Kindergarten Montessori

"What did you do today at school?" "Counting beads, sorting grains." "Today also?"

I'm unsure to what extent my tendencies towards fascination and fixation, in stories I'm told of my very early years, is poetic license, a habitual exaggeration on the part of the storytellers; the video evidence I have of myself at age six summarily refutes the claim that I was ever silent, but perhaps my tendency to talk aloud about my fixations came a little later.

The above scene, emblematic of this typical narrative theme, is nevertheless notable because of its silent characters: the teachers whose agency was understood to direct my actions during the school day, and who seemed to choose an activity for me that, by all accounts, I would have chosen for myself if given the chance. The choice to let a child count and sort if it wanted to (one that nonplussed my mother, and I infer that it was part of the reason why she transferred me into a more "traditional" school for my UKG the following year) seems to embody a poetic sort of approach to the development of a mind. With this reconstructed account, and what I know of the Montessori method, I can posit that the goal was precisely to do let me do what I wanted. The justifications offered by the philosophy are undoubtedly both causal and moral antecedents to my experience, but they can't really speak for the experience itself. Of course, this all being outside the realm of my actual memories, neither can I.

One of the interesting things about pedagogy is that any purpose it may serve is only applicable after a time lag - one that takes all involved parties well past the point where extrinsic motivation is available for any of them. What a student and a teacher experience is meant to be superadditive, but both the experience and the effects of teaching are synthetic, diachronic, and slow. Establishing causal links between any teaching practice and its effects is, as with most creative endeavours, an empiricist's nightmare; and by extension - because there is no hope of discovering representative measures of good teaching - a behavioural economist's bane.

Empirical justifications are, therefore, clearly unrelated to why everyday people choose to practice, endorse, and subject themselves to the imparting of an education. The (arguably more fundamental) converse also holds, that we don't really know why we learn...instrumental though it is to a great many other activities, learning-in-general doesn't really seem to be fully justified by instrumentality. Of what use is counting beads and sorting grains? What could my tiny tabula rasa mind have been gaining from the care which I'm told I put into the activity, day after day?

The connections do, in fact, seem best understood from a poetic frame. There is no real way to access the downstream effects of my teachers' action from when I was four, except by seeing what their choices rhymes with in my present self - what consonances can be drawn between my reconstituted understanding of what they were trying to do, and experiences and thoughts in other, better-mapped parts of my mind.