My partner became involved in Montessori a few years ago, and I've been really impressed with how it works. If you don't know much about Montessori, here is my "in a nutshell" version: It's a method of schooling usually associated with preschool and elementary education. There are mixed age groups (e.g. 3 to 6) in classrooms. There is at least one adult who gives one-on-one lessons on how to work with "materials." Th…
Alternate pedagogies (Montessori, Waldorf, etc.) seem to work quite well for early childhood education, but I'm very skeptical of them for middle school, and especially high school (what Montessori defines as "3rd stage"). The reason for this is that extremely few people I've met who went to such high schools came out of them with levels in science/math that could be reasonably qualified as decent (and often borderli…
Hi, nice to know you. Montessori-educated until University here. Even in high school, it's all about the learning material: as long as the teachers were skilled enough to make me interested in the subject, there was hardly any limit to what I could take in. I left school with high marks across the board, with five languages and all STEM subjects except biology (because I hated the learning material with a passion).
That said, my parents encouraged the same at home so it's not just my school: I wrote my first BASIC program with my father when I was nine, and there was a surplus of construction toys (Lego, Mecano, electric science kits) at home as well.
(edit: I'm not familiar with official "Montessori" policy on high schools, but I want to add that our school roster was partly free: we had a number of mandatory class hours for each subject, but were expected to spend more time in school than just our roster: all teachers had "open hours", which you could use to get additional mentoring from the teacher, peers or sometimes senior year students)