Childhood is a time to have fun. At Post Oak the children are always working. Don’t Montessori children have fun?”
This is a good, honest question that seeks out the nature of early childhood education, in fact, the very nature of childhood.
This question perfectly expresses a mistake we adults often make in thinking about children. It assumes that childhood is a vacation before adulthood. It assumes that recreation is the purpose of childhood.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Creation, not recreation, is the purpose of childhood. The young child is creating herself from the elements of the environment. The human infant enters the world in a woefully undeveloped state. A newborn horse stands and walks before its first day is done; the human child may take more than a year to accomplish the same mobility. Remember your child when she just started to walk. Think of the concentration, the dedication, the willingness to fall and get up and fall and get up again. A child at this stage will wear out even the most adoring parent. Is this a vacation? No, it is work. Joyful work. The work of becoming.
When it comes to the brain, the tasks are numerous and more complex than walking. We are born with the potential of our genetic inheritance, but little more. Intelligence and identity are created by our experiences in the environment. The human infant learns language. He learns culture. He learns attitude and judgment. He learns behavior.
This is the work of infancy and childhood. How do we motivate a child to want to do this? We don’t need to. The motivation comes from within the child. Do we give formal language instruction to an infant? No, she learns to speak through her own efforts to make sense of the language in her environment. A child in a rich language environment, who is spoken to and listened to has a better opportunity to develop greater skills in the use of language.
I met three children outside one of the primary classrooms last week. They were each working on one of the number chains. The first was counting up to 216, the second up to 729, and the third to 1000. The first child was deep in concentration, counting the beads and placing a ticket at the end of each bead bar. The other two, very familiar with the steps of this work, were lightly chatting as they organized the tickets before starting the actual counting.
I asked, “Is this fun?”
“Yes!” they chimed in chorus.
“What do you like about it?” I pressed.
“Counting,” was the reply.
I suppose they could have been playing dress up instead, but it was clear that in their minds counting the bead chains was not only worthwhile, but fun.
We want to once again thank John Long and the Post Oak School for allowing us to republish John’s wonderful essays in Tomorrow’s Child and in our online resource collections.
