by Sophie Madle, Bryn Mawr College ’27; Image by Sarah Madle
Education is a cornerstone of democracy, justice, and community, and yet racial inequalities eat away at the mortar. K-12 schools where POCs make up the majority of students are frequently underfunded and don’t adequately prepare children for higher education. However, predominantly white institutions with better test scores disproportionately expel and suspend Black students, leading Black parents to avoid enrollment.
bell hooks, an acclaimed philosopher and professor of Women’s and Black Studies, spent her life teaching, writing, and advocating for gender and racial justice, and preferred to spell her name in lowercase so as not to draw attention away from her work. Using her book, Teaching to Transgress, as a standard for racial justice in education, I argue that the Montessori system models her recommendations, despite its disproportionately White composition. When paired with efforts towards racial integration and valuing the voices of educators of color, Montessori classrooms become champions of racial justice.
In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks enumerates her experiences of racial harassment and dismissal at all levels of integrated education. She defines education as political, with two possible dichotomous approaches. Either it can promote critical thinking (a threat to authority) and become an anticolonial practice, or it can enforce obedience to authority. When properly taught, critical thinking deconstructs systemic inequalities such as colonialism and racism. At her segregated school, hooks describes her Black teachers’ dedication to teaching students to think as “a counter-hegemonic act” (hooks, 2). In comparison, she describes her experience at integrated schools as places where the curriculum reinforced messages about White superiority and where she struggled to “maintain the right to be an independent thinker” (hooks, 4). hooks identifies education that teaches students to think critically as “the practice of freedom” (hooks, 4). While oppressive institutions may co-opt analytical thinking to accomplish colonial goals, this requires doublethink, as the individual is permitted to think critically only about their assigned workload. The individual is not permitted to truly think critically, as Hooks puts it, because they may not question authority or choose their own tasks. As a teacher aiming to create this habit of critical thinking in her students, hooks emphasizes the importance of flexibility needed to promote excitement in learning, for students to be taught as individuals, of valuing everyone’s presence, of valuing of everyone’s perspectives, and of collective responsibility in creating the learning environment where critical thinking can take place. She specifies that in order for education to be “a practice of freedom,” students must be active participants (hooks, 14).
The Montessori Method of education thoroughly fulfills her every description. Maria Montessori (1870-1952) created the Montessori Method by observing children’s innate desire to learn and preparing environments that allowed children to develop competence, be self-sufficient, and teach each other. Montessori schools are defined by prepared environments that allow children to hold responsibility with freedom, mixed-age classrooms that allow children to inspire and learn from one another, and a focus on emotional intelligence and learning from others’ perspectives. The method is used in thousands of schools across the world today. The characteristic individualized instruction provides flexibility for children at different levels and in different moods and avoids what hooks terms the “‘banking system’ of education,” in which facts are inserted into students like a deposit, and students regurgitate information like withdrawals (hooks, 14). Grace and Courtesy lessons are given to practice stewardship and ensure respect between peers and teachers, embracing collective thinking as well as individual expression. Students starting in the one-year-old class enter a prepared environment that allows freedom with responsibility.
However, Montessori’s most common critique is that the method is primarily for the economically privileged; public schools have not embraced the philosophy en masse, and, therefore, White upper-class students, the primary demographic of private schooling, are most likely to access the method. Jessica Winters, a New Yorker editor, argues that despite the origins of the Montessori Method in the asylums and poverty of Rome, Maria Montessori is responsible for beginning the decline of the method into a commercialized product limited to the economic elite because she sought patents for her innovations—the Montessori materials, such as the movable alphabet—and recused herself from her university job to train teachers in the method full-time. Leaders in Montessori research contend that Winters reduces the impact of the Montessori materials and fails to point out that Montessori was granted patents by the U.S., Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and England. Maria Montessori was merely engaging in the commercialized world around her, and holding her to a higher moral standard regarding her intellectual property seems arbitrary and unjustified. The issue of demographic disparity affecting Montessori access is the responsibility of the state, which does not make it accessible to the masses, not of the philosophy itself. The modern problem remains: even the student bodies of Montessori public schools are likely to be more White than their overall school districts. Montessori is the “largest alternative pedagogy in the U.S. public school system,” but there are nine times as many private Montessori schools as public ones (Debs & Brown, 2). Another critique is that Montessori’s common presence in private schools makes White parents familiar with it and more likely to flock to available Montessori public schools, while Black parents unfamiliar with the philosophy may not try it.
While unequal racial enrolment in Montessori schools is a symptom of economic and racial inequality in America, wherein systemic oppression causes disproportionate levels of poverty in racial minorities, it is not a cause. Montessori creates the critical thinking that leads students to be able to question and challenge racial inequality. Although the materials were patented (the patents having since expired), Montessori as a term is not trademarked; therefore, each certification is slightly different, and simply having Montessori materials present in a classroom does not inherently create this “practice of freedom” (hooks, 12) when not paired with authentic Montessori training emphasizing observation, individualism, practical life, and critical thinking. When Montessori prioritizes educators of color and Black literary perspectives, starting with Hair Love in the 3-6 room and Warriors, Bad Boy, and The Hate U Give as part of the middle school curriculum (books prescribed by the Houston Montessori Center) in tandem with the original methods of intrinsic motivation, community, and care, it becomes a propellant for racial justice in communities. All children and families should have the opportunities to be exposed to this environment. More studies should be done about the long-term benefits of Montessori; more public schools should embrace the method of critical thinking over the “‘banking system’ of education” (hooks, 14); and when public school systems offer Montessori, they should appropriately educate all parents as to their options and the benefits of Montessori. While the small student bodies of Montessori private schools do not always allow for excessive scholarship funds, they should offer them when possible, along with community outreach to educate families about the tenets of Montessori.
