I’m thrilled to offer this little online interview with Trevor Eissler, author of Montessori Madness: A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori. Be sure to check out his book, and if you are affiliated with a school, check out his school fundraising program! $10 of every book purchase will go back directly to your school.
Eissler, a father of three Montessori students, is a pilot and flight instructor. He has trained hundreds of pilots over fifteen years. He is an author, a juggler, a unicyclist, a Toastmaster, a pianist, a triathlete, and a husband. He wants to be a Montessori student when he grows up.
1. What was the moment when you decided that you had to write a book for other parents about Montessori? What motivated you to spread the word?
This question reminds me of the times in life when you come across a great saying, quotation, even line of poetry. Those thoughts you come across that resonate most deeply within you are the ones you’ve really known all along. You didn’t have the words for it necessarily, and it may not have been in your consciousness yet, but deep in your bones you feel like you’ve “known” it.
So it is with my experience with Montessori. There was an “Aha!” moment when I walked into the classroom for my initial parent observation not knowing the first thing about Montessori. We had been seeking education options for my three young children and this was just one option we happened to blindly stumble across. The moment I decided to aggressively spread the word about Montessori was when I realized in that first observation both that the method was absolutely wonderful, and that there must be millions of parents out there, many college-educated like myself, who have not a clue what the word “Montessori” means. I asked around. Nobody had heard of it. I could easily have missed that chance encounter with this school and might never have come across the method.
That made me angry. Why are we Montessorians not marketing ourselves better? Why are we not marketing ourselves at all? We talk amongst each other and describe finer points of the materials and the experiences to each other, but we don’t proselytize aggressively. We need to take the argument not only to those who come looking for an alternative education, but to those who haven’t the faintest inkling what an alternative education is–those who would laugh at the thought. That’s when I decided to write a book targeting those folks. They are our neighbors and friends. We must take the argument TO people, not wait for them to come to us.
2. In your mind, what are the greatest benefits of a Montessori
education?
We both know there’s a boatload of benefits from Montessori education. Let me just mention one that’s usually further down on the list: confidence. In Montessori, we have confidence in our children. In traditional schools we don’t. In traditional schools, every time a test is handed back or a report card sent home, we wait with bated breath for someone else to tell us how to value the child. Is she a smart kid? A dumb kid? How is she rated against her peers? After any test or report card, our evaluation of the child could change based on the letter on a piece of paper. We’re always doubting our children.
By “confidence” in the Montessori setting, I don’t mean a blind confidence that the child will do no wrong, I mean a confidence that the child, given the right environmental support, will not only choose his or her future path wisely, but is valuable to us right now. In this moment. Regardless of how he or she answers the next question we pose. The miraculous thing about having confidence in a person is that they rise to the occasion. They see this confidence, feel it, start to believe it, and the benefits of thinking you’re a confident person become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
3. If you had to distill your book’s argument down to one sentence,
what would it be?
You need to go take a look–one thirty-minute observation–inside a Montessori classroom.
