Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who also wrote frequently and eloquently about education. He was a contemporary of Maria Montessori (though I’ve yet to find any record of them actually meeting) and it’s instructive to examine how their thoughts on pedagogy overlap. Whitehead saw the learning process as having three components, which he labeled romance, precision, and generalization. In the romance stage, the child is first presented with a new concept and enjoys the emotion of discovery. According to Whitehead, the child is “becoming used to curious thoughts, of shaping questions, of seeking for answers, of devising new experiences, and of noticing what happens as the result of new ventures.” Picture a child’s first experience at a beach strewn with shells of various shapes, sizes, texture, and color. They are given to the visceral excitement of the moment as they explore the myriad of what is before them. If this energy is acknowledged and supported, Whitehead asserts that a second desire will arise, one that craves deeper, more precise information, to answer the very questions that the stage of romance engendered. The child, home from the beach, gets out shell identification books and the “S” encyclopedia (Googles it?) and excitedly learns the types, biology, and nomenclature of shellfish. Whitehead made a point of noting that traditional education puts an emphasis just on this second stage of precision; the facts, the specifics, the right and wrong. But without the more general, the broader view that comes from the romance stage, he argued, the facts are barren and nebulous, unattached to any larger context, and quickly forgotten. The third stage of the learning process, is that of generalization and synthesis. It is a stage that leads the child further, allowing the integration of this new-found information into creative ideation and a cogent “whole”. It also, quite elegantly, leads the child back to the first stage of romance, of discovery, but with the addition of this gained wealth of knowledge. Subsequent excursions to the beach equal the excited discovery of the first trip, but the experience is now imbued with a greater sense of wisdom, as the specific is now seamlessly integrated with the whole.