In Praise of Public School Teachers

Opinion

Lakshmi A. Kripalani

I applaud those of you who teach in public Montessori schools.

You are our hope to reach all children. You work against the odds.

Private Montessori schoolteachers may claim to do a better job but they are not, as you are, reaching those who need them the most

• Public schools cannot reject children they cannot handle, as often happens in private schools.

• In public schools children often arrive without Montessori preschool-a real challenge to even the most experienced teacher.

• Mixed-age grouping allows younger children to learn spontaneously from older children. However if we have mixed-age grouping where the older children have no early childhood experience in a Montessori environment or advanced knowledge, you cannot easily mobilize this resource. You may well be forced to teach each child instead of directing the children to function independently.

• Some of you have principals who do not fully appreciate the benefits of multi-age grouping and revert back to the single-grade classrooms. These principals may believe that they still have a Montessori environment.

• You may be challenged by those who do not understand that independent learning does not take place in a vacuum. The prepared environment is not merely the material but children working at different levels side by side. It is only then that the children progress on their own, learning from what is going on in the environment.

• You may well have received a lesser training than you have a right to expect. There has been a wide gap in the training of the elementary teachers from its inception. Dr. Montessori showed teachers how to proceed with experienced children. She never developed strategies to meet the needs of the children who grew up without these experiences. Followers have mimicked what she contributed.

• Many of you may have taken partial training through a summer course and started working in the fall. You did not get the opportunity to observe, assimilate or comprehend a new approach. If that happened to you, you probably had to fight the urge to create more and more materials, resulting in the dependency on that material.

• Some of you may not have received any cohesive training-especially if you took some of the shortcut courses.

• In many schools you may be shortchanged when the principal gets transferred or leaves in the midstream. In almost all systems, there is no pool of potential replacement principals with experience or knowledge of Montessori.

• You may have had to work without a Montessori trained coordinator in the building to direct or guide you and your colleagues.

• You deal daily with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation and I can only hope you have a faculty working together in the face of NCLB challenges. You know that the tests do not reflect the child's real progress.

• You may be working with colleagues whose passion to serve children has been overtaken by their concern for keeping their jobs.

It is not for me to criticize those who decide that they cannot continue to work in public schools, but I can salute those of you who stay and do this important work.

I can only hope that the leading Montessori associations will find ways to support you. One step would be a campaign to transfer funds from meaningless testing to true assessment of each child's development and progress.

Perhaps the associations can also get the attention of politicians who demand results without providing the necessary resources.

Copyright ©2006

Lakshmi Kripalani was trained by and has worked with Dr. Maria Montessori and Mario Montessori. She is an AMI Montessori techer trainer and consultant..

Dr. Montessori's 1946 Lectures-Karachi, India, transcribed and edited by Lakshmi Krfipalani is available through the Houston Montessori Center, (713) 464-5791.

Ms. Kripalani is available for lectures, workshops or consultations.

She can be reached at lkripal...@comcast.net.