Three Expressions of Faith in the Child

Snapshots of Christian, Islamic and Jewish Independent Schools

By Mark Anderson

Maria Montessori had a famously spiritual side, reflected in her almost mystical descriptions of a child’s development, as well as her specific discussions on religious learning.

Although the growth of Montessori during its first few generations in the United States has been largely secular, many religious educators here have always found a comfortable collaborator in Montessori.

The movement towards religious-affiliated Montessori learning is growing today, leading a steadily larger number of children into Montessori classrooms.

And more religiously oriented educators are adopting—and adapting—Montessori’s methods to their schools each year.

This summer we visited with a handful of religious schools that have chosen Montessori as their academic and spiritual curriculum. We share here some glimpses into the choice they made and why this movement continues to grow.

Jewish: Child’s Way

When D’vorah Horn-Greenberg and Rabbi Susan Lazev started designing Montessori curriculums for their Jewish preschools they were a continent and two decades apart from each other.

But their motivations were much the same. Both were convinced that Montessori methods offered a better way not just to support the intellectual development of young children, but also to begin nurturing their spiritual lives.

The key to that opportunity was Montessori’s recognition that the appetite for spiritual experience arrives early in a child’s life.

And that faith in the early readiness for spiritual work—and in following the child’s lead along that path—are right at home in Jewish tradition, Lazev says. She and Tara Prupis underscored that link in the Hebrew name they chose for Child’s Way Jewish School, the preschool that they founded two years ago in West Orange, NJ.

“Derech HaYeled means in part ‘the way’ or ‘the path,’ and it refers to a Bible passage, ‘Educate a child according to his or her own way,’” Lazev says. “That’s certainly a Montessori concept,” but it also indicates the Jewish belief that it’s through the child that faith is sustained, she says, and through the child that we find our way forward as a culture.

Prupis and Lazev are both mothers, and they’d spent several years searching for a preschool that combined a religious environment with a rigorous child-centered learning approach. What they found instead were classrooms characterized by simple, teacher-directed busy work.

“From a Jewish standpoint, those don’t deliver content in the most effective way.”

As they searched for an alternative, Lazev began reading about Montessori. “What attracted me initially was the concrete approach it took,” its trust in a child’s motivation to learn by exploring materials and tasks on their own.

Prupis and Lazev decided to establish their own school, incorporating that child-directed approach.

They trained at the Center for Montessori Teacher Education in New York and started adapting those classroom principles to Jewish lessons, opening the door for children to begin their own explorations of the Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah and other celebrations and stories. “Our school is about a process that begins with the child, not about coming up with a product at the end of an exercise,” Lazev says.

For Horn-Greenberg the introduction to Montessori began when she was hired out of college to teach art at a Montessori school. She fell in love with the pedagogy and with its commitment to developing a culture of peace. “I was very much into changing the world.”

Montessori’s curriculum of peacemaking provides an important tool and counterpart to the Jewish injunction Tikkun olam, to “repair the world,” Horn-Greenberg says.

“Montessori creates such a positive sense of self for children. It develops their capacity to reach out to the world. That was a gap I saw in Jewish education, and it made perfect sense to me to combine the two.”

Horn-Greenberg wrote a Montessori curriculum for Jewish preschools as part of her masters degree work in California in the early 1980s. She put that into practice at Bayt Yeladeem Children’s House, which she founded in Elkins Park, PA, in 1984 and led until last year.

At both Child’s Way and Bayt Yeladeem, opportunities to begin the experience of Jewish life often come during holiday or Shabbat celebrations.

Children practice practical life skills in preparing for the holidays, setting Seder tables, pouring juice (in lieu of wine), lighting candles, or distributing scented spices for Havdalah at the beginning of each week. Each activity links to parts of the deep story of Jewish customs.

The Tu B’Shevat, celebrating the progression of natural life through the seasons, is an example at Child’s Way.

The Tu B’Shevat Seder traditionally includes a succession of white to red wines served to represent the progression of the year from the white, cold of winter through shades of red that represent the ripening of the earth. Children repeat that service with juice, coloring it to match the ripening and to match laminated color cards. The lessons are reinforced as they discuss other cycles—their rising and going to bed each day, the sun’s daily cycle—and as they move through the classroom where they’ll encounter geography lessons on ancient Israel and its seasonal produce.

That integration of the lesson throughout the classroom and the respect that each element receives distinguishes Montessori, Horn-Greenberg says.

“Teaching of religion often gets siphoned off to arts and crafts activities. The problem is you can’t teach the holiness of an object if you’ve shaped it out of pretzels, and that’s something I love about Montessori. It gives great respect to the materials that make up the ritual, all the materials in the environment. Children are ready to understand that.”

Islamic: Inherent Goodness of the Child

The Islamic School of Seattle opened in 1980 as a faith-based school with a child-centered curriculum.

Its founding director, Ann El-Moslimany, had long been interested in Montessori, and over the years she grew more certain that the Islamic school should evolve in that direction.

She was just waiting for the right person to lead the change.

In 1996 she found a promising candidate, a young school parent, Aishah Jalani. “[El-Moslimany] invited me to get Montessori training and join the school to help make that transition,” Jalani remembers.

She liked the idea, enrolled at the Montessori Education Institute of the Northwest where she gained preschool certification, and in 1998 began introducing Montessori as the Islamic School’s preschool curriculum and as a means to introduce young children to Islamic traditions and lessons.

“Montessori is very much in line with what [El-Moslimany and I] both envisioned for the school,” Jalani says—a holistic, child-centered and progressive educational curriculum.

But the educational path and the religion share another important kinship, she says—a belief in the “inherent goodness” of the child.

That certainty is a key tenet of Islam called “fitrah,” a faith that all children have innate knowledge of God, which adults are called to nurture and guide.

“Montessori understood that very well,” Jalani believes.

“Dr. Montessori herself was a person of faith,” and that helped her recognize the developmental value that faith provides, she says. “Faith gives individuals a strong sense of belonging, accountability, ownership and community,” traits that are goals for both Montessori and Islamic educators.

Those core similarities make Islam and Montessori “dynamic complements” in an educational model, and Jalani says they’ve made the task of developing a Montessori-based Islamic curriculum simpler.

The school utilizes a traditional Montessori environment and approach in preschool and early elementary grades, but Jalani and the five other teachers and assistants regularly introduce stories of the prophet Mohammed’s life into daily and religious lessons—adopting stories about his manners and characteristics in Montessori lessons on grace and courtesy, for instance.

The practical life rituals at snack time include offering grace and the ablutions that Muslims conduct before every prayer. A prayer area is part of the classroom environment, and all lessons are presented in English and Arabic, the language of the Q’uran.

“We also nurture in the children a sense of accountability and respect—for themselves, for each other, for the materials,” Jalani says, as well as a recognition that God is never absent from them.

“God-centeredness is the heart and soul of our school,” and she says that’s evident every day. “I see that in the way children move through the room, the respect they show for everything around them. I see it in the way they solve problems and resolve disputes. I’ll hear them use critical thinking but they also take responsibility for they way they behave. You hear in them the sense that God is a part of their lives.”

The number of Islamic schools in the United States is small at this point—Jalani thinks the Seattle school is the only one in the Northwest. But the number is growing and more are exploring and adopting Montessori every year.

Some of those schools have approached Montessori in a superficial way, she says. “It’s a catchy idea and they like the materials,” but those schools often revert to traditional models by the time children reach elementary grades.

But Jalani is also impressed with the work underway in many existing schools, and she hopes to begin collaborating with them to share resources, ideas and to search for a solution to a chronic problem: finding trained Montessori teachers.

At the Islamic School of Seattle that effort reaches an important milestone—and a challenge—this year.

Jalani has been the only certified teacher on a staff of six, and she’s divided her time between elementary and preschools. “This year we’re asking that teachers commit to get their certification.”

The school will provide training onsite during the year, but they will require teachers to complete their training next year. “It’s a big leap,” but one that’s important the quality of the school’s program, she says.

Christian: Seeing God’s Hand

For Fran Erling “following the child” is a fundamental tenet of the Montessori method she learned years ago.
It’s also something much more.

“We believe that God has a plan for each child, and his or her interest during the day is what God has put in them,” giving the child the motivation to explore, learn and develop.

Erling and Mary Dietz were both trained Montessori teachers when they founded the Way of the Shepherd Catholic Montessori preschool in Minneapolis’ northern suburbs in 1998.

That small school started as a needed next step in the home-schooling movement for many among Erling’s circle of friends and young families. “We knew parents who were frustrated because they didn’t feel they could provide the teaching quality they wanted for their children.”

Way of the Shepherd’s goal was to provide a high-quality academic setting for their children and the children of a handful of friends, but with that explicitly Christian underpinning.

“Both Mary and I realized when we were going through Montessori training that we wanted to see the spiritual lives of children nurtured more than they could be in secular schools. We believed that was Montessori’s intent, too.”

The school Erling and Dietz opened succeeded immediately and has grown steadily, from 11 preschoolers in 1998 to 92 today. Erling and the current school community hope to be able to move to a new site next year—it’s fourth expansion since starting—and they hope on this move to obtain outdoor green space and enough room to accommodate junior high grades over the next several years.

Alongside conventional Montessori methods—all five teachers in the school are trained in AMS- or AMI-affiliated programs—Erling and Dietz utilize the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a Christian curriculum developed by an Italian theologian, Sofia Cavaletti, and her Montessorian collaborator, Gianna Gobbi.

Cavaletti and her followers utilize many of Montessori’s insights about the learning opportunities at each developmental stage and the power of the environment to outline a path of religious discovery for primary and elementary-age children.

The Catechesis activities occur in a space that’s separate from the Montessori classroom—an atrium, designed with the same care as the Montessori environment to engage the child’s ready curiosity. It has spaces for presentations by the Catechist-guide on Bible stories or the liturgy, for individual and group work and prayer, and an environment filled with prepared lessons and materials.

The two disciplines, Catechesis and Montessori, are separate but Erling said they derive from the same dynamic core, which moves the child to explore the world and his spiritual life.

“They’re so closely knit. If a child grows spiritually, all other development follows, whether that’s intellectual or character building. Children are born with dignity that develops each day, and that’s what we’re trying to help them recognize and learn to respect in themselves and in each other.

“Montessori believed that—she characterized it as cosmic work—and it coincides exactly with our faith.”

Ed and Barbara Fidellow also see God’s hand in the motivations that stir a child’s curiosity and moral development.

The Fidellows operated the Lakemont Academy, a Christian Montessori school in Dallas, TX for 29 years. The couple left the school five years ago to work full-time on developing the Christian Montessori Fellowship, a loose affiliation of Christian Montessori schools around the country. The Fellowship just celebrated its 25th year.

“Montessori said our job is to help a child find his or her personality, and there’s an interesting religious aspect to this,” Ed Fidellow says. “We’re made in the image of God, and God is a personality. That is the image we’re made into, so our job is helping the child discover that facet of God in them.”

Ed Fidellow, who leads dozens of small workshops each year on Montessori and school development, says his work isn’t based on new research or innovations. He is trying instead to help educators and families back to the “foundational” teachings of Montessori, the things that can be lost among the latest brain or development research.

“Grace, courtesy, practical life and the deep respect for the child. Those aren’t a part of anybody else’s philosophy.”

And those are pedagogical qualities that will appeal to many existing Christian schools that are candidates for a new wave of Montessori development, Fidellow thinks.

“There’s lots of discussion about how we can increase access to Montessori,” he says. “All those Christian schools are candidates. They want to do a good academic job, this is a compatible curriculum. We need to speak their language, though.”

 Resources

Jewish

• Chabad Lubavitch of Beijing, China is an Orthodox community that operates a Montessori school and designs and manufactures Montessori materials for Jewish curriculums—sandpaper letters for the Hebrew alphabet, a wooden calendar that includes the months of the Roman calendar on one side, the lunar or Jewish calendar on the other: www.chabadbeijing.com

Christian

• The Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, headquartered in Oak Park, IL, provides training programs, workshops, learning materials and other publications. www.cgsusa.org
• Christian Montessori Fellowship schedules regular workshops around the country, an annual national conference and it publishes a regular newsletter. www.christianmontessorifellowship.com

Islamic

• You can learn more about the Islamic School of Seattle or get in touch with Aishah Jalani at the school’s web site: www.islamicschoolofseattle.org