Montessori Madness! A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education by Eissler Trevor

Author:Eissler, Trevor [Eissler, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sevenoff, LLC
Published: 2011-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Competition

Without the counterbalance of a nurturing home or community environment, traditional schools can crush a child’s internal reward system. Then, surprised by dependent, listless, and bored kids, the schools turn around and attempt to devise techniques to re-motivate children. One of the easiest techniques is to ratchet up competition. In an evolutionary sense, competition was necessary for survival. When resources were scarce, it could be lifesaving to possess the drive to hoard more resources than others. Survival-of-the-fittest may have worked for us in desperate situations in the past. When there were two cavemen, and a single leg of mutton between them in the dead of winter, competition could decide which one lived another day. There are certain times, on the brink of survival, where one must outcompete another, or both will die.

However, humans have developed an even more powerful parallel drive: teamwork. We have an unmistakable urge to build up our family and community in order to make the group more successful. Thus, when bad times come along we have in place an even greater safety net than we would with our own powers alone. We compete to make our group stronger in an absolute sense, not relative to another group. This drive has developed in us as we’ve come to realize the surprising result that a heck of a lot more can be accomplished when people work together. Through teamwork, humans have overcome many of the ills and threats that exist in the world. We have eliminated the need to compete over crumbs. Instead we made the pie bigger.

In the modern world the one-leg-of-mutton mentality of competition is unhealthy to our society when instead of trying to increase abundance through teamwork, we take abundance from someone else. Worse yet, we sometimes take from others even when it has no tangible benefit for ourselves. We fight for relative abundance instead of absolute abundance. Those of us who tear others down have not been transformed by the power of teamwork. Working for the good of the team or of the community is not a new concept. It is the familiar advice we have handed down for thousands of years, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

In our children’s lives, the scarce resources of toys, the love of a parent, or rewards and prizes for grades can trigger unhealthy competition. When the environment is designed such that everyone has the same goal and is competing for the same reward, envy is a potential parasite lesson. Before our family came up with a rotation plan, I saw this every morning when my three kids fought over who sat in the middle car seat! There’s only one middle seat, so it was a zero-sum game. When one had the seat, the others didn’t. One was victorious and the others stewed and sulked. As they grow older, I don’t want my kids to learn the lesson that in order to have, others must have not. I don’t want them to start

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