"To consider the school as a place where instruction is given is one point of view.
But to consider the school as a preparation for life is another.”
- Maria Montessori
Montessori is focused on teaching for understanding. In a primary classroom, three and four-year-olds receive the benefit of two years of sensorial preparation for academic skills by working with the concrete Montessori learning materials. This concrete sensorial experience gradually allows the child to form a mental picture of concepts like "how big is a thousand, how many hundreds make up a thousand, and what is really going on when we borrow or carry numbers in mathematical operations.
The value of the sensorial experiences that the younger children have had in Montessori are often under-estimated. Research is very clear that this is how the young child learns, by observing and manipulating his environment. The Montessori materials give the child a concrete sensorial impression of an abstract concept, such as long division, that is the potential foundation for a lifetime understanding of the idea in abstraction.
Because Montessori teachers are developmentally trained, they normally know how to present information in an appropriate way.
What often happens in traditional schools is that teachers are not developmentally trained and children are essentially filling in workbook pages with little understanding and do a great deal of rote learning. Superficially, it may appear that they have learned a lot, but the reality is most often that what they have learned was not meaningful to the child. A few months down the road, little of what they "learned" will be retained and it will be rare for them to be able to use their knowledge and skills in new situations. More and more educational researchers are beginning to focus on whether students, whether young or adult, really understand or have simply memorized correct answers.
In a few cases, kindergarten Montessori children may not look as if they are not as advanced as a child in a very academically accelerated program, but what they do know they usually know very well. Their understanding of the decimal system, place value, mathematical operations, and similar information is usually very sound. With reinforcement as they grow older, it becomes internalized and a permanent part of who they are. When they leave Montessori before they have had the time to internalize these early concrete experiences, their early learning often evaporates because it is neither reinforced nor commonly understood.
By the end of age five, Montessori students will often develop academic skills that may be beyond those advanced. Academic progress is not our ultimate goal. Our real hope is that they will feel good about themselves and enjoy learning. Mastering basic skills is a side goal.
Montessori children are generally doing very well academically by the end of kindergarten, although that is not our ultimate objective. The program offers them enriched lessons in math, reading, and language, and if they are ready, they normally develop excellent skills.
The key concept is readiness. If a child is developmentally not ready to go on, he or she is neither left behind nor made to feel like a failure. Our goal is not ensuring that children develop at a predetermined rate, but to ensure that whatever they do, they do well and master. Most Montessori children master a tremendous amount of information and skills, and even in the cases where children may not have made as much progress as we would have wished, they usually have done a good job with their work, wherever they have progressed at any given point, and feel good about themselves as learners.