What do the following people have in common? Anne Frank, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Prince William and Prince Harry, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinn, Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Sims creator Will Wright? Each of these people was Montessori educated. Google founders Page and Brinn have gone so far as to credit it as a major factor behind their success. As parents of Montessori children you are part of a club of advocates for Montessori that includes Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Jean Piaget and even Fred (Mister) Rogers. Both are arguably good crowds to be in. The latter are folks we like to call Montessori adults. They are people who either didn’t have the chance at a Montessori education or were peers of Maria Montessori. We know that more than a few of our parents were Montessori educated themselves, but for those who weren’t we offer up our belief that it is never too late. Below are some suggestions for how we can all become Montessori adults.
1) Choose ways to enrich yourself daily. Building new skills and knowledge in the age of technology that shows you only what it believes you want to see can make it difficult to find new ideas to look at. Throw in time limits from what has become an age of “busy-ness” where we rush from institution to institution and the challenge becomes even more pronounced. But it is never too late to have creating your own work cycle pay off. GoT was fun, but rather than binge watching a show, reading someone else’s opinion on some subject or just streaming a how-to video, dig in at the ground level and build some knowledge from the ground up. Suggestions? Try to grow some food (or for the more advanced, try to cultivate your own strain of a food). Dig in to a data set at https://www.data.gov or https://ucr.fbi.gov. See if you can make Excel kick on the fan inside of your computer. Fire up the power tools you have been intending to use for years and start trying your hand at making something. Crooked cuts are better than the cuts not made. In Montessori, knowledge gained is its own reward.
2) Practice failing. Huh? What? Yes – regular attendees of our klatches know we love to fail. Just as children return to the work shelves until they have mastered all of the work that interests them, you too can return to the biggest challenges standing in your way until you have tackled them to a satisfactory level. Every failed attempt is a lesson learned and a new brick to build your personal house on. Acceptance that moving ahead can be <em>extremely<em> difficult is a lesson we all must learn. Beyond only benefitting you, modeling humility, persistence and a positive attitude in the face of challenges is a huge gift to your children.
3) Become a mentor. We have parents that are welders, accountants, restaurant managers, artists, mechanics, vice presidents, financial analysts, software developers, musicians and more. What skills do you have that led you to your vocation and how can you share them? People may not want to learn the intricacies of tax rules for LLCs, but if you are an accountant you probably did better at math than the average bear. Volunteer as a tutor. Create an online course on Udemy to help others learn the basics of a new skill. Contribute your skills to those around you. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, “He who receives and idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”.
4) On the flip side of number 3 above, ask lots of questions of people who know something you don’t. As people who are barraged by two and three year olds asking an enormous number of life’s most challenging questions every day, we are, perhaps surprisingly, more than happy to do the same to others. If you don’t ask, you don’t know. There are real experts in the world (not just those suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect). When you meet one, ask them if you can trouble them as a resource. This includes the Directresses in our schools.
5) Do something that stimulates the senses. As we grow older sand between our toes goes from being that thing that makes us wiggle appendages to see how it feels to being the stuff we have to spend time cleaning up when our children drag it in from all corners (including Greystone House, sorry 🙂 ). Take your child out and stick your toes in the water at the pond. Make some super messy homemade play-doh together and squeeze it between your fingers. Have some alone time? Float in a pool rather than doing power laps. Gain back some child-like wonder using sight, smell, sound, taste and touch.
Even if you missed out on the pink tower and binomial cube as a child you can still engage with the world in a way that is truly perspective changing and growth driving. You just may find some new meaning in your life. Worst case, your kids will think it is pretty cool having some company in the sandbox.
