Contact Montessori Organizations

I was able to keep my children in Montessori schools for several years and was grateful for every moment. The teaching focused tightly on how children learn and on each child's response to the Montessori method. I loved that my children were taught to think for themselves through learning that taught them how to think rather than what to think.

That's why I was truly horrified to learn that Association Montessori International/USA (AMI/USA) published an article that wasn't just highly political but was also extremely uninformed. Native Americans were not plaster saints. They were human beings who engaged in both good and bad behavior. Their bad behavior was something akin to the primitiveness that Europeans were already in the process of shaking off, but that was still part of their mindset. All of them, Native Americans and Europeans alike, were brutal, violent, and wedded to torture. To pretend otherwise is ignorant and offensive to Europeans and Native Americans alike.

​

I expect better from Montessori, especially because Maria Montessori was so clear about keeping politics away from children. As she wrote, “Not in the service of any political or social creed should the teacher work, but in the service of the complete human being, able to exercise in freedom, a self-disciplined will and judgment, unperverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear.”

Your institution should apologize for the words it wrote and promise never to do so again. Otherwise, you've betrayed Maria Montessori and her extraordinary accomplishments at the most profound level. More importantly, by making politicized statements a part of the American Montessori ethos, you've betrayed the children.

Andrea Widburg