Ask HN: Anyone go through Montessori education until age 12 (end of grade 6)?

Wow, this is terrible advice.

You have to put in the effort yourself to teach them those values (if you can even call them that...) and that life is not all fun and games. That said, Montessori model schools are great for your children, even if they're just "glorified daycares" instead of school. Children need to play, it's how they learn everything, including how to enjoy life. Do not immediately throw them into a life of "discipline, structure and obedience". That's not what life is about.

My son went through Montessori from ages 2 until 11 (finished grade 5). As with any other institution, it depends on the quality of teachers. He had 1 great teacher, one good teach, and 1 not so good teacher during his schooling. There are a couple of key factors which made us choose Montessori:

- mixed aged group classrooms. So in one year of the 3 year cycle, he is the younger child (and receives mentorship from his older buddies), and in year 3 of each cycle, he is the older buddie mentoring younger pupils. Since he has no siblings, this is a benefit to his development.

- Montessori follow the state curriculum, however they allow children to manage their own time. So if he wants to do math all day, he can, and the teacher is there more for project management and giving him assistance than to drive him by a strict 45 minute schedule. At the end of the week, he is supposed to accomplish the assigned work (regardless of which order he wants to do it in). This will help him in the future with his own project management and prioritising work loads (we hope).

- the parents sending their kids to Montessori are not of the Elitist breed. I wont explain what I mean by that here. Its better than Steiner type schools (my personal opinion).

Other than the above, there wasn't anything particular about Montessori compared regular State run schools.

> Montessori teaching is rigid in its own way and not the best for children with dyslexia/dysgraphia (though neither are standard public school curricula)

i didn't mention this in my comment but this point is true in my experience as well. My oldest has both dyslexia and dysgraphia and really struggled with reading the way Montessori teaches it. We had to get outside specialists and basically do a very intense summer school to get him up to speed and things figured out. Once we understood what was happening we were able to get state required accommodations at his Montessori which really helped. He's now at a public middle school magnet and doing pretty well. His reading and writing are, by far, his hardest subjects because he's basically got one hand tied behind his back because of the dyslexia/dysgraphia but the kid knows how to work and he gets through it.

edit: If i may brag, i've seen that kid of mine do things grown adults would run from. That summer school was 4 hrs a day of intense work and an absolute struggle many days ended in tears/frustration but he did it and beat dyslexia down to something he could manage. I've never seen anyone work like he did, when i'm getting lazy and phoning it in I think about him and pick up the pace.

I have very old memories (6? or earlier) for attending for a approximately a year. It might have been Waldorf, it might have been Montessori.

There were several young people who I later transferred in HS back into their district and remembered.

Lots of little learning puzzles and nap time. LOTS Of stories. In fact I would say the curriculum, and this is a long time ago, was primarily fables besides what was self-directed and puzzles. The teachers were mostly kind.

I’m helping to manage a Montessori preschool, so I’m immersed in Montessori at the moment.

There’s a pretty consistent underlying structure to the day, and the kids are taught to eg sit quietly for the class gathering (“circle time”), so I don’t think it’s accurate to say that the kids are taught no discipline. The periods that they’re asked to sit for aren’t very long, it’s preschool. But if you go an observe a class, they’re actually extremely well behaved. During their work cycles, they go and get their work, they sit individually to complete their work for a bit, then they return it to the shelf as they found it. And they’re learning relatively advanced reading, spelling, and math at 4.

One thing to be aware of is that many Montessori schools, especially nowadays, are “Montessori-inspired”, they don’t actually go through the effort (and the hiring requirements) it takes to be accredited by AMS. It’s more expensive to hire actual Montessori teachers, but the difference can be pretty incredible.