Making Montessori Hawaiian

Serving An ‘Involuntary Minority’

By Nanette Schonleber

Fifty years ago, the newly reborn Montessori movement in the United States split painfully, debating the issue of cultural adaptation.

Mario Montessori and the leadership of the Association Montessori Internationale argued for a single model and centralized control.

Nancy Rambusch and the newly created American Montessori Society talked about “contextualizing” Montessori in America.

The split really embraced two questions.

First, how important is culture in the education of young people? Today there is wide acceptance of the principles of the sociocultural approach to learning. Culture is crucial.

AMS advocates were passionate in support of that vision and sought to discredit what they saw as the inflexibility of the AMI approach.

John McDermott, a professor of educational philosophy and supporter of AMS, put it this way about 1960:

The contentions of the traditional Montessorians about the universal similarity of children for purposes of education display a basic naivete about the extra-ordinarily powerful and irreducible interrelationships between a culture and the child’s development of a modality of consciousness.

Of particular significant for the American scene is the tradition of public education and the needs of an egalitarian-oriented society.

Rambusch put it this way:

Everywhere, Montessori stresses the importance of the environment and the need to recognize the world in which the child is actually living. America is not a nation of educational aborigines, awaiting the Gospel from abroad.

The American Montessori “model” of education did not exist and could not have existed fully realized prior to its diffusion. It was in the process of evolution from the movement that I and a few others realized that “American Montessori” was not the same things as “Montessori in America.”

A second question has to do with specific cultures, and I would argue that it is time for Montessori—and other educators—to reconsider that.

In the early days of AMS, America’s opinion leaders shared the assumption that America was a melting pot, a single, dominant culture. Montessori schools could adapt.

We have learned a lot in the last half century, and I have learned a lot in the last few years. We know much more about the significance of subcultures in our children’s lives.

I recently completed my doctoral dissertation, “Culturally Congruent Education and the Montessori Method: Perspectives from Hawaiian Culture-Based Educators.” For that dissertation, I listened to Hawaiian preschool educators who had completed Montessori teacher education programs and gone on to lead Hawaiian language or culture-based (HLCB) schools. These classrooms clearly did not look like traditional Montessori schools, but those who took Montessori training were pleased with their Montessori training. They found a great deal of congruence in the Montessori vision and their vision of cultural respect.

They had, essentially, gone beyond anything the founders of AMS might have imagined to create not American Montessori, but Hawaiian Montessori.

What do we make of that?

I will offer one hypothesis on which I would encourage discussion.

Let us begin by applauding those educators who are working so passionately for the preservation of their language and culture.

In trying to understand their challenges, I used a paradigm proposed by the late educational anthropologist John Ogbu in 1985. Ogbu identified three kinds of minority groups:

• voluntary minorities, those who have come to the United States voluntarily in search of a better life,
• involuntary minorities, those who have come involuntarily, as a result of slavery, colonization, or conquest, and
• autonomous minorities, those who have an identity that, while distinctive from the mainstream, has a “cultural frame of reference” that demonstrates and encourages success.

Ogbu was particularly interested in why, in spite of the advances that have been made in what he called the “opportunity structure,” children who are members of involuntary minorities such as Hawaiians, continue to lag behind their counterparts in their school outcomes while other minority groups achieve more.

We know Montessori education works well with both voluntary and autonomous minorities. We need to consider whether it can be adapted to work with Hawaiian and other involuntary minorities, such as American Indians, Native Alaskans and African Americans or whether it will feel like one more model of teaching imposed from the outside.

Based on my research, I believe that the Montessori approach can be a good fit. Montessori herself shared many of the same underlying values as Native Hawaiians, for example, and many of the teaching strategies she espoused are similar. The key is that, just as Nancy Rambusch McCormick saw the need for an American model that met the needs of mainstream Americans, there now is a need for a new American model, or perhaps models, that emerge from within the cultural beliefs of groups who have been marginalized in the past.

The Hawaiian culture-based educators who incorporate Montessori’s values and teaching methods into their own schools are perhaps an example of this new “American Montessori” model. Just as the early founders of AMS saw a need to break away from the European model but saw no problem with considering their “American” version as Montessori, so (I believe) now indigenous and historically underserved minorities (or involuntary minorities) are creating the Montessori model that is a good fit for their own goals and values.

While sharing many things in common with the old American Montessori model, this new model may not look like the old model; in fact, in some cases it may emphasize aspects of Montessori’s writings that are not much emphasized by the American Montessori model—things like a focus on the larger community and caring for the land.

What connects us all is that we share at least some elements of a similar world-view. In the case of the Native American and Hawaiian culture-based educators these include the idea that (a) children have a spiritual essence that must be allowed to manifest itself, (b) the earth is sacred and (c) all is interconnected. Whatever the group, they will need to adapt the Montessori approach to their own culture and time just as McCormick-Rambusch did so successfully in the 1960s.

Nanette Schonleber is on the faculty of the Chaminade University.