The Teenage Brain

The education program for adolescent students proposed by Dr Montessori over 90 years ago was that of a farm school. She envisioned this to be a place where students would grow their own food, experiencing life as close to the land and nature as possible. She called this program “Erdkinder”, which translates to English as “children of the Earth” or “children of the land”. According to Dr Montessori, attending such a school would provide young adolescents with the opportunity to become psychologically and economically independent, thereby preparing them to be capable and contributing adults in society.

The Globe and Mail recently published an insightful article on brain development during the teen years and beyond. It also provides a supportive case for heeding Dr. Montessori’s advice to “follow the child” – why education must correspond to respective developmental stages.

Is loss of cursive writing affecting children’s development?

Ever wonder why Montessori schools still use cursive? Take a look at this MSNBC interview with writer, Maria Konnikova discussing her article (New York Times, June 2014) on cursive writing in schools and how it can have an impact on the brain beyond childhood.

Creating Healthy Environments for Our Children

How can we create healthy environments for our children to thrive in today’s society? Hear what Dr. Bruce Perry has to say….

Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D. is an American psychiatrist, currently the Senior Fellow of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston, Texas and an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, Illinois.

Montessori Builds Innovators

Few of us know adults who attended Montessori schools and often wonder what the long term benefits might be.

In his article for the Harvard Business Review, Andrew McAfee, co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy in the MIT Sloan School of Management, asserts that Montessori builds innovators:

There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.

So shouldn’t we be paying a great deal of attention to the educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there’s a “Montessori Mafia” among the creative elite. So maybe there’s something to the method Italian physician Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century.