The Montessori Education Technique and the Wish to Understand

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire talks about what he calls the banking program of education. In the banking system the student is observed as an object in which the teacher must place facts. The student has no duty for cognition of any sort the student need to simply memorize or internalize what the teacher tells him or her. Paulo Freire was pretty considerably opposed to the banking system. He argued that the banking system is a technique of manage and not a technique meant to successfully educate. In the banking method the teacher is meant to mold and change the behavior of the students, from time to time in a way that nearly resembles a fight. The teacher tries to force facts down the student’s throat that the student may perhaps not believe or care about.

fetc.org leads most students to dislike school. It also leads them to create a resistance and a adverse attitude towards learning in common, to the point where most people today will not seek information unless it is required for a grade in a class. Freire thought that the only way to have a genuine education, in which the students engage in cognition, was to transform from the banking program into what he defined as problem-posing education. Freire described how a difficulty-posing educational program could work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by saying, “Students, as they are increasingly posed with difficulties relating to themselves in the planet and with the globe, will really feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Simply because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other difficulties within a total context not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and therefore continually much less alienated”(81). The educational method developed by the Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori presents a tested and efficient kind of problem-posing education that leads its students to raise their wish to learn as opposed to inhibiting it.

Freire presents two key troubles with the banking notion. The first one particular is that in the banking concept a student is not needed to be cognitively active. The student is meant to basically memorize and repeat information and facts, not to realize it. This inhibits the students’ creativity, destroys their interest in the topic, and transforms them into passive learners who never realize or believe what they are being taught but accept and repeat it due to the fact they have no other option. The second and extra dramatic consequence of the banking concept is that it provides an enormous energy to those who pick what is being taught to oppress these who are obliged to study it and accept it. Freire explains that the troubles lies in that the teacher holds all the keys, has all the answers and does all the thinking. The Montessori method to education does the precise opposite. It tends to make students do all the pondering and dilemma solving so that they arrive at their personal conclusions. The teachers merely enable guide the student, but they do not tell the student what is true or false or how a problem can be solved.

In the Montessori technique, even if a student finds a way to resolve a challenge that is slower or less effective than a normal mechanical way of solving the dilemma, the teacher will not intervene with the student’s course of action simply because this way the student learns to find solutions by himself or herself and to think of creative methods to work on unique complications.

The educational method in the United States, in particular from grade school to the finish of higher school, is practically identical to the banking method to education that Freire described. Throughout high school most of what students do is sit in a class and take notes. They are then graded on how effectively they complete homework and projects and lastly they are tested to show that they can reproduce or use the understanding which was taught. Most of the time the students are only receptors of data and they take no part in the creation of expertise. A further way in which the U.S. education system is practically identical to the banking program of education is the grading technique. The grades of students mostly reflect how substantially they comply with the teacher’s tips and how considerably they are prepared to adhere to directions. Grades reflect submission to authority and the willingness to do what is told extra than they reflect one’s intelligence, interest in the class, or understanding of the material that is being taught. For instance, in a government class in the United States a student who does not agree that a representative democracy is superior to any other type of government will do worse than a student who basically accepts that a representative democracy is superior than a direct democracy, socialism, communism, or another kind of social technique. The U.S. education method rewards these who agree with what is getting taught and punishes these who do not.

Moreover, it discourages students from questioning and carrying out any pondering of their own. Due to the fact of the repetitive and insipid nature of our education program, most students dislike higher college, and if they do nicely on their work, it is merely for the objective of acquiring a grade as opposed to learning or exploring a new notion.

The Montessori Approach advocates youngster based teaching, letting the students take manage of their own education. In E.M Standing’s The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing says that the Montessori Approach “is a process primarily based on the principle of freedom in a ready atmosphere”(5). Studies performed on two groups of students of the ages of six and 12 comparing these who learn in a Montessori to these who learn in a typical school environment show that regardless of the Montessori method getting no grading program and no obligatory perform load, it does as effectively as the common technique in each English and social sciences but Montessori students do a lot greater in mathematics, sciences, and difficulty solving. The Montessori method enables for students to be able to explore their interests and curiosity freely. Simply because of this the Montessori program pushes students toward the active pursuit of expertise for pleasure, which means that students will want to study and will uncover out about items that interest them simply simply because it is exciting to do so.
Maria Montessori began to create what is now known as the Montessori Method of education in the early twentieth century.

The Montessori System focuses on the relations involving the kid, the adult, and the atmosphere. The kid is observed as an person in improvement. The Montessori method has an implied notion of letting the youngster be what the youngster would naturally be. Montessori believed the common education technique causes young children to drop lots of childish traits, some of which are viewed as to be virtues. In Loeffler’s Montessori in Contemporary American Culture, Loeffler states that “among the traits that disappear are not only untidiness, disobedience, sloth, greed, egoism, quarrelsomeness, and instability, but also the so-referred to as ‘creative imagination’, delight in stories, attachment to individuals, play, submissiveness and so forth”. For the reason that of this perceived loss of the kid, the Montessori system performs to enable a kid to naturally develop self-confidence as nicely as the potential and willingness to actively seek knowledge and discover exceptional solutions to difficulties by thinking creatively. An additional significant distinction in how children study in the Montessori method is that in the Montessori system a child has no defined time slot in which to perform a job. Rather the kid is permitted to perform a job for as lengthy as he wants. This leads children to have a greater capacity to concentrate and focus on a single activity for an extended period of time than youngsters have in the typical education program.

The role which the adult or teacher has in the Montessori technique marks a further basic difference between the Montessori s Strategy and the normal education method. With the Montessori Approach the adult is not meant to frequently teach and order the student. The adult’s job is to guide the youngster so that the child will continue to pursue his curiosities and create his or her personal notions of what is actual, appropriate, and accurate. Montessori describes the kid as an person in intense, constant transform. From observation Montessori concluded that if allowed to develop by himself, a youngster would normally locate equilibrium with his atmosphere, which means he would find out not to mistreat others, for instance, and to interact positively with his peers. This is essential because it leads to a single of the Montessori Method’s most deep-seated ideas, which is that adults need to not let their presence be felt by the youngsters. This suggests that even though an adult is in the atmosphere with the students, the adult does not necessarily interact with the students unless the students ask the adult a query or request assistance. Furthermore, the adult have to make it so that the students do not feel like they are getting observed or judged in any way. The adult can make recommendations to the young children, but by no means orders them or tells them what to do or how to do it. The adult will have to not be felt as an authority figure, but rather almost as an additional peer of the children.