walking with great care

Walking with great care, the young child brought the stamp game to the table, gently placed it down, and opened the lid. Smiling shyly at me, she carefully began laying out the first and second addends, in horizontal rows, one under the other, carefully aligning the thousands, hundreds, tens, and units by place value. A scene from any lower elementary classroom in the world. In this case, however, the school was Kiara Karitas, and it was located on the other side of the world from me, in Jakarta, Indonesia. The girl, Hee Youn, was a first-year student in their lower primary classroom. A few years back, the larger Montessori community of educators and parents and administrators and children celebrated the centennial anniversary of the first Montessori school. That milestone spoke to the lasting power of a profound pedagogy; one that has truly stood the test of time, allowing children to learn to their potential, to gain an insight to knowledge that is both integrated and internalized, and to develop loving hearts and inquiring minds. In my role as a school board member for my local district in southern Maine, where math curricula, literacy programs, and science textbooks shift with the vagaries of educational reform, I see firsthand the disadvantages of moving from one Newest Thing to the Next Newest Thing, and the expense and learning curve it requires for teachers and children alike. But what struck me in Jakarta (and Seoul, and Nashville, and Sarasota…) was how the span of Montessori not only reaches back 100 years, but also across the world. What does it say of an educational system, that it can speak so forcefully, with such profound results, to parents and children in schools from New Hampshire to California to Asia, Africa, Europe and beyond? What does it say about the Montessori method, that can unite so many schools in a common model, using the same Montessori materials and same prepared environments? What does it say about this worldwide and historical community of teachers, students, and families, who wear different clothes, write in different languages, give and receive lessons spoken in different tongues, but are united all the same? I wouldn’t have bothered to ask Hee Youn. She was too busy, and wouldn’t have cared. And frankly, my Bahasa is lousy.