Maria Montessori and the Case Against Homework

By Colman McCarthy

For new ideas on education—except for tormenting children with more tests, can you think of any?—look back exactly 100 hundred years ago this month to an impoverished Italian neighborhood. The school was Casa dei Bambini, in the San Lorenzo ghetto of Rome.

Maria Montessori, a 37-year-old physician with unconventional notions about child development, had assembled some 60 children ages three to six--some disabled, some troubled—and began what she called her “experiment.” She would stay at it until her death in 1952, seeing it take hold in a movement that now includes more than 5,000

U.S. Montessori schools and some 8,000 worldwide.

What’s happened is less a successful experiment than a grand revolution. No deep psychological research is needed to weigh the benefits of the Montessori child-centered classroom: let children be children. That would seem self-evident but not in these cankered days of excessive homework, standardized testing, back-straining bookbags, advance placement classes, grade mongering and harried parents who over-schedule their children and themselves,

Lost in the calcified mayhem is the truth discovered by Montessori at Casa dei Bambini: “These children have free choice all day. Life is based on choice, so they learn to make their own decisions. They may decide and choose for themselves all the time….They cannot learn through obedience to the commands of another.”

Yet schools keep commanding: learn this, learn that. We know what’s best for you.

At the centennial of the Montessori movement, the growth has spread to unexpected sites: “Once considered a maverick experiment that appealed only to middle-class white families in the States, “ Jay Mathews wrote recently in The Washington Post, “Montessori schools have become popular with some black professionals and are getting results in low-income public schools with the kind of children on which Montessori first tested her ideas.”

As an amateur Montessorian, I’m on board because of my disdain for assigning homework and tests. Both are forms of academic violence , an abuse of power over the weak. If a teacher engages students’ minds during class, the students will think about the ideas long after class. If the teacher doesn’t engage, why should students bother to keep thinking: they weren’t taught, they were bored. Homework extends the message: we’ll bore you some more.

Small wonder that Montessori children tend to be creative in their non-school lives. It carried over from the classroom.

I was heartened to come upon an essay in “Tomorrow’s Child” magazine by Tim Seldin, president of the Montessori Foundation: “All the usual arguments that parents and mainstream teachers use to justify homework miss the point. Homework does not teach children responsibility, time management skills, self-discipline, or more of what they should be learning during the day. What it teaches is how to put up with a job that they dislike…..Gifted teachers get the job done in a normal school day by inspiring a sense of interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm among their students.”

Next time you go to Google, or when you next realize you are a millionaire because you bought stock in Google , remember the words of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founders: “We both went to Montessori school, and I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, and doing things a little differently, that contributed to our success..”

When you have a moment, make it a Montessori moment: Google .montessori.org and see what turns up. Then go find her books. It’ll be home-thinking, not homework.

It could be a liberating moment, which we can all use.