The Montessori Education Program and the Wish to Learn

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In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire talks about what he calls the banking program of education. In the banking technique the student is noticed as an object in which the teacher need to place data. The student has no duty for cognition of any sort the student should simply memorize or internalize what the teacher tells him or her. Paulo Freire was very much opposed to the banking method. He argued that the banking method is a system of handle and not a technique meant to successfully educate. In the banking system the teacher is meant to mold and change the behavior of the students, at times in a way that pretty much resembles a fight. The teacher tries to force information down the student’s throat that the student may well not believe or care about.

This process at some point leads most students to dislike school. It also leads them to develop a resistance and a unfavorable attitude towards finding out in general, to the point where most folks won’t seek information unless it is required for a grade in a class. Freire believed that the only way to have a genuine education, in which the students engage in cognition, was to modify from the banking system into what he defined as dilemma-posing education. Freire described how a issue-posing educational technique could function in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by saying, “Students, as they are increasingly posed with challenges relating to themselves in the globe and with the globe, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. For the reason that they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other challenges within a total context not as a theoretical query, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly crucial and thus consistently significantly less alienated”(81). The educational method developed by the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori presents a tested and productive type of issue-posing education that leads its students to enhance their desire to discover as opposed to inhibiting it.

Freire presents two main issues with the banking concept. The very first one particular is that in the banking idea a student is not needed to be cognitively active. The student is meant to merely memorize and repeat info, not to comprehend it. This inhibits the students’ creativity, destroys their interest in the subject, and transforms them into passive learners who never understand or believe what they are becoming taught but accept and repeat it due to the fact they have no other solution. The second and additional dramatic consequence of the banking concept is that it offers an enormous power to these who pick out what is becoming taught to oppress those who are obliged to discover it and accept it. Freire explains that the problems lies in that the teacher holds all the keys, has all the answers and does all the pondering. The Montessori approach to education does the precise opposite. It tends to make students do all the pondering and challenge solving so that they arrive at their own conclusions. The teachers simply help guide the student, but they do not tell the student what is accurate or false or how a dilemma can be solved.

In the Montessori system, even if a student finds a way to solve a dilemma that is slower or less efficient than a common mechanical way of solving the problem, the teacher will not intervene with the student’s method for the reason that this way the student learns to locate options by himself or herself and to consider of inventive methods to perform on distinct difficulties.

The educational system in the United States, specifically from grade college to the finish of high school, is almost identical to the banking approach to education that Freire described. For the duration of high school most of what students do is sit in a class and take notes. They are then graded on how effectively they full homework and projects and finally they are tested to show that they can reproduce or use the know-how which was taught. Most of the time the students are only receptors of facts and they take no part in the creation of information. Another way in which the U.S. education program is virtually identical to the banking program of education is the grading technique. The grades of students mostly reflect how considerably they comply with the teacher’s ideas and how a great deal they are prepared to follow 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 becoming 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 form of government will do worse than a student who basically accepts that a representative democracy is better than a direct democracy, socialism, communism, or another kind of social system. The U.S. education technique rewards these who agree with what is getting taught and punishes those who do not.

In addition, it discourages students from questioning and doing any considering of their personal. Since of the repetitive and insipid nature of our education method, most students dislike higher college, and if they do properly on their perform, it is merely for the objective of obtaining a grade as opposed to understanding or exploring a new notion.

The Montessori System advocates youngster primarily based teaching, letting the students take handle of their personal education. In E.M Standing’s The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing says that the Montessori Strategy “is a system primarily based on the principle of freedom in a ready environment”(five). Research performed on two groups of students of the ages of six and 12 comparing those who understand in a Montessori to those who study in a normal college atmosphere show that in spite of the Montessori program possessing no grading system and no obligatory perform load, it does as nicely as the standard program in each English and social sciences but Montessori students do substantially much better in mathematics, sciences, and issue solving. The Montessori system enables for students to be capable to explore their interests and curiosity freely. Because of this the Montessori program pushes students toward the active pursuit of expertise for pleasure, which means that students will want to find out and will find out about factors that interest them merely due to the fact it is exciting to do so.
Maria Montessori started to create what is now identified as the Montessori Method of education in the early twentieth century.

The Montessori Technique focuses on the relations involving the child, the adult, and the atmosphere. The kid is observed as an individual in improvement. The Montessori program has an implied notion of letting the child be what the youngster would naturally be. Montessori believed the common education program causes children to drop quite a few childish traits, some of which are considered to be virtues. In Loeffler’s Montessori in Contemporary American Culture, Loeffler states that “amongst 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 folks, play, submissiveness and so forth”. For the reason that of this perceived loss of the youngster, the Montessori program performs to allow a child to naturally develop self-self-assurance as effectively as the potential and willingness to actively seek knowledge and discover special solutions to difficulties by considering creatively. A different vital distinction in how children discover in the Montessori system is that in the Montessori technique a child has no defined time slot in which to perform a activity. As an alternative the child is allowed to execute a process for as long as he wants. This leads youngsters to have a improved capacity to concentrate and concentrate on a single activity for an extended period of time than young children have in the typical education technique.

The role which the adult or teacher has in the Montessori method marks a different basic difference amongst the Montessori s Strategy and the typical education technique. With the Montessori Approach the adult is not meant to constantly teach and order the student. The adult’s job is to guide the child so that the child will continue to pursue his curiosities and develop his or her own notions of what is genuine, suitable, and accurate. Montessori describes the child as an individual in intense, constant transform. From observation Montessori concluded that if allowed to develop by himself, a child would often locate equilibrium with his environment, which means he would find out not to mistreat other people, for example, and to interact positively with his peers. This is critical because it leads to a single of the Montessori Method’s most deep-seated concepts, which is that adults should not let their presence be felt by the youngsters. This means that though an adult is in the environment with the students, the adult does not necessarily interact with the students unless the students ask the adult a question or request assist. Furthermore, the adult should make it so that the students do not really feel like they are being observed or judged in any way. The adult can make ideas to the children, but in no way orders them or tells them what to do or how to do it. The adult have to not be felt as an authority figure, but rather pretty much as yet another peer of the children.