What Should We Teach Our Children?

by Maren Stark Schmidt | Early Adolescence (12-15), Infant-Toddler (0 to 3), Later Adolescence (15-18), Lower Elementary (6-9), MFA, Montessori Education, Montessori Family Life, Uncategorized

What should we teach our children? Research shows that 80 percent of the facts we learn for tests are forgotten in a month. We remember best that information with which we have an emotional connection. It’s a lot easier to remember your birthday than the year of the Battle of Hastings (1066, in case you’re wondering).

If we don’t emphasize memorizing facts in our teaching, what should we teach?

First, let me say that facts are important. Having a base of knowledge gives us some tools with which to think and do things. Actually, I’ve told students, we don’t have to learn our math facts. We could carry around a chart with the facts or carry a calculator. But if we don’t have our chart or calculator with us at a critical time, what do we do? If not knowing is painful, and knowing helps us, we discover that memorizing key bits of information makes us more efficient in our thinking and doing. Having certain information and skills at our fingertips makes doing more fun.

Teaching and learning are two entirely different activities. Remember, we are rearing adults, not children. Traditionally, what we teach in most schools too often depends on what we want our students to know, instead of what they need to know. That raises the big question: what do our children need to learn to become fully functioning adults? Helping our children possess certain qualities might serve our job best, certain qualities, such as having the ability to make good decisions; loving to learn; dealing with change; questioning; making choices; learning to be good at doing things, and much more. With these qualities, learning becomes like breathing – something we don’t even have to think about.

In this article I’ll address some of these qualities our children should learn and how we might teach them. We’ll start with learning to make good decisions.

Learning to Make Good Decisions

Learning to make good decisions is acquired by making poor decisions and figuring out, on our own, how to turn it around. We learn far more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. When confronted with a problem that we have to figure out over the course of a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or a few months, we gain not only knowledge but wisdom.

By allowing our children to get clear and accurate information—which may be learning the hard way that the stove is hot—about their interactions with their environment of people, tools, nature, and ideas, we start them on the path of learning to decide independently how they will act.

By allowing our children to get clear and accurate information—which may be learning the hard way that the stove is hot—about their interactions with their environment of people, tools, nature, and ideas, we start them on the path of learning to decide independently how they will act.

With our young children we’ve removed many feedback loops for learning and, thus, to making decisions, good or bad. Preschool administrators comment on the growing number of three-year-olds who aren’t toilet trained. Comfortable diapers remove feedback to the child about their actions or lack of action. Plastic tip-proof covered cups prevent spills along with preventing feedback on the fine-motor control necessary to drink from a glass. A diet of finger foods prevents learning how to use a fork, knife, and spoon – perhaps for a lifetime.

Within the limits of safety, learning to make good choices begins with clear and accurate information about personal interactions within one’s environment.

Learning to make good decisions is based on having good information. Our Montessori classrooms are designed to give children clear, accurate and timely information. Wise decision making is at risk without this important information, as well as confidence to explore new activities.

Learning to Love to Learn

Trying to keep our children frustration-free by controlling the consequences of movement prevents our children from getting necessary and accurate feedback for optimal learning. When we can prepare a child’s indoor and outdoor spaces with a variety of activities that match skill and will, we also create a place where a child is eager to try new pursuits, as well as repeat familiar activities in order to absorb the skill.

For example, we don’t hand a three-year-old a copy of Tom Sawyer and expect him to read it. Yes, we want the child at some point, perhaps by age ten, to have the skills to read at that level. Spoken language is a key to being a successful reader. We keep language in the air by reading aloud everyday. We involve our children in conversation, as well as limit or eliminate television and video game time.

With the goal of literacy, we teach our three-year-old the sounds of the alphabet and later introduce the shapes of the letters with their corresponding sounds, one by one. Next, we show how to spell a word by sounding it out and writing the word with loose letters organized in a box. In isolation from a book, we introduce short words on cards, such as cat. Next we introduce cards with two words at time, big cat, followed over the course of weeks by three-word exercises, such, as big yellow cat, then on to sentences: The big yellow cat ran. These exercises are placed in baskets and left on a shelf in order that the child can choose to repeat when he so desires.

Slowly, the eye and the mind are trained to start at the left-hand side and move to the right in order to decode the symbols. Instead of asking the child to read out loud, we ask him to act out a collection of sentences written on paper strips and placed in a basket, an activity he can do anytime, independently, without adult interaction. When we see that he is acting out the sentences accurately, the child is introduced to longer sentences or two sentences on a page: The big yellow cat ran after the brown-spotted dog.

As the child becomes more familiar with the words, he begins to memorize that certain combinations make certain words and doesn’t need to decode each sound for each word. Reading becomes faster and more fluid.

As each stage of learning to read is met with a favorable outcome, the child experiences a success cycle, where learning creates a desire for more learning.

All these steps describe an indirect preparation for learning to read a book like Tom Sawyer. If we want to help a child love to learn, we prepare him indirectly for the next step of accomplishment in such a way as to assure success. We then allow the child to take the step independently.

By creating a place where a child can choose activities that create the next step in a continuum of learning through indirect preparation, we help a child love to learn. By making the tasks neither too easy nor too hard – by creating a Goldilocks’ spot of “just the right” task – we provide the nourishment for a lifetime of loving to learn.

Begin with the end in mind. Start giving lessons where the child is at the edge of his skill level by giving an adequate challenge, and prepare for the next step as the young child repeats various activities to gain competency. Using indirect preparation is a key teaching skill to help children love to learn. It makes learning, as Goldilocks would say, “Just right!”

As our children love the challenge of new learning, we will also be indirectly preparing them to learn to deal with change.

Learning to Deal with Change

Learning to deal with change has become one of the critical life skills of our times. The amount of new information that we can access through the Internet grows in such a geometrical progression that it staggers the mind. In 2010, Eric Schmidt (no relation), then CEO of Google™, commented that every two days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. “I spend most of my time assuming the world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them soon,” Schmidt said.

We are awash in a world full of user- generated instant messages, tweets, pictures, videos, and more. Our interactions with our environment, that consists of people, objects, nature, and ideas, seem to be dominated by electronic objects and the ideas that flow through them. People and nature appear to take a back seat to oh-so-many electronic interactions.

We deal best with change when we feel safe and know that we possess a skill set that will help us navigate uncharted waters. Interestingly, the skills that might serve us best in dealing with change are best learned from people and nature: Being aware of change. Facing feelings. Knowing when to accept or reject change. Having an attitude of anticipation. Knowing that you can choose to act, not react. Learning to relax. Setting smart goals. Having a support system.

Without learning how to deal with change and making conscious choices of how to act, feelings of helplessness, as well as feeling trapped and victimized, occur in times of uncontrollable change.

Nature helps us show our children the nature of change. Day and night. The phases of the moon. Weather. Seasons. Seeds. Growing. Dying. Wind. Weather. Caterpillars. Tadpoles. Being aware of the changes that are occurring all around us everyday and seeing the patterns of change helps us learn to put our lives in perspective. A rock filled with stromatolites sits on our bookcase, a reminder to put everything in perspective. Geologists believe the stromatolites to be the oldest living thing captured in the fossil record, living 3.5 billion to 1 billion years ago. Change happens, and this too shall pass.

Learning to be aware of our feelings and having a vocabulary to name those feelings is important with dealing with change. Feelings are our natural signs that our needs are, or are not, being met. Being in touch with our physical, emotional reactions helps us meet our needs and deal with change.

Learning to be aware of our feelings and having a vocabulary to name those feelings is important with dealing with change. Feelings are our natural signs that our needs are, or are not, being met. Being in touch with our physical, emotional reactions helps us meet our needs and deal with change.

Some change is good. Some is bad. Change for change’s sake is not always what we should accept. Knowing the nature and patterns of change, along with our underlying emotions and needs, helps us discern if we should welcome the change or choose something else.

Learning to relax will help us avoid fighting change when perhaps struggling with change is not the wisest option. Being in nature, exercising, and learning to breathe, again, are all things we learn from other people.

Anticipating change can be fun. It can feel like Christmas. A birthday party. A vacation. Our attitude makes a difference. We always have a choice of how we will act or not act in the face of change. Attitude and choice are abilities we learn from the people around us.

Young children, as all of us did, need knowledgeable adults to guide them to learn the essential skills to deal with a lifetime of change and growth. We need to provide our children a safe place to experiment and make mistakes in order to learn to make good decisions. Our children need adult guidance to point out interpersonal skills of communication and intrapersonal skills of how to read emotions and how to make informed choices.

Learning to deal with change is about learning to see the world change around you and having skills that will allow you to go boldly where no one has gone before. That’s life. We should be helping our children prepare for it.

Learning to Question

Information is an avalanche, if every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. To be able to dig ourselves out of this morass of words and images, in order to find our way and to live our lives, learning to ask questions becomes an essential skill.

First we have to ask big questions such as, “What is truly important to know?” These answers will be as varied as there are people on this planet. All of the answers will be right for each and every person asking the questions and hunting for the answers. Maybe not the right answer for me. Maybe not for you. What is vital is asking the questions. And continuing to question. It is possible to build a life based on erroneous information, so we need to keep on questioning.

Daniel Pink in his book, DRiVE: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, suggests that to help us find our purpose in life, we need to ask a big question: What’s my sentence?

Pink makes the point that our lives can be summed up in a sentence: He was a wonderful father who gave his children wings; She helped people regain their health; He helped everyone he met see his or her potential.

Once we know our sentence—for our life at this very moment—then we know what is important to know. Our questions become a search for vital and true information upon which we will build our lives.

Pink explains three qualities that are necessary for us to tap into our potential as individuals. We need to have autonomy. We need to have a sense of purpose. We need to have a level of mastery of essential skills related to our purpose.

Autonomy means we have a choice of the activity in which we engage. The choice is based on internal motivation and not extrinsic rewards or punishments. When we can be curious and self-directed in the way we use our time, we create more powerful results than those obtained through stick-and-carrot methods. In short, autonomy means we have the freedom to question, to find those answers in our own way and in our own time.

The by-product of asking the big questions and knowing our sentence is that we have a sense of purpose that guides our actions and provides a backdrop where we can consider plans and decisions. Understanding our purpose creates a personal value system. As we make our independent choices for activities central to our purpose, we start on a lifetime path of mastery.

To keep us on-track, Pink offers a little question: Was I better today than yesterday?

Learning to question begins with asking the big questions to understand our purpose in life, to understand our sentence. For once we understand our purpose, we focus on developing essential skills and core knowledge that relates to our big questions. Asking everyday if we have improved acts as a directional trim tab for reaching our objectives. Asking helps us maintain altitude and attitude.

To help children learn to question, we have to allow them the freedom and time to ask and answer the big questions in their unique way. We have to allow children to have important choices in their learning and living activities. We have to give them the gift of deep time – time with people, time with tools, time with nature, time with ideas – to explore, make connections and develop mastery of essential skills and knowledge.

Most importantly, and the most difficult – we have to give ourselves as adult models of fearless questioning.

Learning to Make Choices

Our children’s world is changing at a pace that is difficult to comprehend. The jobs that are here today probably won’t exist in ten, much less twenty, years. We need to teach and help our children learn a skill set that will enable them to navigate the fast-moving changes they will inevitably encounter during their lives.

A situation we are seeing with twenty-somethings has been named “a failure to launch.” The shift in our economy’s infrastructure has limited the number of job opportunities for those entering or trying to re-enter the work force. For many, it feels safer to play video games in their parents’ basements than to make a conscious effort to create a different opportunity for their futures.

In my observations, people who have had the opportunity since early childhood to make important choices in their daily routines seem to have the resourcefulness to choose to do something different. Yes, the world is not what they were told it would be, but the young adults who are comfortable with making choices have the ability to respond to new circumstances. Their years of practice with making choices is a habit. Learning to make choices and living with the consequences of those choices also creates a sense of commitment within an individual. Those young adults without years of practice lack the creativity to see things differently and are paralyzed by their inability to see or make a choice to step out of the expected.

How do we help our children to learn to make choices? We can start with the one-year-old by laying out two sets of clothes and asking, “Which outfit would you like to wear now?” For our two- or three-year-old, who has dressed himself with a plaid shirt, striped pants, argyle socks, and a polka-dotted stocking cap, we acknowledge and appreciate his efforts by saying, “I see you got dressed all by yourself.” On shopping trips we can ask, “Which would you prefer this week for dinner: broccoli or green beans?” At bedtime, perhaps we offer simple choices such as, “Would you like to brush your teeth before or after your bath?”

Whenever we can let our children make a choice, we do. We need to bring a deep respect for the child’s work in learning how to learn to live, day-by-day, choice-by-choice. With years of experience, our thirteen-year-old will choose the right friends; our seventeen-year-old will confidently choose a college; our college-graduate will build a career.

We also need to understand that sometimes, for the novice, choice is about satisfying curiosity. We can’t truly choose what we don’t know. How can we choose between cherry or coconut pie unless we know how each one tastes?

To help our children know, we need to offer our children bits of knowledge and experience in order for them to make choices they can live with. Using the correct name for objects is one help. It’s not a thinga-ma-jiggy. It’s a phillips head screwdriver. We offer tastes and smells of new foods. This is a bell pepper. This is a carrot. This is cinnamon. This is ginger. The names and the experience with items that have sensorial qualities of texture, sound, movement, shape, and much more can be introduced to our children three or four items at a time. We can give short demonstrations on how to do tasks, such as how to turn a page, to carry a breakable item, or to wash a glass.

Being able to choose confidently requires that we have the experience and knowledge to not only know how to choose, but to know what we are choosing. We help children learn to make choices by respecting their need to learn to make choices and live with those choices. Being confident in their ability to choose well allows our children to live their lives creatively, to develop self-discipline, and to work cooperatively with others, because they respect others’ right to choose.

Remember, the child is always asking us to “help me help myself.” if we will only stop to listen. Allowing choice is a good place to begin our help.

Learning to Be Good At Doing Things

Recently I read an article by a father of a three-year-old boy discussing his son’s prowess in the kitchen, and what a surprising amount of tasks his son could accomplish: washing vegetables, stemming mushrooms, cracking eggs, and kneading dough. The dad observed, “I’m not pushing him. He’s pushing himself.”

Our “under-seven’s” are in a developmental stage where they are absorbing information and skills from the people, objects, ideas, and tools in their environments. Now that we know about mirror-neurons, it’s perhaps easier to understand that children learn by watching people perform tasks. If we give our children the tools and time to duplicate that task, they learn to do it quite well. A child with an interesting job to do will do it again, and again, and again. Repeti-tion is a learning characteristic of this age child.

Our “over-seven’s” get bored at doing the same task over and over, day after day, but not the younger child. They love the familiarity of family and are learning foundational skills for later learning. The young child’s inner- teacher directs the child to copy tasks he sees others in his environment doing. The will to do is very strong, and the will develops the skill. The will needs to be nourished by giving the child appropriate tools, time, and a safe place in which to repeat and repeat an activity. That’s one way a child learns to be good at doing things.

Another way is by being presented incremental challenges that enlarge a child’s scope of activity. Once a child can crack an egg successfully, perhaps the new step would be to introduce a hand whisk or fork and show how to stir the eggs for scrambled eggs. Or perhaps show the child how to peel a boiled egg and slice it. The key is the adult watching to know when the next challenge needs to be introduced, making sure the challenge is not too hard or not too easy.

In the case of the egg, we can add more tasks until the child can cook scrambled eggs independently, put them on a plate with sliced fruit and a piece of toast. I’ve known many five- and six-year-olds that could prepare this type of simple meal for their entire family. And clean up afterwards! It all began with their interest in kitchen activities at age two or three.

The way we help our children learn to be good at doing things is by showing them and allowing them to do many activities, adding challenges along the way. It may seem simplistic, but our children learn by watching and then doing. Too many children, rich or poor, live their lives in homes and schools that offer little in the way of rich, interesting, and life-affirming activities with the time and tools necessary to perfect a skill.

In our Montessori schools and homes, we offer our young children opportunities to develop practical living skills from learning how to care for themselves, others, the indoors, and outdoors, as well as learning how to interact with others. From washing hands to washing windows, our young children want to learn how to do things well. As the dad said, “I’m not pushing him. He’s pushing himself.” Let’s make sure our children have a place to push themselves.

The Big Question Remains

As adults helping children learn to help themselves, the big question remains: what do our children need to learn to become fully functioning adults? Our focus needs to be on helping our children possess certain qualities such as having the ability to make good decisions; loving to learn; dealing with change; questioning; making choices; learning to be good at doing things; and much more.

Our Montessori communities provide a place where we can continue to ask this question and find the optimum ways to help our children help themselves—for all their lives.

Tomorrow’s Child/sept 2012/p11