthy, reliable member of our liberal-democratic society.”
  
  Our newsletter last week on the non-value-neutrality of education is also relevant, as are my musings about the role of public education in amplifying these problems.

• The Gears of My Childhood (book forward): If you haven’t read this classic from Papert then you’re missing out. “The understanding of learning must be genetic. It must refer to the genesis of knowledge. What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models.”

• Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Montessorium essay): Jason Rheins takes a deep dive into Plato’s famous allegory for its relevance to education.
  
  “Plato’s allegory emphasizes a profound challenge with respect to education and enlightenment. There are real ‘epistemic sinkholes’; some the results of mere ignorance and others deliberate misinformation, in which not only is the truth unknown but apt to be resisted as unreal and contrary to familiar misconceptions.”
  
  The foregoing link is to part 1; here’s part 2.

• Historical oddity: Did you know that Nikola Tesla proposed encasing classrooms in electrical currents in order to stimulate the brain activities (and physical growth) of students? This is real.

• A Sesame Street classic is making the rounds on Twitter. Watch it with your kids::

  (Note: the video’s volume is pretty high, so please take care.)

Nothing is agreed as regards the exercise conducive to virtue, for, to start with, all men do not honor the same virtue, so that they naturally hold different opinions in regard to training in virtue. (Politics VIII)

There are questions about how to do this for a growing child, about what “exercise” is “conducive” to virtue. (Aristotle spends a plurality of this chapter musing on the types of musical training that are the most helpful. Flutes are out, lutes are in.) And, more fundamentally, there are questions as to what that virtue is. For the Greeks, they would have been pondering differences such as the Spartan conception of virtue—a monomaniacal conception of courage—or the more integrated Athenian view. And the non-Spartan philosophers weren’t all unified, so that division forks into and is crosscut by further controversies about the nature of the good.

It’s not really until the 20th century that you start to get the idea that values aren’t the province of education.

The modern idea, now common, is that values are the province of parents and the home, or perhaps the province of the student themselves—and that the school shouldn’t impose here. This coincides with worries about state control over education. Given that values are controversial, public school is controversial. So maybe, a common sentiment goes, there’s some way to just keep schools out of these controversies. Bills to ban CRT, or the recent Florida Parental Rights (e.g. the “Don’t Say Gay” bill) are attempts—badly misguided, in my view—to accomplish a sort of value-neutrality by legislation.

But Aristotle was right. The 20th-century notion of value-neutral schools is a fantasy. Schools can’t and oughtn’t be value neutral. Grant Addison has a great piece in the Washington Examiner arguing as much, and it’s definitely the best thing I’ve read this week:

This is the messy debate so many parents find themselves in today. The issue of who teaches students and how, the extent of a parent’s say over a child’s curriculum or classroom environment, the role of the government in proscribing or allowing certain methods of instruction or doctrine—these are all questions about values, and there’s no getting around that.

As Addison notes, the notion that “school isn’t value-neutral” tends to be a talking point of the left, the tip of a spear designed ultimately to bring politics into the classroom, in ways that range from pedagogically thoughtless to outright propagandistic. And one of the questions raised by the specter of the inescapable normativity of education is whether or not some degree of propaganda is unavoidable. If it’s not, does the question just become whose propaganda a students gets?

My view is that propaganda is completely avoidable in schools. It does not follow from the fact that schools cannot be value-neutral that their values must be taught by catechism or indoctrination. Schools can both be value-laden and non-propagandistic.

The best model here is the First Amendment:

The underlying value here is a rich conception of individual agency; there is no First Amendment without some such conception.

Likewise with schools: valuing human agency substantiates a narrative that underlies pedagogical and curricular decisions. And it does so in a way that—for opinionated, value-laden reasons—always helps a child independently understand, grapple with, and maybe even reject the basis of those decisions. In a proper education, the equivalent of “burning the flag”, though it occurs rarely, is important to protect.

This is what our lanterns are designed to be: a vision of the principles underlying a good life, a vision that is both strongly opinionated and agency-centric. We’re not alone in attempting to articulate principles like this; there’s a long history of this sort of project, even other recent attempts, like this excellent one from George Lukianoff last year.

Baldwin famously said of education:

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. (“A Talk to Teachers”)

The paradox is at least partially resolved by noting that the worthiness of this purpose, the value of creating such a person, is itself a guiding moral value. It’s predicated on other values—such as the value of the individual mind, and the capacity of the individual to discover truth and create a life for herself. The Enlightenment view of the human being as a self-governing agent is not hollow or neutral. It’s the seed of a whole worldview, and the proper framework for education.

I’ve actually Tweeted about this a fair bit.

With all that in mind, it’s also worth reflecting on the worst piece I read this week. It’s still probably worth reading, since it’s one of those “so wrong that it’s interesting” type of pieces: Abigail Cartus and Justin Feldman’s hit piece on Emily Oster.

Oster’s works on parenting are all premised on empowering individuals to understand the risks and benefits of different approaches to key parenting questions—about breastfeeding, sleep training, schooling, SIDS, etc., etc.—and make decisions accordingly. At the heart of this project is the idea that agency is good, that it’s good to be able to more effectively make individual decisions about oneself and one’s family, and that the individual agent is the proper locus of judgment and consequent action.

As with the First Amendment, and as with Baldwin’s notion that the purpose of an education is to create an individual who can “look at the world for himself”, Oster’s approach is not value-neutral. It’s value-rich. These are all structures that are designed to enable individual judgement, disagreement, and choice.

In Oster’s case, it’s not a legal or pedagogical structure, but a framework of thinking and risk assessment, created specifically for the domain of childrearing. But, like with those other two cases, there’s a whole ideology operative in the background of all of these structures, a deeper philosophical view that these structures rely on in their very operation. (Some will shy away from the deployment of “ideology” here, but I mean it in a positive, non-dogmatic way: a fundamental worldview.)

And that’s the basis of the Cartus/Feldman critique. Their argument, such as it is, repeated over and over in a dozen or two variations, is to link the implicit philosophy of agency that powers Oster’s work with, essentially, “the right”: the Koch family, a panoply of right-of-center institutions, and a “neoliberal”, “economic” style of reasoning—a wretched hive of scum and villainy, as far as these critics are concerned.

This is also mixed in with some mildly-convincing and some less-than-mildly-convincing critiques of her approach to Covid data vis-a-vis schools. But mainly it’s guilt by ideological association, occasionally punctuated with gestures to various far-left alternatives that Cartus and Feldman think are ideologically better. There isn’t much offered in the piece itself as to why they are ideologically better; their intended audience is people who are already ideologically sympathetic to them and antipathetic to more agency-centric forms of liberalism.

At a meta-level, their critique is actually right. There is an implicit ideology operative in Oster’s work. And it’s not unrelated to ideas that drive what might be called neoliberalism—or other ideas, ones that crosscut political categories and don’t map easily onto right/left divisions.

At an object-level, though, their critique is dead wrong. The worldview operative in Oster’s work is good, or at least largely good, as partially evidenced by the goodness of Oster’s work. Identifying it with a right-wing bogeyman isn’t completely meritless. But it is incredibly clumsy. Politics is downstream of ideology, and trying to jam “agency” and “cost-benefit analysis” into an equality with “right-wing” is a great way to manufacture confusion and entrench false alternatives.

There’s no value-neutral education or parenting. And there doesn’t need to be. Ideology as such is not bad; it’s good to have a worldview. One can be guided by fundamental values without becoming an inquisitor. The right values are agency and the suite of epistemic, moral, and anthropological ideas that define and undergird it. The whole Enlightenment project is figuring out how to make those values operative without either making them self-undermining, by resorting to force or abrogating independence—or apologizing for them, by devolving into weaker pleas for tolerance and neutrality.

Contra Baldwin, there’s no paradox. A good education isn’t value-neutral, but nor is it propaganda.

Over the vast majority of the last 2600 or so years of education, the Philip of Macedon approach to education—hire an excellent full-time tutor—was one of the very, very few ways to get your children an education that had at least a chance of being quite good.

Over that timespan, our species has not made much progress in the field of education: knowledge of learning, development, and supporting materials and practices. But education is a human endeavor, and there are always particular humans that are good at connecting with and communicating to other particular humans. And even if you can’t literally get an Aristotle or a Locke, you can try to find an up-to-date knowledge generalist. In absence of other innovations, something like Bloom’s 2-sigma effect dominates everything else.

Erik Hoel has a long, interesting piece exploring the idea that the decline of this Philip of Macedon approach has also led to a decline in the incidence of genius. Twitter thread here:

The argument blends a few observations: (1) the decline in the frequency of geniuses, (2) the decline of tutoring (or the narrowing of it to be focused almost exclusively on standardized test performance, and (3) as demonstrated in research and illustrated by historical example, the high effectiveness of a good tutor. The piece is worth a read, even if just for the trip through history.

But I’m mostly skeptical of the case overall. Even granting that genius is on the decline, something is being greatly oversimplified—and I say this as someone who has devoted his life to education—in the premise that “The answer must lie in education somewhere.”

The issue of education and genius is somewhat similar to the issue of education and war, which we covered a few weeks ago. These things have broader causes, rooted in the fundamental ideas and values that are operative in cultures. Education is one (important) leg of how those fundamental ideas and values operate. One shouldn’t understate the importance of education, but one also shouldn’t overstate it. Generally, I think one big part of the way that intellectual leaders in education have a broader impact is by keeping the wider view in mind, by noticing how their philosophies of education relate to, well, philosophies.

I don’t have a super strong view as to the biggest determinants of the incidence of genius, but my highest prior is: where in history there is a density of discovery and creation, it's largely because of broadly shared cultural ideals that valorize them. These ideals are absorbed by ambitious children when they grow up, and also affect institutions and social networks in ways that function as ambient rocket fuel for “genius” (or any other degree of talent and ambition).

It’s difficult for education to override cultural defaults. It works better when it’s an effective delivery system for extant trends, as a multiplier on culture.

Incidentally, the raison-d’être for Montessorium’s initiatives is to try to filter out worse cultural trends and amplify better cultural trends in our educational system:

• The Pedagogy of Progress initiative is an extended analysis of how industrial progress can serve as an ideal and centerpiece for a positive vision of human progress generally

• The Agency and Identity initiative is an extended analysis of identity development in a way that is agency-promoting—and a critique of popular approaches that are, in our view, agency-demoting.

• Our core philosophy is meant to interrelate our educational philosophy to general issues in ethics, epistemology, and philosophical anthropology.

As for Bloom’s 2-sigma effect and the Philip of Macedon approach: my view is that their powers are real but more limited than they seem. They are a brute force solution in a field that needs optimized solutions. They are lead bullets in a domain that needs silver bullets.

Education in a group setting and a prepared environment, guided by adults who have more specific learning expertise—a learning environment more or less along the lines that Montessori envisioned—is better than having a killer tutor. A prepared physical and social environment offers a better surface area for learning and development than individual adult instruction.

In the very early years, this form of education is already relatively accessible (though not nearly accessible enough), thanks to Montessori and a century of grassroots movement. And, though rarer, it’s not even completely unknown for older students. Even at the most advanced stages of education, there are oddball examples of exceptional cutting-edge pedagogy—the structure and content of The Origin of Species is one; persistent, exceptional learning communities such as those of the early universities are another—that serve as models of non-brute-force innovation that exceeds the capacity of tutors.

The problem with the Philip of Macedon method isn’t just that it’s hard to scale Aristotle as a tutor. It’s that we can do better.

What we’re reading

• Writing matters (academic paper): Jan Feld, Corinna Lines, and Libby Ross argue that papers with more editorial effort are more likely to be accepted into conferences and journals. Twitter discussion here.

• I ♥ universities (essay): Lucy Keep offers a heartfelt appreciation of the depth and virtuous semi-permeability around university culture. Apropos of the above discussion, the learning culture of universities is incredibly hard to capture with a single tutor, and one question for educators is what the analogous setup is for younger students.

• Maryland takes a stand against the college degree (opinion): Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg on the significance of a shift away from requiring a college credential for many government jobs in Maryland. Slow train coming.

• Montessori’s unpinned butterflies (book review, paywall): Another review of the de Stefano’s new Montessori biography (we published an excerpt here earlier this week). Barbara Spindel, the reviewer, focuses unduly on Montessori’s messianic streak; the biography itself is more objective on this point.

• There’s a tempest of controversy around a paper arguing that physics education has too much “whiteness”—not at the level of representation, but at the level of pedagogical practices, like using labs and writing and even whiteboards. It’s so ridiculous that I’m by fiat imposing the judgment that this tempest is teapot-contained, but here’s a representative tweet so you can judge for yourself:

Come join us on Clubhouse tomorrow at 3p EDT for a discussion with her about the life of Maria Montessori and the story of her research.

She’s given us permission, as a teaser, to send along this excerpt from her book, where some of the first tensions in the US Montessori movement in the 1910s are starting to surface.

The only other bit of context we’ll stall with: the biography is written in the present tense.

The First American Tensions

In the United States, thanks to Samuel McClure’s publicity campaign, interest in the method is extremely high. Maria’s book, translated by Anne George, arrives in the bookstores in 1912 and immediately sells out. It is enriched with a preface by Henry W. Holmes, a professor of pedagogy, who writes very positive things about the method but who also makes an observation that will often show up in academic critiques. “A system of education does not have to attain perfection to merit study, investigation and experimental use,” he comments, puzzled by the fact that Maria Montessori claims to have created a scientific method but then does not accept the idea that other scientists assess it and, if necessary, improve it. Personally, he is optimistic: “Dr. Montessori is too large-minded to claim infallibility, and too thoroughly scientific in her attitude to object to careful scrutiny of her scheme and the thorough testing of its results.”[106] In reality, that is just what Maria will do: insist on being the only one to assess and develop her method, thus antagonizing a large portion of American pedagogues.

A solution is found quickly for the sale of the teaching materials. Carl Byoir, a journalist with a flair for business, reads about the method in McClure’s Magazine and realizes its economic potential. He goes to Rome and proposes an agreement to Maria for the exclusive right to produce and sell the material in North America in exchange for a payment of six thousand dollars. To get an idea of the value of this figure, consider that at the time the average annual income in America was eight hundred dollars. Instead of providing for a percentage on every set of materials sold, as the Humanitarian Society does, Byoir offers Maria 20 percent of the shares and the related dividends. Upon his return to the United States he creates a company, the House of Childhood, and in January 1912 he starts production. It is a very profitable enterprise because a complete set of materials costs twelve dollars to produce and sells for fifty dollars. Yet less than a year after starting production, Byoir sells his holding in the company to another businessman and abandons the enterprise. We do not know the reasons for his decision. It can’t be ruled out that he came to understand Maria’s difficult character and preferred to capitalize on his investment and make his exit before entering into conflict with her.

More the optimist, McClure continues to dream of getting rich by capitalizing on the method. Owing to his poor management, he has been ousted from his magazine and is in trouble with his creditors. He founds a Montessori Educational Association to manage the avalanche of requests that come in to the editorial offices, but when he announces it, he gets a telegram from Maria, annoyed that the impresario has not waited to receive her authorization: “indignant/ announcement in july issue premature.”[107] The crisis is resolved quickly and the association begins operation. It will give rise to one of the many misunderstandings that will undermine their collaboration. Maria thinks that the association is a tool for attracting investors, while the Americans—accustomed to the tradition of committees going back to the time of the War of Independence—think of it as a way to allow for a collective leadership of the movement. The first American Montessorians apply the method with an open approach, thinking they are contributing to the development of something that is still evolving. Anne George, for example, observes that American children are different from their Italian counterparts and predicts that some adjustments will be needed.

She is comforted in this idea from the words of Maria herself, who has been saying for some time now that the method is not complete and that, more than a system of codified rules, it is based on the scientific observation of children: “That which is commonly called my method of education is in truth a first germ of positive science, which with its research methods has touched the truth where the souls of children are evolving. The Children’s Houses are the first laboratories of human science; that is why their fame has traversed the world at lightning speed.”[108] The principles applied in the method do not come from her but from the children, who, left free to work, reveal the workings of their minds to those who know how to look at them with attentive eyes. One of the Franciscan nuns who are students at the convent in via Giusti gave what may be the best definition of the Montessori system: “A method that is nothing other than a patient observation of childhood.”[109]

106. Central State Archive, Private Secretariat of the Duce, Ordinary Correspondence,1922–1943, B 288, F. 15230-15279.

107. Radice, The New Children, p. 37.

108. Clara Tornar, “Maria Montessori durante il fascismo,” in Cadmo 2 (2005), p. 21.

109. “Il caso Montessori,” in La vita italiana, May 1934, p. 615.

“One reason we have a stake in the education of other people’s children is that they will grow up to be citizens. Education is a public interest, which explains why parents shouldn’t get to veto any book they think might upset their child, whether it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or Beloved… A functioning democracy needs citizens who know how to make decisions together.”

This is one of the most persistent arguments for public schools in particular but also schools in general. (Hirsch’s latest is a book-length version of this argument.) Packer’s article is worth reading, both for a good instance of this argument and for very good critiques of how the public school system is failing right now.

But, in my view, the argument is wrong. The purpose of education is to support an individual child in living her whole life to the fullest. Or, equivalently: the purpose of education is to support the development of a child such that they can joyously grow and flourish as an adult. Or: supporting the development of an individual’s virtue such that she can achieve happiness.

The focus is on individual needs, not social ones. I think this does mean supporting children in becoming the sorts of people who can participate in free societies as citizens, and that this is important. Human society is an irreplaceable value in an individual human life. It is not to be taken for granted, either in terms of the sowing—participating in a manner that ensures its continued existence and betterment—or the reaping—getting the maximum that one can out of living in such a society. So, yes, civilization matters, civics matters, loving and cooperating with other human beings matters.

But this is not a subtle difference in emphasis, or a simple waving away of a false alternative in favor of a “both-and”. It’s not that Packer, Hirsch, and countless others are sorta-wrong. They are wrong-wrong. It’s an issue of what is fundamental, and apparent isomorphisms between these positions are at best superficial. The ultimate aim of citizenship is starkly different as an ultimate aim than the ultimate aim of virtuous individuals.

Montessori herself is ambiguous on this topic; one can cite passages in favor of a more social telos, a “both-and” telos (probably her considered view), or an individualistic telos. So, without any pretense at arguing that this is also what Montessori thought, allow me to at least cite one of her more individualist passages (and also one of the only places where she clearly has Dewey in mind as a target of critique):

Education should not be limited by the democratic ideal or associated with any other ideal which is difficult to define. One wanders far from education when one begins to discuss the exact meaning of the democratic ideal.

Education should be a science and a help to life, a definite and exact study which following the previously discovered laws of life will become something exact and discernible. …

The preparation of the citizen of tomorrow depends entirely on the psychological foundations of man. Men are by nature social beings. They choose to live together, not as a herd but as independently functioning beings that associate together. (The Child, Society, and the World)

For Montessori, the individual’s virtue of independence is developmentally fundamental to achieving a functioning society, even if society is the aim. Only the independent human being, secure and happy in her competence and worth, can reliably help achieve a cohesive, freely associating society.

In my view, an independent human being is not just the fundamental developmental cause, but also the fundamental aim. Societies are created for and judged by their value to individuals, not vice versa. Likewise in education: the pro-citizenship, pro-civic-life aspects of education are to be created for and judged by reference to their value to the individual student.

Some good weekend reads:

• Nafez Dakkak had a great piece last month—The Gameboy instead of the Metaverse of Education—arguing that non-cutting-edge technologies are the best to put on the center of the page in terms of thinking about ed tech. I’m actually bullish on the metaverse for education. But it’s definitely true that educators haven’t even learned how to leverage older technologies.
  
  Nafez uses video games as his central example for this point. My favorite example of “underleveraged, dumb” ed tech is simply video recording of classrooms. Athletes, actors, and surgeons all improve their craft by having recordings that they can go back and review, can watch with a coach, can archive to better catch long-term patterns. Teachers should have this too—for these and other reasons. It’s simple, obvious—and still very hard to properly de-risk and pull off in practice.

• As the world continues to phase out of remote learning, which has generally been a disaster, stories of cases where it continues to work and be popular are of particular interest. It’s important to not accidentally learn the wrong lessons from botched execution and bad pedagogy: homeschooling, often heavily supported by virtual resources or just virtual school, is growing, is often very good, and is likely the future. (We continue to invest in our offerings on this front.)

• As of—*checks watch*—now, state-wide Covid K12 mask mandates have been dropped in the few remaining holdout states, such as California and Oregon. There is, though, one corner of education where mandates still linger: toddlers and preschool children. Emily Oster offers a cool-headed analysis of the insanity.