The Montessori Education System and the Desire to Learn

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire talks about what he calls the banking system of education. In the banking system the student is seen as an object in which the teacher must place information. The student has no responsibility for cognition of any sort; the student must simply memorize or internalize what the teacher tells him or her. Paulo Freire was very much opposed to the banking system. He argued that the banking system is a system of control and not a system meant to successfully educate. In the banking system the teacher is meant to mold and change the behavior of the students, sometimes in a way that almost resembles a fight. The teacher tries to force information down the student’s throat that the student may not believe or care about.This process eventually leads most students to dislike school. It also leads them to develop a resistance and a negative attitude towards learning in general, to the point where most people won’t seek knowledge unless it is required for a grade in a class. Freire thought that the only way to have a real education, in which the students engage in cognition, was to change from the banking system into what he defined as problem-posing education. Freire described how a problem-posing educational system could work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by saying, “Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Because they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other problems within a total context not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly critical and thus constantly less alienated”(81). The educational system developed by the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori presents a tested and effective form of problem-posing education that leads its students to increase their desire to learn as opposed to inhibiting it.Freire presents two major problems with the banking concept. The first one is that in the banking concept a student is not required to be cognitively active. The student is meant to simply memorize and repeat information, not to understand it. This inhibits the students’ creativity, destroys their interest in the subject, and transforms them into passive learners who don’t understand or believe what they are being taught but accept and repeat it because they have no other option. The second and more dramatic consequence of the banking concept is that it gives an enormous power to those who choose what is being taught to oppress those who are obliged to learn it and accept it. Freire explains that the problems lies in that the teacher holds all the keys, has all the answers and does all the thinking. The Montessori approach to education does the exact opposite. It makes students do all the thinking and problem solving so that they arrive at their own conclusions. The teachers simply help guide the student, but they do not tell the student what is true or false or how a problem can be solved.In the Montessori system, even if a student finds a way to solve a problem that is slower or less effective than a standard mechanical way of solving the problem, the teacher will not intervene with the student’s process because this way the student learns to find solutions by himself or herself and to think of creative ways to work on different problems.The educational system in the United States, especially from grade school to the end of high school, is almost identical to the banking approach to education that Freire described. During high school most of what students do is sit in a class and take notes. They are then graded on how well they complete homework and projects and finally they are tested to show that they can reproduce or use the knowledge which was taught. Most of the time the students are only receptors of information and they take no part in the creation of knowledge. Another way in which the U.S. education system is practically identical to the banking system of education is the grading system. The grades of students mostly reflect how much they comply with the teacher’s ideas and how much they are willing to follow directions. Grades reflect submission to authority and the willingness to do what is told more than they reflect one’s intelligence, interest in the class, or understanding of the material that is being taught. For instance, in a government class in the United States a student who does not agree that a representative democracy is superior to any other form of government will do worse than a student who simply accepts that a representative democracy is better than a direct democracy, socialism, communism, or another form of social system. The U.S. education system rewards those who agree with what is being taught and punishes those who do not.Furthermore, it discourages students from questioning and doing any thinking of their own. Because of the repetitive and insipid nature of our education system, most students dislike high school, and if they do well on their work, it is merely for the purpose of obtaining a grade as opposed to learning or exploring a new idea.The Montessori Method advocates child based teaching, letting the students take control of their own education. In E.M Standing’s The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing says that the Montessori Method “is a method based on the principle of freedom in a prepared environment”(5). Studies done on two groups of students of the ages of 6 and 12 comparing those who learn in a Montessori to those who learn in a standard school environment show that despite the Montessori system having no grading system and no obligatory work load, it does as well as the standard system in both English and social sciences; but Montessori students do much better in mathematics, sciences, and problem solving. The Montessori system allows for students to be able to explore their interests and curiosity freely. Because of this the Montessori system pushes students toward the active pursuit of knowledge for pleasure, meaning that students will want to learn and will find out about things that interest them simply because it is fun to do so.
Maria Montessori started to develop what is now known as the Montessori Method of education in the early twentieth century.The Montessori Method focuses on the relations between the child, the adult, and the environment. The child is seen as an individual in development. The Montessori system has an implied notion of letting the child be what the child would naturally be. Montessori believed the standard education system causes children to lose many childish traits, some of which are considered to be virtues. In Loeffler’s Montessori in Contemporary American Culture, Loeffler states that “among the traits that disappear are not only untidiness, disobedience, sloth, greed, egoism, quarrelsomeness, and instability, but also the so-called ‘creative imagination’, delight in stories, attachment to individuals, play, submissiveness and so forth”. Because of this perceived loss of the child, the Montessori system works to enable a child to naturally develop self-confidence as well as the ability and willingness to actively seek knowledge and find unique solutions to problems by thinking creatively. Another important difference in how children learn in the Montessori system is that in the Montessori system a child has no defined time slot in which to perform a task. Instead the child is allowed to perform a task for as long as he wants. This leads children to have a better capacity to concentrate and focus on a single task for an extended period of time than children have in the standard education system.The role which the adult or teacher has in the Montessori system marks another fundamental difference between the Montessori s Method and the standard education system. With the Montessori Method the adult is not meant to constantly teach and order the student. The adult’s job is to guide the child so that the child will continue to pursue his curiosities and develop his or her own notions of what is real, right, and true. Montessori describes the child as an individual in intense, constant change. From observation Montessori concluded that if allowed to develop by himself, a child would always find equilibrium with his environment, meaning he would learn not to mistreat others, for example, and to interact positively with his peers. This is important because it leads to one of the Montessori Method’s most deep-seated ideas, which is that adults should not let their presence be felt by the children. This means that although an adult is in the environment with the students, the adult does not necessarily interact with the students unless the students ask the adult a question or request help. Furthermore, the adult must make it so that the students do not feel like they are being observed or judged in any way. The adult can make suggestions to the children, but never orders them or tells them what to do or how to do it. The adult must not be felt as an authority figure, but rather almost as another peer of the children.The consequence of this, not surprisingly, is that a lot less ‘work’ gets done by the students. Nevertheless, the students’ development is dramatically better in the Montessori system than in a standard education system. But how can students who have no obligation to do any work possibly compete with students who are taught in the standard system and do much more work in class and at home? I believe the answer lies in that while students taught in the standard way are constantly being pushed towards disliking school and doing things mechanically without really thinking about it, Montessori students are led to actively explore their interests and enjoy doing so. Furthermore, Montessori students are constantly engaged in cognition. They are continuously learning to think in different ways and creating solutions to problems from scratch, as opposed to students in the standard method of education who only solve problems with the tools or information that the teacher gives them to use.The final important aspect of the Montessori Method is the environment in which the student learns and explores. As mentioned before, it is of utmost importance that the children feel like they are safe and free to do what they want for as long as they want. It is also important for the children to have a variety of didactic material to play and learn with. These can be as simple as cards with different letters which the students use to make different words with. In this way the student can get the idea of the letter being a physical object which can be moved and manipulated to formulate words as opposed to simply an abstract concept which he must write repeatedly on a piece of paper. Montessori describes a copious amount of didactic materials that she used. She also describes how effective they were at helping the children grasp concepts such as the formation of sentences, square roots, and division. The didactic materials do not just help the students grasp the concept of different abstractions from reality, they also make learning a game and this makes students develop a natural joy for learning and thinking about abstract concepts. In The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing talks about a young girl who was learning to read and played a game in which she attempted to read words from cards containing different words marked with different levels of difficulty. Standing states about the girl, “She was fairly rushing at this intellectual food. But even in Set 2 most of the words seemed beyond her. At last she had made out one, M – A – N, MAN. How delighted she was! With what joy did she place the card triumphantly under the picture of the man!”(173). This aspect of the Montessori method, in which children are left to play different learning games at their will, creates a hunger and excitement for learning.Especially at a young age, it is much easier and enjoyable for children to learn with didactic materials instead of simply sitting in a classroom and taking notes when the children are wishing they were somewhere else or doing something else the entire time they are meant to be learning. With the use of didactic materials and by allowing students to use them or not use them whenever they want to, the Montessori system gives the students the freedom to learn what they want to when they want to. This is especially important when we think about how the standard method of education, like the banking system, forces students to ‘learn’ even when the students don’t want the information being shoved down their throats, and this leads to a form of artificial learning where students memorize information or to a mechanical process where students do not internalize the information and forget it as soon as they are not being graded on it.Montessori criticized the standard method of education greatly. In addition to seeing it as inefficient and outdated, Montessori, like Freire, believed that it was oppressive to the students. In her book The Montessori Method, Montessori writes, “The principle of slavery still pervades pedagogy, and therefore, the same principle pervades the school”(16). Montessori then goes on to describe a simple example which illustrates her point. She talks about how chairs are especially designed for classrooms. These classroom chairs, Montessori posits, are made to restrict as much movement as possible, force the children to look forward towards the teacher, and make them as visible as possible to the teacher so the children always feel like they are being watched and must behave properly.Montessori views the standard method of education as an antagonistic model in which the teacher is basically fighting the student, constantly trying to control him and repress his childish behavior while attempting to force feed him knowledge that the student does not want. Despite the many studies which have shown that the Montessori Method is more effective and humane than the standard method, and even though more than 100 years have passed since it was introduced to the United States, very little has changed in the way children are educated here.In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire says that education is used as a tool to manipulate and control masses. He proposes that the banking system of education exists and persists not because of its effectiveness at getting students to learn, but rather its effectiveness at indoctrinating children into believing something that the people who control the schools want them to believe. This leads to an important question. What is more important for the United States: that children grow up being able to think for themselves, or that they grow up believing what others deem correct? Here, especially in public high schools, there is a strong emphasis on nationalism and many ideas are taught as inherently inferior to others. For example, it is not only taught in schools that capitalism is better and more humane than, for instance, socialism and communism, but rather students are also taught to fear these concepts and to fear the very idea of questioning or thinking about social structures other than capitalism and economic models other than the free market. Furthermore, teachers often promote the false portrayal of the United States as the hero and police of the entire world. The U.S. education system is not meant to liberate students and inspire them to seek knowledge, but rather it is meant to keep them in line and is used as a tool to shape a kind of person who thinks only as far as is socially acceptable. How much our education system is manipulated by the interests of the people who control it is questionable. However, it is clear that whether or not our education system is being used to control the masses, it lends itself well to do so and can be used to sway people’s opinion and repress ideas that might go against the establishment.Our current education system is closer to the banking system than to something like the Montessori Method in which the development of the child is put first and children are presented with a form of problem-posing education. It is likely difficult to change to a way of teaching that allows students to learn for themselves and be inspired to actively seek knowledge. A good place to start would be to use didactic materials to the extent that is possible and to present students with differing sides of arguments in a judgment-free manner. Another important point is that creative thought should always be encouraged and dissenting ideas should be welcome and debated thoroughly. By making the transition to an education system that is problem-posing, students would be encouraged to think critically and create different, unique and inventive ways to solve problems. This change would lead to enormous growth in innovation and scientific development, as well as giving students a more humane and interactive way of learning.

Starting a Franchise? Looking For Business Money To Finance A Franchise?

The priority of securing business money when you have selected and are starting a franchise becomes even more important as you focus on getting the business started and up and running.Let’s discuss some of the sources of capital in the Canadian franchise environment, and we’ll share some tips and strategies that have helped many other clients looking for Canadian business financing in the franchise environment.There are actually 5 sources of capital that will successfully allow you to complete the financing of your new business. They include your own equity injection into the business, i.e. your down payment, bank and institutional financing (its not what you might think, so stay tuned on that one ), asset financing via an independent finance company, and finally a potential vendor take back from either the franchisor of the existing franchisee from whom you are buying the business.Let’s therefore backtrack a bit and hopefully give you some solid tips and new information around how this financing is, in our words ‘ cobbled together ‘ to give you a total financing solution for your new business.It’s always the same question when we talk to clients… ‘How much do we have to put in ‘… they are of course referring to their owner equity investment into the business. The truth is that the amount varies when it comes to the financing portion of your business. That amount is flexible and can vary anywhere from 10 – 50 per cent depending on the size of the financing and the amount of working capital you want to have on hand d on day once that will allow you to finance the business properly.Another tip we’ll share in the above mentioned ‘ owner equity ‘ area is simply that in many cases some franchisors will actually mandate how much you ‘ have ‘ to put in. We therefore recommend to all clients that they get a clear understanding up front so there are no surprises. In defense of the franchisor they are probably relying on their own experience that allows them to have determined over time what it takes to successfully run and grow one of their units in their franchise system.So how exactly do the banks in Canada participate in the starting of your franchise? Is it as simple as approaching your bank and determining what business money they will lend to finance a franchise? Not really we tall clients. We have rarely if ever seen a direct term loan to cover the financing of a franchise. But yet the banks do participate in most of the franchise financing in Canada. How? They piggy back on a special government program called the BIL/CSBF programme. This loan is underwritten by Ottawa, and has very generous terms and conditions around rate and structure. Unbelievably you are actually only guaranteeing personally 25% of the loan, which is another benefit.So our cobbling together of a financing package is getting there – another great strategy is to finance separate individual assets with an independent lease firm. This type of asset financing is easier to get approved, and can cover a significant portion of any assets that need to be financed.We spoke of a potential vendor take back from the franchisor or existing franchise as part of the purchase package. We will share with you several tips and comments on this one – namely that you should not fully rely on getting this type of financing in place. Occasionally you might be successful, may times you wont. Why? Simply because the franchisor or existing franchisee is motivated to sell you a franchise, not finance it!Speak to a trusted, credible, and experienced Canadian business financing advisor in the area of starting a franchise and getting the right business money in place to allow you to complete your new role as a Canadian entrepreneur.

Photography Basics – What is Photography All About?

If you’re new to photography, but you’re interested in embracing it as a hobby, congratulations! Photography is an immensely enjoyable pastime that you’ll be able to enjoy and share with the people around you until the day you die.If you’re wondering where to start, try reading the rest of this article for a basic introduction to photography, starting with the most basic question of all: what is photography?- What is photography?Strictly speaking, photography is ‘the process of producing a still picture by recording light radiation’. If we’re being generous we could say that photography has been around since the early 1800s, but in terms of it being something open to the average person to get involved in, the agreed-on date is more likely to be 1900 – the year in which Kodak introduced the $1 ‘Brownie’ camera.Photography is somewhat unusual in that while it is definitely an art form (in that it’s capable of producing something that appeals to the senses) there are strong technical elements to it as well. In this way it contrasts with an art form such as drawing or painting, where little or no technical knowledge of the medium is necessary. It’s a rare professional photographer who isn’t also an expert with the technical aspects of photography, though they do exist.- What sort of camera will I need?This question has two very different answers. On the one hand, any kind of camera at all can be used to make interesting images, so one could say that that’s the answer: ‘any kind of camera at all’. On the other hand, photography is arguably its most enjoyable when done with a camera that is versatile and easy to control manually, and so one could say that the answer can only be: ‘an SLR’. Certainly if you don’t currently own a camera, you’re even remotely interested in taking up photography as a hobby, and you have the money, an entry-level (digital) SLR is the right way to go.- How do I improve?Unsurprisingly, getting better at photography involves a lot of trial and error. While digital photography makes trial and error a much better strategy than it used to be by massively reducing the cost of taking a photo, there’s still no need to do this blindly. Reading about photography in books, magazines and online is also a useful way to improve, as is looking at a lot of photographs taken by other people. You’ll quickly learn that people generally agree on a set of ‘rules’ that produce pleasing photography, and while eventually you’ll break these rules to good effect, there’s no question that it’s worth learning them first.

5 Tips Small Businesses Can Take Away From The Tiny House Movement

What on earth could small businesses learn from the tiny house movement if your industry is unrelated? It comes as no surprise that the growth, mission, popularity and purpose of the tiny house movement have grown over the past decade. People are joining this movement for financial freedom, environmental and leisure enjoyment. These owners reduce skyrocketing maintenance costs and living expenses that come from soaring mortgage payments of capacious houses. This movement also frees up more time to spend with family and travel.Over the past decade, we have seen the increase in restructuring, downsizing and corporate dismantling by many large firms. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 99.7 percent of all employer firms are small businesses. While this percentage is an impressive number, there are some great tips many small businesses can take away from the tiny house movement.
Compact and mobile: Owners of tiny houses downsize to reduce the overabundance of clutter, high mortgage payments, and freedom to do more things they want to engage in. They have the capability of hitching their home on the back of a vehicle and can save money on hotel costs when traveling. Depending on your type of business, with the ease and digitization of many applications and smart devices, you can mobilize your business and take it anywhere. Even if you relocate, your business can be just as portable. Small businesses may be compact in scale, but can be substantial in their return on investment.

Energy and cost-efficient: Tiny house owners save money by lower operating costs, energy usage, and maintenance costs. You will find innovative ways to curb your budget in certain areas that will free up money for other important business investments to grow your business. Small businesses may not use up as much energy and power as larger organizations. You can operate more efficiently as well as effectively.

Environmentally conscious and sustainable: Tiny houses may be built using environmentally friendly and repurposed materials. They are built to last but are as unique and aesthetically appealing as the details in a larger home. Small businesses can apply similar eco-friendly elements and recycled supplies to their organization. Make a statement with personalized and customized brand installations on a smaller scale, but with great innovative curb appeal.

Technological advantages: Technology is not as big and bulky as it once was. Tiny houses can embody the same level of digitization as larger homes, just on a smaller scale. At one time, big businesses had the upper-hand with harnessing more advanced applications in technology. Nowadays, not only is technology more advanced and constantly evolving, many elements are far more affordable than they’ve ever been.

Innovative: While tiny house living is not a new phenomenon it is increasing in popularity. The idea of living a quality life on a small-scale pushes us to new levels of residential creativity. We are inspired to try something new, creative, and innovative that will make us stellar in our industry. Since many quality products and services are more affordable and reliable, small businesses can make quality purchases and outsource services that will save on equipment and personnel budgets.
Just because a small business may adopt a few ideas from the success of the tiny house movement, some of these applications may not be feasible or appealing to your particular industry. You don’t have to sacrifice quality for affordability. Small businesses have the power, however, to promote their business with creative, personalized and exceptional customer experiences, regardless of size and budget.