In today’s Insta-worthy world, we tend to want to present things as always “perfect”. But in what fantasy land do children, or us adults, never mess up?
The reality is, real perfection includes falling down. And that’s why in Montessori it’s OK for children to make mistakes along the way, like accidentally spilling things.
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About Jesse McCarthy
For over 20 years, Jesse McCarthy has worked with thousands of children, parents, teachers and administrators — as a principal for infants to 8th graders, an executive with a nationwide group of private schools, an elementary & junior-high teacher, and a parent-and-teacher mentor.
Jesse received his B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and his Montessori teacher's diploma for ages 2.5 to 6+ from Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), the organization founded by Dr. Maria Montessori.
Jesse has spoken on education, parenting and child development around the globe, from Midwest America to the Middle East, as well as at popular organizations in and outside of the Montessori community: from AMI/USA and AMI/Canada to old-school Twitter. Jesse now lives with his family in South Florida where he heads MontessoriEducation.com and, alongside his wife (and young son), runs La Casa, The Schoolhouse.
Transcript: Montessori - Things Fall
You ever been walking around the grocery store, or some random shop, and you bump into something — or many somethings — and it goes just crashing to the ground?
That is not fun — usually just plain awkward. And if other people are around, it can be embarrassing. Especially if it’s a big fall or giant spill, like milk going everywhere or something.
Well I was thinking about this related to children, particularly in today’s ONLINE Montessori world — what I’ll call Social-Media Montessori — where there never seems to be any spills, you know. Everything is always so beautiful and orderly. Nobody’s bumping into anything.
Think about this: If people were to go by only what they see in their Instagram feeds, I feel like most normal parents, and teachers without real experience, would think that Montessori children never mess up. They don’t spill things, they don’t drop things. Nothing ever falls in Montessori.
But this is not true, of course. In fact, it’s far from the nature of childhood itself. Growth — healthy development — requires some messiness along the way. And so in real-world Montessori classrooms, things get messy at times. And that’s OK. More than OK actually: it’s to-be-expected.
I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.
So a few weeks back at the Montessori schoolhouse my wife and I have, La Casa, a young girl, she’s three years old, relatively new to the environment, was pouring some beans — hard, uncooked beans — she’s doing it from one little glass pitcher to another.
(Ooh, it started to rain here. Anyways, if you’re unfamiliar with this kind of pouring activity, or you’re wondering why a child this young would be handling glass, I can talk about that another time. What I’m getting at today is something different. So let’s get back to the girl..)
I’m sitting across the room from her, as she’s pouring these little beans. And she is so focused, just so engaged. She just keeps repeating the pouring. Back and forth, again and again. And she’s clearly loving it.
Sometime later — maybe 20 or 30 of these back-and-forth pours later — she’s done. Satisfied look on her face. She stands up, tucks in her chair, and starts to get everything ready to put back on the shelf. (So that you can kind of visualize this, she’s got a tray, and then the two pitchers are on that tray, and one filled with all these beans.)
I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but next moment, I see the pitcher filled with all these beans, probably a hundred of them or so, just fall to the ground. Bam! Super loud. The glass didn’t break, but the other children are now staring over her way — and there are all these beans, everywhere.
The little girl, she has this look on her face, a concerned look, that kinda says, ’Ugh, what do I do??’
Just at that moment, a few of the other children come over and start to help her clean up. A couple of the younger children picked up a few beans by hand, while the oldest child, this 5-year-old boy, got the floor brush and dustpan and is sweeping up the rest.
It was so wonderful.
And all this time, I hadn’t said a word. And my wife, the teacher, she hadn’t said anything either. It was the children themselves who decided to help. (My wife went over afterward, but again the children got moving first, all on their own.)
Now there are many reasons why this kind of help happens among children in Montessori classrooms, and I’m not going to get into them right now. What I want to highlight is that this is NORMAL in Montessori. So the occasional spills and this casual cleaning up.
There’s no shaming for dropping things. No laughing at things falling. There’s just: ‘Oh, that’s a bummer. Let’s clean it up.’ And then back to work.
And this culture of comfort with messing up, is ironically part of what allows for children to NOT mess up so much moving forward.
So practically — with practice — children get better at handling things more carefully, of course. But just as importantly, emotionally, because of this prepared Montessori environment, they don’t have fear around failure, or at least not as much as most children do today.
In fact, one of the most helpful aspects of Montessori is that it’s OK for children to make mistakes along the way, like accidentally spilling things.
In today’s Insta-worthy world though, we tend to want to present things as always “perfect.” But in what fantasy land do children, or us adults, never mess up?
The reality is, real perfection includes falling down. That’s why trial and error is baked into Montessori: when something spills, children clean it up. (And in the classroom they have the child-sized tools to actually clean things up.) Then, with a little help from friends, they go at it again. And again and again until they succeed. And ultimately, succeed BIG.
And these ups and downs in the Montessori classroom, they merely follow the same path of the ups and downs of our real lives. Like success rarely follows a straight line. And when we adults embrace that fact, the sky really is the limit.
As Maria Montessori said it, and in her uniquely scientific and uplifting way: “[I]t is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives… The error becomes impersonal and is then amenable to control. In this way, small things lead to great.”
So what I ultimately want to get across here today, is twofold.
One, real growth requires messiness. ‘Progress is not linear,’ as Maria Montessori also once said it.
And the second point is, we gotta check ourselves around children: are we preparing an environment that allows for this natural trial & error of childhood, or are we anxiously working to avoid any failure, or any falls, or anything that looks like things aren’t proceeding ‘perfectly as planned’?
Let’s just keep it a little more chill with children, and with each other, and ultimately with ourselves. Because, man, the ride is so much more enjoyable — and less stressful — when we’re OK with the occasional bumps along the way.
Ok, that is it, everyone. Thank you for listening. Hopefully it was worthwhile for you.
Shoot me a message if you want to tell me anything on your mind. You can reach me at MontessoriEducation.com, you know I’m Jesse McCarthy. Or you can always comment wherever you’re listening, or watching if you’re on YouTube.
Please just be a little bit patient if I don’t get back to you immediately. Fall, if you’re listening around this time, is the busiest time of the year for me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m pumped up for it! I’ll be all over the place the next two months, I got some talks and workshops coming up. But that means most of my down time is spent with friends and family, especially my lovely, lovely wife Alessandra and son Ragnar. Big shout out to them.
Anyway, please please share this episode with someone else who you think might appreciate it. Again, thanks again for being here with me. I love this stuff, and I’m just so stoked to be doing work where I get to spend so much time with children and the rad parents and teachers like you all out there. Keep rocking, everyone, and adios until next time.