A Note

Hello,

Thanks for taking the time to visit here.  While I have been a Montessori upper elementary director for many years, I attended the NAMTA Adolescent Orientation in Ohio last summer and am starting an adolescent program in the fall of 2014. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has also taken a Montessori adolescent training program.

I think best through writing and have written a number of things related to Montessori philosophy, curriculum and practice, as well as pieces on other, related educational thinking.  My purpose in creating this site is to make these articles available for anyone who may find them interesting or useful.  If you like what you’ve read, let me know.

Thanks,

Sheldon Clark

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If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
(The Absorbent Mind, chapter one, The Child’s Part in World Reconstruction)

If society holds it necessary to make education compulsory, this means that education has to be given in a practical fashion, and if we are now agreed that education begins at birth, then it becomes vitally necessary for everyone to know the laws of development. Instead of education remaining aloof and ignored by society, it must acquire the authority to rule over society. Social machinery must be adapted to the inherent necessities of the new conception that life is to be protected. All are called upon to help. Fathers and mothers must shoulder their responsibilities; and if the home fails for lack of means, then it is required of society not only to give the needed instruction but also the support necessary for bringing up the children. If education signifies a protection of the individual, if society recognizes as necessary to the child’s development things that the family cannot provide, then it is the society’s duty to provide these things. The state must never abandoned the child…. This means that society’s first step must be to allocate a higher proportion of its wealth to education.
(The Absorbent Mind, chapter two, Education for Life)