Sunday Edublogging

Nice article in Slate about Montessori schools. There's a bit at the end about Waldorf schools, and also the Reggio Emilia teaching techniques. I don't know nearly enough about the differences between the methods to have a strong opinion either way. I do know that my brother-in-law, David, is one of the smartest, nicest, and generally wonderful people that I know, and he went to Montessori schools. And while he certainly got some aspect of his brains genetically (his dad is the very widely-published economist Dan Hamermesh), I feel like the schools have to have had some impact on his impeccably good manners and general sociality, because he sure as hell did not get that from Daniel, who is a wonderful person but not, shall we say, the planet's most tactful.

I do know Faith, who is almost certainly never going to read this, is a huge believer in the Waldorf method, and the only adults I've ever known who came out of that program were also smart and interesting and generally wonderful people. But, at the end of the day, I think the point to take home is that there is no one right way to educate a child. Which is really, I think, a generalizable lesson; there is no one right way for people to live. No two species of animal live in exactly the same way, hence every possible ecological niche is filled. If every animal were to adopt the same strategy (say, eating mangoes to get calories), then the world would run out of mangoes quite quickly, and also out of animals.

In the same way, while the world can certainly support a lot of people living a fairly destructive, 20th-century style Western lifestyle, I'm not so certain that it can support 6 billion of them nondestructively. At the same time, those 6 billion are here, and they want that lifestyle. So the trick is going to be to figure out how to get them the parts that they want (heated houses, drinkable water, Twinkies (tm)), without bringing all the bad parts of that 20th-century lifestyle along for the ride.