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

I went from preschool to second grade, and I thought it was OK. My teacher in first and second grade was really mean to me which caused me to beg my mom to let me go to public school as I was not willing to go back for a third year of that lady.

Overall I felt it was very restrictive on my education. My day consisted of a few required activities (copy down a few sentences by hand, do 5 addition problems, etc.) followed by doing whatever I wanted. My favorite one was putting together a cube out of these colored blocks, but there’s only so many times you can put that together. The rest of the day was basically spent in boredom as I’d exhausted all the activities that interested me. I spent a fair amount of time reading.

The restrictive part however was the complete lack of preparation on the part of the teachers to teach anything. I remember after doing addition for a while, I asked my teacher to teach me how to multiply. She said “no, that’s for third graders” and left. I basically pieced together that “two times three” meant 2+2+2 just from the way it sounded in English. What a way to shut down a child’s education.

I’m sure I had an abnormally bad experience, and my sample size isn’t enough to discredit the Montessori methodology as a whole. However, I was much happier and felt I learned a lot more from public school. My conclusion is thus that the quality of teachers is vastly more important than the methodology. If you have well-funded public schools in your area, I would definitely suggest them over a poorer private Montessori school.

I did my last year of high school in a public US high school.

I took some AP classes and some regular classes. The AP classes were probably better or at least on par with my private school Mexican high school.

The regular classes were a grim perspective into the US education system.

It felt mostly like a daycare for young adults. The way they treated us was closer to how you treat infants than 17 year olds. There was little to no hope for learning from the teachers, and no expectation from the students. Cheating was rampant.

When I told my English teacher I had been admitted to UT Austin, his reaction was "no you weren't".

The US takes good care of university bound students, but does a pretend job for for those that are not on that track.

Seconded. My kids have been in Waldorf for a couple years. I plan on keeping them in Waldorf and when they’re older maybe supplementing with extracurricular math (like Russian school of math) since Waldorf excels more in creativity, imagination, and mindfulness but weaker in STEM (but still present). But that seems like the right priority for elementary aged children.

When my oldest went to the local middle school, there were 4 classes from one elementary and 3 each from 2 more making 250 or so kids. It seemed like there would be advanced English, regular English, and remedial English. Maybe 15-20% on each side and 60% or so in the middle.

Absolutely not, because being put in the remedial class was "tracking" so there could be no separating kids by ability. My daughter was sent to the library about every other day because she got her work done the first day and it was supposed to take two or three.

I am sympathetic to the idea that when a student is a little behind at one point doesn't mean that they always will be. Maybe things are going on at home, maybe they don't have a home, etc.

But our local school system insists on treating them all the same, regardless of their abilities.

My advice to my kids was to take any AP class that you could. It would be harder but you'd be in a class where the other students wanted to learn and almost always the teacher wanted to teach.

I attended Montessori from 3rd-6th grade and then went to a 2-year transition program called "Project Based Learning" before returning to traditional schooling for 9th-12th grades. I loved Montessori and it helped shape me into the person I am today.

However, transitioning back to traditional schooling was extremely painful, and sadly it never got easier. I hated the rest of my school experience, from 9th grade until basically the end of college.

In Montessori, when it was time to learn a new subject, I'd have a brief, one-on-one conversation with the teacher to get oriented, and then after 10-20 minutes, they'd set me loose to apply the ideas on my own until I mastered the material.

Compared to that freedom, ordinary classrooms were miserable. Trapped, listening to lectures for 45+ minutes at a time before I was able to get my hands dirty and try anything out. And if I caught on early in a lecture, that made things even worse! Now I had to sit there for a half hour and listen to a teacher explain something I already understood—to no one's benefit. I'm getting worked up just thinking of it. Suffice it to say that moving at the pace of the slowest person in the class was torture for my ADHD brain. Montessori spoiled me and I never really reacclimatized.

I don't have any advice except that for some people (like me) Montessori works extremely well, and for many others, it doesn't work well at all. But if it works well, then transitioning back to regular schooling can be tough.