Everything Montessori Teachers need to harness their inner musician and bring music to life in their classrooms
Hi, again! I recently discovered that the French publication Montessori Apprendre Autrement here in France published an interview with me from last year. It’s episode #30: “La musique dans la vie des enfants.” The interview was conducted in French and English, with translations by Caroline D’Allo. Check it out here!
“A clever person has all the right answers. A genius has all the right questions.”
- Some clever person
Out the window of the bus, the French countryside swished by. The late afternoon sun poured honey-like into the moquette seats on our side of the bus, making the children, my colleague, and I, feel lethargic and drowsy. We were headed homeward from a class trip visiting the Lascaux caves in central France. My head swam with dream images of smudgy bulls and horses rubbed into stone by hairy and calloused prehistoric fingers, when Christian interrupted my reverie with a question.
"Mister Michael,” he began—our school insisted the children mix the formal with the familiar as a compromise between the more formal-minded French teachers who wanted titles, and the Montessori teachers who wanted to be on a first-name basis with the children— “Who is it that brings me my presents at Christmas, my parents, or Santa Claus?”
Uh-oh. Should I tell Christian the truth, that Santa Claus doesn’t exist—at least, there is no good argument or evidence for the existence of Santa Claus—or should I tell him what his parents have probably let him believe: that Santa brings him his presents?
In a very neutral tone, with not an ounce of mockery or sarcasm, I said, "Which is more likely? A large, jolly old man who lives in the north pole and employs an army of tiny elves makes, by hand, all of the presents for all of the children in the world (whose families don’t adhere to religions that practice other gift-giving traditions). This man somehow knows everything about you, including not only what you want, but even how you’ve behaved during the year. He watches you all year long and if you behave badly, he either deprives you of presents, or gives you a lump of coal.”
“Every Christmas Eve,” I went on, “he loads a giant sack full of all of the presents and all of the coal onto a magical flying sleigh driven by eight magical flying reindeer. In a period of 24 hours, he travels to every household, lands on the roof, and slides down the chimneys, placing the presents under every tree, including yours. After he delivers the gifts, he wiggles his nose and goes back up the chimney again.”
Here, I had to take a breath, ignoring the children’s cries of, “What if you live in an apartment?” and “How does he get in if your chimney is broken?” and “Does he deliver presents to igloos?”
“Or,” I continued, working hard to maintain a measured and flat tone, “You have parents who love you. They know you very well, because they have raised you from the time you were born. To them, you are the most precious person in the world.”
“To express this incredible love they have for you, they work very hard to provide for you. With the money they earn from working, they buy things that they know you’ll like, wrap them up, and put them under the tree at Christmas time. They give you presents every year just to experience the joy of seeing your face light up. They give each other presents, too, because giving is something that makes us human beings feel good.”
“The tradition of Christmas has a long history by the way. It arose out of a combination of Christian and Pagan customs and stories. Your parents like to tell you stories, because human beings love stories. Sharing stories contributes to the richness and fullness of human life. The stories don’t have to be true to be enjoyable, or to teach us lessons, or to fill our lives with magic. Taking pleasure in a story is enough.”
“Some stories, both true and fictional, are so precious to human beings that we like to hear them over and over again. So every year your parents go along with the stories and participate in the traditions either because they strongly believe in them, or because they get pleasure from them, or both. Either way, they relish the coziness of winter time when they get to pause and spend time with you and the other people that they love.”
“So,” I concluded. “Again, which seems most likely?”
I assure you, I did my very best to make my description of both scenarios completely unbiased. Any sneer in my voice, any giggle bubbling up behind my words might have revealed my opinion the matter, and, in spite of my position being correct, I did not want Christian to adopt my perspective.
For even though Santa Claus is, in truth, a myth, I preferred that Christian come to that conclusion on his own through an exercise of sound epistemology, rather than just take my word for it. I felt it was better in the long run to let Christian practice the critical thinking tools he needs to figure out the Santa Claus question for himself.
Now, while belief in Santa Claus is relatively harmless—though one could argue that encouraging children to believe anything that can’t be shown to be true is at least a little bit harmful—sadly, Santa Claus is only one subject area in which children become indoctrinated into a set of unwarranted beliefs; another subject area is religion.
I suppose it’s only natural for parents to pass on to their children religious tenants. One can stomach the dishonesty and allow leeway for the emotional connection a parent has to his or her culture or heritage, even if it does result in passing on to their children morbid beliefs such as that women are inferior and should be covered up, or a wafer turns into the body of a human being.
One can feel for a parent who, having been indoctrinated by his or her own parents, feels the desire to pass along comforting beliefs and associations to his or her children. In the end, parents are responsible for a child’s safety, and believing that her child is a wretched sinner who will burn in eternity if he doesn’t adopt her beliefs can tend to make a mother, to put it mildly, overprotective.
But an educator has no such excuse. He or she must always point children, as much as is possible, toward a path to the truth of reality—to the extent that it can be obtained. A Montessori educator, in particular, must shed his or her personal beliefs when working with children and carry him or herself like, as Dr. Montessori says, “a humble scientist.”
Scientists leave their unwarranted beliefs and assumptions outside the door as soon as they enter their laboratories, and well they should: biases cloud vision and move one further away from, not closer to, reality.
Now, while scientists attempt to answer questions about reality by removing bias, questioning, observing, measuring, and testing, religious believers, by contrast, attempt to answer questions about reality by simply adopting beliefs in spite of a lack of evidence for those beliefs, and in the face of evidence that contradicts those beliefs. What’s more, at the end of the day, it’s the methodology of the scientists, not the religious believers, that has become the best tool humanity has developed for determining the nature of reality.
In rejecting scientific methodology in favor of religious dogma, religious educators do significant harm to the children in their charge. The educator’s task, at minimum, is to point children toward an exploration of the universe that is in keeping with scientific methodologies, not to spoon-feed childern harrowing tales as if they are true.
This is why education must necessarily be secular. Simply put: like a scientist, the first and most important job of an educator is to teach children how to think, not what to think. Along with that, to operate ethically, an educator must teach children only those facts about their universe that are true, that is to say, that can be, and have been, verified empirically via the scientific method. In doing so, an educator fosters, not suppresses, critical thinking skills.
TEACH HOW TO THINK, NOT WHAT TO THINK
Religious and secular educators both have in common a certain relationship to life’s big questions, but while the religious educator asserts—unjustifiably—that his or her particular belief system has the answers to those big questions, only to then discourage critical inquiry for fear of the threat questions pose to the belief system, the secular educator accepts, and indeed relishes, not having the answers. A secular educator encourages further questions.
Indeed, when it comes to life’s big questions, the Imam, the Rabbi, the nun, and the priest, all have an agenda. They need the questioning child to accept their religion’s particular set of faith-based answers, which, being based on faith, not fact, are actually non-answers.
At this point, the reader will hopefully indulge me in a brief digression to make something clear: the statement that religious belief is not based on fact is not an insult, but merely itself a statement of fact. It is simply the case, for example, that a claim written in an old book can never be taken to be true just because it is written in an old book.
Any truth claim written down in any book needs corroborating evidence before you can reasonably accept it. This is especially true of claims that have no empirical basis in reality, such as a supernatural claim. For, as the late Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
If you read, for example, in a 2,000 year old tome that a man was tortured and killed by the Romans, well, that claim may not be true, but you can find mountains of evidence of the Romans torturing and killing people, so you could go along with it. If, however, you read in a book that that same man rose from the dead, well, to believe that you would need substantially better evidence, since no one has ever been established to have risen from the dead.
Getting back to the point, in contrast to the religious educator, the secular educator has an altogether different agenda: to step back and guide the child toward finding his or her own answers to life’s big questions, and to encourage the child to ask more.
Consider a child in a Montessori Catholic school who’s grandma recently died. This child likely receives the comforting—if dubious—impression from his religious teacher that his grandmother is in heaven, and that he will eventually see her again. (If, and only if, said grandma professed to believe in the dogma at the moment of her death. That part, of course, the religious teacher likely leaves out.)
That same child in a secular Montessori classroom receives, on the contrary, emotional support as well as an invitation to explore questions such as: what happens to us, biologically, when we die? What do various cultures and civilizations believe about death? What is the most healthy way to handle grief? A question in a religious classroom that leads to a sophistical sermon, in a best-practice Montessori classroom leads to a fantastic research project.
What’s more, the secular educator helps the child to know how to ask questions; how to seek, not necessarily find, the answers. The child in a secular Montessori classroom benefits little from a pithy “24” as the answer to the question, “What do I get when I multiply four times six.” The child in the religious Montessori classroom benefits even less in hearing, “heaven” as an answer to the question “Where is my deceased grandmother?”, since, unlike “24,” “heaven” is not a verifiable answer that can be demonstrated to be correct—which basically means it’s not only false, but dishonest.
A better answer to the first question would be to point to a reliable process for finding the answer. The secular educator says something like, “I don’t know, let’s take six things four times, count them all together, and see what we get.”
All Montessori educators, indeed, have many materials that lead children through the process of multiplication. They can hand the child some colored bead bars and shows the child how to count them. They can lead the child to the Checkerboard or the Large Bead Frame, or invite the child to get some friends together to play the bank game, or even show the child the Japanese technique of multiplying using criss-crossed lines. What’s more, Montessori educators of all stripes can show the child not just how to perform multiplication, but how to check and verify that his or her answers are correct.
Unfortunately, verification that a religious belief is correct proves anathema to the pastor or the nun, because religious claims can’t be verified on any rational basis.
To be fair, Sister Mary-Catherine could also show a child how the process of multiplication works. But for the child’s less concrete questions, such as the question about grandma’s destination after death, Sister Mary-Catherine then must be inconsistent, and, necessarily, dishonest. She must stop all inquiry and revert back to pretending to have the answer: heaven.
But a secular educator knows that the answer to a question about something as mysterious and profound as death could also focus on process: “I don’t know,” she could say, “Why don’t you get a friend and do a research about life cycles of animals, plants, and humans? Or you could learn about cognitive science, or about how biological systems shut down and decay. You could even do a project about what various human civilizations believe about death. Let me tell you a fascinating story about how and why the Egyptians buried their monarchs with all of their beautiful treasures!”
More importantly, the child given the tools of sincere inquiry, rather than a stopgap false answer, will not help but lead himself or herself to the correct conclusion about death: that all the evidence we have shows that grandma’s brain and heart have stopped and that she is dead. All of the brain functions that make up her personality are no longer active, so as far as we know they are no more. Her body will break down and become part of the universe again. Isn’t that a beautiful notion? And, since, as far as we know every human being is unique, no one like grandma will ever exist again in quite the same way.
A child discovering that information can then be helped to deal effectively with grief, and even be led to a deep appreciation for the preciousness and fragility of grandma’s life, knowing that it was the only life she will ever have. This, in turn, may lead to a deep appreciation of the child’s own life.
It’s no mystery why religious educators discourage children from learning “how” to think: following evidence where it leads, using logic and exercising critical thinking skills and sound epistemology—in other words, using the best tools we have to determine the true nature of reality—can never lead a clear-thinking person to religious belief.
As an example, I once said to child in my class, “I have a 2-euro coin in my pocket. Do you believe me?” She said yes. Later that day I told her I had a magical chocolate unicorn in my pocket that grants wishes. “Do you believe me,” I asked. “No.” “Why did you believe me when I said I had a coin in my pocket and not a unicorn? I didn’t have either.” She replied, “Because coins are real and unicorns aren’t.” Children get it. It takes a religion to discourage this kind of sound thinking.
Discouraging questioning with regard to their religious dogma and giving children pretend answers to life’s big questions, are examples of the disservice that religious educators do to children. By leading children to believe that this life is just a place to wipe their feet before the real party begins after they die, religious educators deprive children of the reality that, as far as we can tell, this one life they have is precious and extraordinary, they can make their own meaning from it, the universe is knowable, and no one, not even (and especially not) Sister Mary-Catherine, has all the answers.
Given that realization, the child appreciates how precious and unique this life is and begins to explore its wonders and search for his place within it. The fact that life ends needn’t diminish life’s beauty. After all, does the value of a book diminish because eventually the story ends? On the contrary! As any comic book fan knows, the rare issues are the most valuable. The editions of which there exist only one become worth a fortune.
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
Not only does religious education deal with questions questionably, both in in discouraging critical inquiry and pretending to have the answers, but the methods of religion to impart this information proves problematic, being reliant on rote memorization and deference to authority.
All Montessori teachers, to be fair, find themselves in danger of falling into the trap of equating “memorizing” with “learning.” Indeed, an alien being coming down to our planet would likely fail to contrast a group of children reciting math facts or verb conjugations in a secular Montessori classroom with a group of children reciting morning prayers in a Christian Montessori classroom. Both memorizing math facts and reciting prayers utilize the lowest level of cognitive function: Recall.
By “lowest cognitive function”, I’m referring, of course, to Bloom’s Taxonomy, which divides the way people learn into three domains, one of which, the cognitive domain, emphasizes intellectual outcomes. The Taxonomy further divides the cognitive domain into categories that it arranges progressively from the lowest level of thinking, simple Recall, as stated before, to the highest: Evaluation of information. The levels in between, ranked in order, are Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, and Synthesis.
A child’s work that accesses multiple domains, as it does in best-practice Montessori classrooms, results in improved attention to detail, increased comprehension, and expanded problem solving skills.
These are the outcomes that any sentient being, terrestrial or extraterrestrial, with cognitive faculties would see were they to observe children engaged in active experiences in a classroom environment, which necessarily invite the children to work on, say, the math facts from a multi-tier cognitive perspective, especially when the aforementioned work accesses the higher cognitive levels.
A child performing cubing with the Trinomial Cube, for example, Evaluates the most effective way to work with and Synthesizes what she’s learned by designing a follow-up project, such a poster or 3-dimensional model.
She finds excitement and satisfaction in the Application of the math facts as she Analyzes the variously-shaped prisms, categorizing them and deriving their values.
All of this leads to deep Comprehension of not only the math facts, but of how they relate to real-world objects in space. After plenty of repetition with this and other work, over time she can’t help but Recall her math facts.
Again, a Catholic or Christian Montessori school teacher could achieve the same cognitive aims when it comes to some true and empirically verifiable fact, such as the product of six times four, but, sadly, when it comes to religious claims, Recall is necessarily the highest level a child can ever attain.
This is to be expected when the truth of a claim is dubious. After all, the less valid a claim, the harder its adherents will defend it against critical inquiry. This is because the aims of accessing multiple domains to study a religious doctrine become dangerous to the upholding of the doctrine, as they necessarily result in the conclusion that the doctrine cannot be true.
Imagine, for example, a child exploring the resurrection of Jesus with an acute attention to detail, to take just one benefit of learning across multiple cognitive domains. Which inconsistency do you imagine would derail his or her acceptance of a man rising from the dead first: the fact that there is no contemporaneous non-Christian historic evidence that such an event took place, the fact that no one has ever risen from the dead, the inconsistencies in the gospel’s not-eyewitness accounts of this supposed resurrection, or the fact that the only information we have about this alleged historical event comes from a 2,000 year-old collection of word-of-mouth stories told by believers that has been written down by anonymous authors and translated, retranslated, and interpolated by countless anonymous illiterate scribes over the millennia?
No thinking person, child or adult, inquiring honestly and armed with the tools of critical thinking, could ever reasonably come to the conclusion that any person, let alone Jesus, if he even existed, rose from the dead.
Yet the nun or priest running the Catholic Montessori classroom will insist that it is true; the only way she or he will be able to get an inquisitive child to believe it is to shut down critical inquiry and just make him memorize it.
No responsible educator worth his salt would ever spoon-feed a child any fact, let alone a fact that wasn’t, in fact, a fact.
In point of fact, a large part of the problem here, setting aside for a moment the requirement of rote memorization, is the insistence on the part of said nun or priest that the claim she or he wants the child to commit to memory is the infallible truth.
On what basis does Sister Mary-Catherine or Father O’Malley stake the truth of this resurrection claim? Lacking as it is in evidentiary support, and devoid of any sound or valid arguments to support it, the only way to accept the unlikely claim that a man rose from the dead is to defer to a long chain of authority figures, some of whom are, alarmingly, impossible to verify even exist.
At the far end of the chain is the unseen, unverified god who is claimed to have “revealed” the resurrection to the other links in the chain: the Popes, Bishops, Cardinals, Priests, etc., etc., who have passed the disputable claim along through the ages.
The chain then ends with Sister Mary-Catherine standing before the child, getting him to recite that a man rose from the dead as though it is the truth, as though such a thing were even possible, verifiable, or even logically consistent, and insisting that the child believe it purely on the grounds of her authority—which, it should be emphasized, is one of the only ways a child could accept such a claim.
A responsible educator would never yank a child’s chain in this way.
For the secular Montessori educator, the facts of reality are the only authority. Six times four does not equal twenty-four because the educator said so, or because 2,000 years ago someone wrote it down in a book.
Six times four is twenty four because if you take six things four times, you will get twenty four things. And this is true whether this educator calls him- or herself a Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu. It is true whether the educator and child are in a religious classroom, a secular classroom, or on Mars.
Furthermore, the secular educator leads the child to discover these facts of reality for him or herself, distancing himself even further from a position of authority.
Of course, in certain fields of inquiry that educators and children alike access, people can rightly claim authority. Scientists, musicians, doctors, mathematicians, artists, athletes, and others who have achieved accolades in their field can certainly be relied upon to make reliable assertions about the universe.
The difference, however, between Sister Mary-Catherine referring to the Bible and the secular educator referring to a paper by Einstein, is that people like Einstein gain their authority from empirically verifiable truths about reality.
Einstein’s outlandish (at the time) claim that spacetime is physical and that gravity results from its curvature is true because anyone, layperson and scientist alike, can observe the bending of light around a massive object and verify that it is so.
It took Sir Arthur Eddington sailing out to a remote island armed with a camera and going up against the worst weather possible to confirm Einstein’s theory. Einstein’s ideas are being confirmed even today. We now have photographs of black holes. We have detected gravitational waves.
By contrast, when Isreal first became a nation, it took all her government’s resources and all of her best archaeologists to scour the Sinai peninsula for any evidence, even the most minute shred of it, to confirm the accounts in the Bible, and they found nothing. The Bible’s stories and accounts continue to yield not a shred of evidence. 2,000 years and still no evidence that anyone has ever risen from the dead.
Because they are so far-fetched, religious claims must necessarily rely on the coercive techniques of authority. Whereas, verifiable reality, not an invisible sky man who allegedly wrote a book, nor his child-molesting minions, gives Einstein his authority.
Unlike religious figures, then, authorities who make claims that can be tested, verified, and empirically shown to correspond to reality, therefore, are the only real authorities, and are therefore the only authorities to whom the secular educator can refer a child in good conscience.
JUST THE FACTS, FATHER
Moreover, the problem of religious educators drawing on their false sense of authority to make children memorize doctrine compounds when we consider that many of the “facts” they feed to their flock are erroneous, unverifiable, or downright false.
Tragically, around 45% of the American public believe that the earth is less than 6,000 years old. Father O’Malley, standing before his class of children, is likely among them. He will tell his children that the book of Genesis in the Bible is true. The earth was created in six days, he’ll say—though the Bible contradicts itself on that point within the first page—and that following the lineage of patriarchs from Adam all the way to Jesus, we will discover that the age of the earth is about 6,000 years old.
Except that we have no good evidence to show that any of that is true. We have an old book, well, a collection of 66 old books, that says it’s all true. That ought to be sufficient evidence, right? Well, if writings in an old book can be considered good evidence, then Valhalla, or Zeus, or Brahmin existed also. Writing something in a book doesn’t make it true.
If we use scientific methodology and observable evidence instead of an old book to discover the actual age of the earth, we will see that it comes out to be 4.543 billion years old. Father O'Malley wouldn’t even have to reinvent the wheel to discover this fact. He could put down his old book and find out the real age of the earth by doing a cursory Google search. So why would Father O’Malley represent information dishonestly to his children?
A secular educator, if he wanted to practice good ethics, would never do such a thing. What’s more, a secular educator wouldn’t even broach the topic until a curious child came to him and asked the question, “How old is the earth?” Then, he will refer the inquisitive child to his classroom library of factual books, the contents of which have been empirically verified, corroborated, and passed peer review—a process that all scientific claims must go through before they can be gifted the title “fact.” Once the child explores in that book, he may even make connections and discoveries beyond the age of the earth, such as the ages of the other planets, or how the earth was formed. Left on his own to explore, the child will likely stop listening to Father O’Malley and find his own way through this wondrous universe.
THE INVISIBLE DRAGON IN THE CLASSROOM
A colleague of mine dreams of opening a Catholic Montessori school. One afternoon while a group of us were sitting around a table, she told us all about a material on her classroom shelf: a miniature altar, with a tiny cup for pretend wine, and a tiny plastic wafer. With excitement in her voice, she told us how the children in her class bring the little altar, cup, and wafer to a rug and perform the eucharist ritual, the one that is supposed to transform the wafer and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Then they put their hands together and say a prayer to the Christian god.
"Isn’t it precious?” she intoned to all of us.
The answer: of course not. Of the many things wrong with this scenario, the most glaring has to be the layers of make-believe going on. In a real church, the priest and all the parishoners are already pretending that the eucharist ritual does anything. They pretend that the wine in the goblet becomes a man’s blood and that the wafer becomes part of his body. (Which part, one is compelled, gigglingly, to wonder.) And pretend they must, because submitting the wine and wafer to rational scrutiny before and after the ritual will certainly show that neither magically transforms into a person’s body or blood, no matter how hard one believes.
And then, of course, there is the obvious fact that we have no evidence of a god. So to whom are these young children being taught to pray when they put their hands together and look piously up toward the ceiling? Observed with the unbiased eye of a scientist, as Dr. Montessori would have us do, we see that the children are really only learning to talk to themselves.
Yet, Sister Mary-Catherine teaches the child the eucharist ritual and the existence of the Christian god as if they are facts about reality. Being that these “facts”, however, are unfalsifiable, they cannot be said to be facts.
A claim that is falsifiable can be shown to be false. If I claimed, as my colleague has claimed, for example, that a grotto in France contains water that has healing powers, all you would need to do to falsify my claim is to think of a statement or conduct an experiment that would show my claim to be false. One way to do this would be to bring a cancer-afflicted person to said grotto, have him drink the water, and note down whether his cancer goes away.
My colleague, however, would protest. She would say the lake has healing powers, but it can’t cure cancer. Well, then, we might rejoinder, what does it mean for this water to have healing powers if it can’t cure the mother of all modern diseases? Can the water regrow a lost limb? No. Can the water cure a headache? No.
When pressed in this way, my colleague moves her claim incrementally backward until the grotto, at first possessing magical powers of healing, now only makes one “feel good.” When asked what would be the difference, then, between walking into a cool lake on a hot day and ingesting the water in this grotto, she burst straight out the corner in which she’d painted herself to again assert, with greater conviction, that the water has healing powers. Her justification for this claim? That the water has been “blessed.”
An inquisitive person, rubbing her hands together in anticipation of the opportunity to ask another question, would be right to then ask, what does it mean for something to be “blessed?” Suppose a priest were to take two identical bowls of water into a chapel and lock the door shut, so that no one could see what he was doing. Now suppose that while inside the closed chapel the priest were to bless one of the bowls of water. When the priest then emerges from the chapel with the two bowls, how could anyone tell which one was blessed?
Does the blessing change the chemical composition of the water? Does it make the water taste differently? In what tangible way could we measure the difference between “blessed” water and regular water? If we were to say that the water was “tap” water, or “mineral” water, or “tonic” water, we could easily differentiate between the three types of water. Surely we could do the same for water that is blessed? Unfortunately, we can’t.
This claim, then, that the water is blessed, having no way to show that it’s false, is unfalsifiable, and therefore does not warrant our acceptance that it’s true.
A responsible, secular educator, first and foremost, would not begin with a claim, let alone an unfalsifiable one. The most a secular educator would say about the eucharist wine and wafer would be that Catholics believe they become the blood and body of their god. That Catholics believe it, we can establish, is a demonstrable, falsifiable fact. (Not counting, of course, the many parishoners and clergy in Catholic communities who don’t believe any of it and are just going with the flow out of duty, peer pressure, or fear.)
On the question of whether the wine and wafer actually become the blood and body of a person, a secular educator might lead the children in an experiment and leave it up to them to discover the answer. They might, for instance, go on a Going-out to a church and bring back to school a sample of the holy water. They could then place a bottle of the holy water next to a bottle of normal spring water. Using certain chemicals, they could compare both waters’ ph values and chemical composition.
If they found that the two were the same, they could safely conclude, not necessarily that the holy water isn’t holy, but that, at the very least, its chemical makeup is no different than normal water, and we would therefore have no reason to believe that the water is holy.
To be charitable, sampling one bottle of holy water would only show that that particular bottle of holy water is no different from normal water. It would say nothing about holy water in general. Perhaps the priest made a wrong gesture during the “blessing,” or maybe his mind wandered during the crucial incantation. One would have to sample every single drop of holy water in every corner of the world to prove that holy water wasn’t real, right? Wrong.
Science and scientific inquiry works partially on induction. Since we have never experienced real holy water, that is, we have never been able by scientific means to determine the difference between holy water and normal water, it is reasonable for us to conclude that the claim that water is holy doesn’t, erm, hold water.
Besides, it isn’t our responsibility to prove that water is not holy. The responsibility lies with the person who claims holy water is real to present us with real holy water to support his or her claim.
At any rate, the children may or may not come to the conclusion that holy water isn’t real. The point is that the educator has led them through the process of asking questions about the world and testing and verifying results. (Although, I would argue that children who are thinking critically conducting such an experiment wouldn’t help but come to the right conclusion.)
Moreover, the entire enterprise might lead to a discussion about what it means to say water is “holy.” A secular educator would be happy to engage in this discussion and provoke the children toward exploring these questions. After all, if there is no difference between water that it holy and water that is not holy, then the concept of holy water is meaningless. But the responsible educator would leave it to the children to reach this conclusion themselves.
THE NEVER-ENDING STORY
The human experience abounds in stories. Telling stories is one thing that religious and secular educators have in common. The difference, of course, is that the stories of religious educators, at least the ones that pertain to their religion, have no evidenciary support. In other words, they can’t be shown to be true.
Take, for instance, the story of the Isrealites’ flight from Egypt. Father O’Malley may gather a group of children to instruct them in this tale. In doing so, he may tell the children the whole familiar story: how the Hebrews were trapped in Egypt as slaves, and how Jehovah, their god, allowed them to escape by sending plagues and murdering all of the first-born Egyptian children. He might, if he wanted to seem progressive, celebrate with his children the Jewish holiday of Passover, which is a celebration of the murder of the Egyptian children.
Father O’Malley will then tell the children about how the Isrealites trekked across the desert to the Red Sea—led by a cloud of smoke and a pillar of fire, no less—whereupon Moses parted the waters so they could cross, only to close the sea up again and drown the pursuing Egyptian armies. He will tell all of this with all the reverence that can be expected of a man who believes clouds of smoke and pillars of fire can lead people places, and that a body of water can be magically cleft in two.
What Father O’Malley will leave out, however, is that none of that has ever been established to have happened. The Egyptians, who were meticulous record keepers and who left behind many catalogs of their trades dealings with other cultures, and who, to be sure, kept slaves, never once mentioned having a host of Hebrew slaves. Nothing in Egyptian literature mentions a single plague, or the unusual dropping dead of all of its first born children in one evening.
You would think that millions of people walking on foot across the desert would have dropped a few things, or left some evidence of their travels: a campsite, the odd sandal, or a bit of cloth. And if an entire army was swallowed up in the Red Sea, one would expect archaologitsts to discover a treasure trove of Egyptian artifacts at the bottom of said sea. As of yet, for the past 2,000 years, archeologists have found nothing.
In fact, as I mentioned earlier, in the mid-20th century, when Israel became a nation, they set about gathering a team of their best archaeologists to scour the Arabian Peninsula and other areas of Biblical interest for evidence left behind from the characters in the Biblical narratives. They found not a single chariot wheel, not a scarab necklace, nothing.
If, then, Israel’s own team of crack archaologists have found no evidence that even one iota of the Exodus narrative ever happened, then what right does Father O’Malley have to deliver the tale to children as if it were fact? In what other profession, save for the arts, perhaps, are fictional narratives passed off as fact? Certainly not in education.
The secular educator also tells fanciful stories. Consider the Montessori Story of the Coming of Life. In that story, the educator tells the children about what happened after the earth formed and settled into a beautiful pearl. The rains came and started to break down the rocks, which crumbled and deposited lots of toxins into the seas, filling them up and shrinking them.
To remedy this, a very heroic creature came upon the scene in the form of a tiny blob of jelly. This tiny blob of jelly liked to eat the toxins in the sea, and so it started eating and eating, making more of its kind, eventually joining up with other blobs of jelly to help out the cleanup process.
These blobs of jelly started to clump together and specialize, so that one decided to function as the part that eats the toxins, the other digests, the other moves, and so on. These little blobs became the first multicellular life. After a time, these multicellular blobs floated to the top of the water and discovered that they liked a certain gas in the air and they liked to feel the warm sunlight. So, when the tide came, they drifted out to the very edge of the water, and when the tide receded, they stayed put on the land, soaking up the sun and drinking in that delicious gas. Those creatures were the first plants.
The story goes on like this, tracing the development animals, from fish, to amphibians, to reptiles, mammals, birds, and, finally, humans. At the end of the story, when humans finally appear, the secular Montessori educator will say that it was as if the earth was preparing itself for the human being’s arrival, with soft grass for their feet, stores of minerals in the cellar, and lots of fertile land for them to grow food.
Of course, both the Exodus narrative and the Story of the Coming of Life contain fanciful bits. It’s as obvious to any thinking person that a floating pillar of fire can’t lead anyone anywhere as it is that a tiny blob of jelly can’t like something, or have any kind of agency. The difference lies in the truth value of the stories in general.
I once told the Coming of Life story to a group of parents at a school in Germany. One of the parents, a biologist, was aghast after hearing the story and accused me of lying to children. “The blob of jelly didn’t just ‘appear’,” she protested, “And it didn’t decide to specialize or decide to do anything.” She had a point.
But where the Coming of Life story plays fast and loose with the truth, it does so deliberately to appeal to the charactistics of the child at the elementary stage of development, what Montessori theory calls the “second plane” of development. When children think of the blob of jelly as a “hero”, it feeds their need for hero worship. Thinking of the blobs of jelly getting together to specialize appeals to the children’s herd instinct. Giving the little characters in the story agency allows the child to think of them as characters in a narrative, and therefore feel gratitude toward them. The framing of the story helps draw the child toward a deep understanding of its contents.
Aside from the manner of telling the story, everything about the Coming of Life story is demonstrably factual. The story outlines, albeit in a fanciful child-friendly way, the actual process of the development of life on our planet. All of the events in the story correspond to our current scientific model of evolution by natural selection. The current scientific model of evolution is, by every standard of evidence across multiple disciplines, an established fact.
The Exodus story, on the other hand, simply did not happen. No evidence from archaeology, geneaology, or any related field, has been found to support the truth of the story. To teach the events of the Exodus story as though it were real history then, is to teach a lie.
We might excuse Father O’Malley for teaching the Exodus story if he were to introduce it as an allegory, or as a metaphorical story, in the same way a secular educator might introduce the Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. That would be fine. But as soon as Father O’Malley asserts that the story is fact, he is misrepresenting reality, and this is something an ethical educator must never do.
In short, responsible educators teach real, demonstrable facts. If they need to dress up those facts in a manner that appeals to the characteristics of the children in their charge, so be it, but they must never present erroneous or non-facts as though they are facts. To do so would be to violate educational ethics.
MAGICALLY FALLACIOUS
Religious educators will reply that they don’t need evidence to support thier religious beliefs, for they arrive at religious “truths” through faith. But is faith a reliable way to get to what’s true? If you truly believed with all your heart that the pen that you’re holding in your hand will float in the air after you let go of it, would that make it so?
You can probably think of many instances in which faith—the belief in something without evidence—not only doesn’t lead to truth, but actually leads to contradictory conclusions. Muslims, for example, believe that theirs is the true god, while Christians believe Muslims are wrong about that. Muslims, in turn, believe Christians are wrong. Both can’t be right, and yet both claim to have arrived at the truth through “faith.” Faith in this case, as in many other cases, has led to a contradiction.
Religion abounds with this kind of poor thinking, called since Aristotilian times “fallacious.” A fallacy, in logic, and in life, is an error in thinking in which a conclusion doesn’t follow from a premise that attempts to buttress it. Suppose, for example, a friend were to tell you that the prophet of his religion split the moon in half because for thousands of years his ancestors believed that to be the case. Would the fact that your friend’s ancestors believed the moon was split in half make it a fact? Clearly it would not.
Because fallacies are so prevalent in human discourse, they have been given formal names. Your friend justifying his belief that the moon is made of green cheese because his ancestors believed it commits a fallacy called ad populum. Put simply, this is a fallacy because the number of people who believe a claim has no bearing on whether the claim is true.
It turns out that all religious claims are based on fallacies, and every fallacy has been used to justify religious claims. One example should serve to illustrate my point.
Why should you accept the claim that Muhammad, the Muslim prophet, was visited alone in a cave by the Angel Gabriel? A devout Muslim might tell you because it is written in the Quaran. But something written in a book doesn’t make it true. In appealing to his book, which he believes is holy, to assert the truth of his claim, your Muslim friend is committing the fallacy of appealing to authority. Why should his book have any authority? And even if his book did have authority, would that make every claim in the book true? As the leader of Germany, Hitler had plenty of authority. Are the claims in Mein Kampf therefore true?
Well, your Muslim friend might then say that 8 billion Muslims believe it, and so it must be true. But this would again be an appeal to numbers, or ad populum. Thousands of Icelanders have begun to again worship the norse god Thor. Does that make Thor real?
Have you ever heard a religious person say, “Well you can’t prove it isn’t true, so it must be true.” This is also a fallacy. Here, your Muslim friend shifts the burden of proof. It isn’t up to you do disprove his claim, it’s up to him to support his claim with positive evidence. By assigning you the task of disproving his claim, he is de facto asserting that his belief is justified until you show that it isn’t. Not only is his belief not justified, but discourse works in exactly the opposite manner.
In a court of law, for example, it is never the defence’s job to show that the defendant is innocent. Rather the prosecution must make a case, with compelling evidence and good arguments, that the defendant is guilty. The jury, voting not-guilty, is telling the prosecution that he has not made his case. Your Muslim friend thinks that Muhammed is guilty of having been spoken to while alone in a cave by the Angel Gabriel. He must make his case if he wants you, the jury, to accept it.
One of the most common errors in thinking committed by the religous is called special pleading. A Christian creationist might, for example, tell you that the universe could not have been created from “nothing” because everything in the universe has a cause, and so the universe must have a cause. He will then leap straight from “everything in the universe has a cause” to that cause being his god.
But if “everything” has a cause, you rejoinder, then surely god must have a cause too. Here, the Christian makes an exception for his god by saying his god is eternal and uncaused. I’m sure you see the error here. “Everything” means everything that exists, and if god exists, then he falls under the set of all things. If the Christian wants to claim god as an exception, he must justify why god is the exception, and then explain how he knows that.
There are two additional fallacies built into this claim, however. The first is called a composition/division fallacy. Even is we grant that “everything in the universe has a cause”, it doesn’t follow that the universe itself must have a cause. The parts of a totality needn’t necessarily contain the same properties as a totality itself. If I told you that because this brick is small and shaped like a rectangular prism it means that the great wall of china is also small and shaped like a prism, you would rightly have me committed.
Finally, by playing fast and loose with the meaning of the word “universe” your Christian friend commits a fallacy of equivocation. It’s clear what he means when he says everything in the universe must have a cause, but how his god fits into that set is unclear. To counter your claim that even his god must have a cause because he is something in the universe, the Christian will equivocate and say that god is not part of the “universe”, but outside of it. So, does the universe refer to everything in our local bubble of space and time, or does it refer to everything that exists period? The Christian’s definition will shift depending on how he wants to justify his claim.
From all this you can see that religous educators, in teaching children that religious doctrines are factual, are actually teaching children erroneous ways of thinking. Reliance on faulty thinking in the form of logical fallacies produces erroneous or contradictory conclusions and results in poor reasoning. Is this how children should navigate the world?
Worse, in many other aspects of life, a religious educator probably goes about her life in a perfectly reasonable manner. I’m sure on her way to school Sister Mary-Catherine looks both ways before stepping on the gas when a traffic light turns green. Not relying on the traffic light as a sole authority, she, reasonably, looks for evidence that no cars are about to plow into her. Oddly enough, when she gets safely through the intersection, she perhaps thanks Jesus.
A secular educator fosters, encourages, and celebrates, not inhibits, a child’s critical thinking skills.
THE MORAL LOW GROUND
It is harmful enough that the claims of religious educators are not verifiably true, but it compounds the harm when their false claims, from women being unequal to men, to homosexuals deserving to die, to endorsing slavery, to injunctions to murder unbelievers, are at their core, immoral.
In Rudolf Steiner schools, better known as Waldorf schools, for example, the teachers are trained in a religion called anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is a Chrisitan mystical religion that, among other crackpot notions, holds to reincarnation. According to the beliefs of their founder, Rudolph “Boom-boom” Steiner, people who lead immoral, depraved lives in their previous life reincarnate in their subsequent life with brown skin. Guess the color of the skin of people who in their previous life led perfect, pure lives.
If this patent racism isn’t sinister enough, Waldorf educators tell countless lies to the children in their charge. In one of the more egregious examples of their dishonesty, in lieu of a factual response to children’s questions about how mechanical things work, like photocopiers or Television sets or automobiles, Waldorf educators declare that it’s all done by a little gnome. (This before sweeping away further questions.)
The reason for the little gnome? Well, according to anthroposophist beliefs, worldy things are inhabited by an Atlantian—yes, as in, the lost city—demon called Ahriman. When children interact with modern things, they could become possessed by Ahriman, and so Waldorf educators must protect the children from this demon. Telling them that gnomes inhabit modern technology is a way of guarding children against being possessed.
But the real sinister motivation behind the gnome is that too much knowledge is harmful to children. According to their doctrinal beliefs, if a child gains a certain kind of knowledge at a certain “stage of their development,” their “soul” can be irreparably harmed. If one could compile a list of immoral actions, surely obfuscating knowledge from children because an old Christian mystic believed that modern technology is haunted by demons would top the list.
In Waldorf schools, anthroposophists not only lie to the children about gnomes and demons, they also prevent them from using certain colors. In the early grades, for example, children are forbidden from using the color black. Why? A Waldorf teacher will dishonestly claim that black is forbidden because it is a harsh, undesirable color. But the real reason black is forbidden has more to do with the aforementioned racism and demons.
Put in a more positive way, anthroposophists encourage children to use or be exposed to certain colors. Walk into a Steiner school and you’ll see the walls painted solid colors. Why? Because the colors are supposed to help the children’s “spirits” or “souls” develop. Without defining or even establishing the existence of spirits or souls, one can immediately see how justifying the use of color in this way has the immoral consequence of piling falsehood on top of falsehood.
Anthroposiphists also teach children to reject modern medicine and psychiatry, to embrace astrology, and to believe in wood sprites and other kinds of folk spirits. The lying continues. Immorality pervades religious thought.
Secular educators also may have to present children with immoral goings on, especially in presenting lessons in history.
History is full of atrocities perpetrated by human beings against one another, both for religious and non-religious reasons. But where immorality presents itself in, say, a study of World War 2, a responsible educator will provoke discussion among the children and ask them if they can determine the morality of immoral acts in history.
Such discussion would include a consideration of the needs, desires, and beliefs of both sides of an issue, and would most certainly not include a blanket statement that such and such an action is right or wrong because “God says so." Rather, it would be rife with questions about what makes such an action wrong, if, indeed, the children deem it wrong.
Critical inquiry can lead to deep conversations even among very young children about what constitutes immoral or moral behavior. Making such judgements doesn’t come from on high in a secular, ethical classroom. It results from conclusions children reach after thoroughly and as impartially as possible exploring the issue.
It’s unfortunate that in today’s post-Enlightenment world, where African Christian mystics murder young girls for being witches, where American Christian Evangelicals scheme to turn the U.S. into a white-supremacist Christian nation, where Catholic child-rapist priests gain protection from the criminal Catholic Church by being shuffled around from diocese to diocese, where a teacher gets beheaded in Paris for the crime of encouraging critical thinking in his students by showing a picture of the “prophet” (cough, cough) Mohammed, and where the word “antisemitism” gets wielded by Isreal as a shield from criticism of their brutal attacks on Palestinians, who themselves lay claim to the land they live on by some “divine decree,” religion still manages to cling white-knuckled to the perception of holding the moral high ground.
It has become taboo to criticize such atrocities perpetrated in the name of religion, and, as a way of protecting precious belief systems from harm, all too often religion is offered refuge in the niggling benefits that it engenders. Could not alcoholics recover from their addiction without recourse to silly beliefs? Could not, and do not secular individuals give to charity, feed and clothe the poor? Is it not possible for secular educators to teach their children benevolent ways to behave without underpinning the good actions with false beliefs?
It calls to mind the challenge issued by journalist and atheist activist Christopher Hitchens: name one moral action carried out by a believer that a non-believer cannot do. I bet you can’t. No one has yet been able to. As a corollary, name one horrible action carried out in the name of religion, that a secular person would never do, and before I get to the end of this sentence you will already have thought of dozens. Genital mutilation, witch burning, slavery, disenfranchising and covering up women, shielding predator priests are exclusively the domain of the religious.
Religious educators, as a consequence, at the very least, must either gloss over, marginalize, or somehow justify these evils in order to maintain the level of cognitive dissonance necessary not to break down and weep over how much their pet beliefs have poisoned the world. They, in turn, pass this cognitive dissonance onto their students.
The secular educator, on the other hand, in providing future generations with valuable critical thinking skills, inadvertently, or perhaps mindfully, acts to engender activism in today’s youth, thereby arming current generations with tools to fight such heinous acts, and future generations to avoid committing them.
I give the reader credit in being able to discern which educator teaches from the moral high ground.
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
It’s unfortunate that religious educators charge themselves with the task of working with children, since, thanks to the patriarchal roots of religious ideas, it is children in religious doctrines, sadly, who suffer most. Bible believers are told to rejoice in dashing babies against rocks. All throughout the Christian and Jewish holy book children are murdered, sacrificed, ripped from their mother’s wombs, and more. Never forget that the punishment prescribed by the “good book” for children who mouth off to their parents is the death penalty.
Indeed, for all the hemming and hawing that religious adherents do about the rights and sanctity of life before we are born, they haven’t a care for us once we pop out of our mothers’ wombs.
Rather, Christian educators teach children that they are wretched, depraved sinners who, through no fault of their own, were "born into sin.” To add insult to injury, the poor children must, in order to shake off the generations old curse that the Christian god is supposed to have laid upon them for a crime a woman (a woman!) committed and that he failed to prevent 2,000 years ago—not that any of that ever happened—supplicate themselves to a celestial mob boss or suffer eternal punishment in an impending afterlife.
If that is not enough psychological torture, the religious deny adolescent children access to reproductive care and tell them that every sexual urge that their bodies naturally cry out for and crave is a grave sin, and that they must abstain from sexual activity in order to please their imaginary god. The rotten fruits from this poisoned tree speak for themselves in the appalling statistics of child sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy rates in the more religious states in the country where I was born.
It the secular world, educators and others, who are crying out for sex education in schools, condom distribution in Africa, and access for adolescents to reproductive care. The secular world knows, indeed, the date shows, that information and prevention, not abstinence, are the best remedies for teen pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
In Catholic churches, children are left alone with celibate older men who have a track record of sexually abusing children, and told these men have ultimate authority from the creator of the universe, leaving these men all the power structure they need to abuse as they please, knowing that they will not be punished, but rather they will just be given a new post in a different location. If this sounds ridiculous, recall that 1,000 children suffered molestation at the hands of over 300 predator priests in Philadelphia alone. (This is not to say that the number of victims is even important. One molested child is a tragedy.)
You might immediately want to rebut that molestation and child abuse happens in secular communities as well. But you would be half right. The fact is, according to the Abel Harlow study (https://religionnews.com/2014/01/09/startling-statistics/) child sexual abuse is more prevalent in “faith” communities. A startling (though not surprising) 93% of sexual abusers identify as religious. “Other studies show that sexual abusers within faith communities have more victims and access to younger victims. With these kind of statistics, one wonders why we let religious educators around children at all.
By contrast, can you imagine, should a secular educator molest a child, that this person would just be given another job at a different school, only to have his crimes swept under the rug, which is exactly what happens to sexual offenders of a religious stripe? Never. A secular offender would be prosecuted to the full extent of the secular law, have his name put on a registry, be compelled to announce his offense to every house along his block, and more. The secular world takes steps to prevent crime, not justify it.
In cases where this does not happen, in cases where a secular person has been shuffled around—and if this author is overlooking a particular case, he invites the reader to comment below—this author will be the first to speak out against the atrocity in question, not to hand-wave the crime away and say, “That person is no real secular educator.” In the secular world, to the best of our ability, we bring crimes to justice in the here and now, not in some proposed afterlife.
Then again, there is no doctrine in “secularity” that commands people to murder, to enslave, to mutilate children’s genitals—-and suck out the blood using the cleric’s mouth—-to stone homosexuals, or to condemn children to death. In fact, there is no “secular” doctrine at all. Any secular educator who perpetrates a crime against a child truly is acting alone. And a sympathetic, responsible secular person would support bringing that person to justice, rehabilitating him, and making sure he would never be allowed to teach children again. Would that the same could be said of the religious.
In a broader sense, the secular educator doesn’t bring children down. She builds children up. In secular Montessori schools, we feel a reverence for children and we communicate to children that they are anything but helpless, wretched individuals. Rather, they are capable, knowledgable, and able to guide their own education and pursue their interests to better the world, this world, the one world we know exists.
Let us never forget the unfortunate Native American children in Canada who have been unearthed in mass graves, murdered by their Catholic caretakers in “Indian Boarding Schools.” About 357 of these houses of horror were run by Christian denominations and staffed by clerical murderers who, between the years 1860 and 1978 murdered more than 1,000 children, at one school alone.
That we trust our children to religious educators at all, given these statistics, boggles the mind.
The author makes no apology, incidentally, to his religious colleagues and friends who don’t condone such atrocities. Those among the religious moderates who take a stand against evils committed by their religious counterparts in the name of their religion deserve little sympathy. In fact, if they could dispense with blowing hot air for a moment, perhaps they could also answer to these charges.
At the very least, they must explain, for one thing, why they alone have the correct interpretation of the injunctions in their holy books, which are the same books used by the abusers and murderers among their ranks, and, for another, how they resolve the “true Scotsman” fallacy that their head-in-the-sand finger-pointing invariably forces them to commit.
After all, what evidence does a moderate, peace-loving Christian have to substantiate his view of the doctrines over the witch-burning, child-murdering zealot? Both covet the same book. Both believe said book is the unerring word of the creator of the universe, and both sorely lack evidence for their beliefs. How is an outsider to tell which is the “true Christian?”
It has been said before, and I emphasize it here: at the very least, moderate Christians provide cover for extremist Christians by legitimizing not only the horrible beliefs and doctrines of their holy books, but by supporting unsubstantiated belief and lack of critical thinking, and, worse yet, by placing money in the tithe baskets in support of their criminal organizations. This same goes for adherents to Jewish and Muslim faiths alike.
Should my religious educator friends—or former friends by the end of this article— protest that religion is not harmful for children, then let me hereby throw the gauntlet down and herby challenge any religious educator who may be reading this—and you’re welcome to post your rebuttals in the comments below—to allow me to come into your classroom and read any passage I like from your holy book of choice. How many of you would permit me to read the story of Jepthah, who allows god to murder his daughter in exchange for victory in battle, or the centurion who asks Jesus to heal his child sex slave—not free him, mind, but heal him. Or the prostitute whom Levite cuts into pieces and sends to the other tribes of Israel as punishment for…wait for it…being the victim of gang rape. Or how about the injunctions in the Quaran to “cast terror into the hearts of the [unbelievers]; strike them; bend their necks (Quaran 9.5)? What dish from the putrid buffet of horrors shall I read aloud to your indoctrinated children?
Let ye, oh religious educator, permit me to read this stuff to your children, or forever hold your peace.
In contrast to the harm done to children by religious educators, secular educators do actual good by children. In the first place, they foster in children a love of the truth, which arms children against abuses, and not just the egregious ones mentioned above.
Even lying to children is tantamount to child abuse of some form. Telling children an eternal sky daddy watches over them at all times and will punish them in a lake of fire for not believing unbelievable things, indoctrinating children with false beliefs, forming in them self-hatred engendered by telling them they are wretched and worthless, cannot be considered anything but abuse. And if children don’t believe your wicked assertions, in spite of your having no evidence to back up said assertions, you say there is something wrong with them is victim-blaming of the most insidious kind.
Secular educators help children to develop their skills. They encourage children to seek flow and optimal experience in good, fulfilling, personality-constructing work in a beautiful environment and in peaceful collaboration with others.
Secular teachers teach children not that they are low and beneath some creator god that they as meager humans could never understand, but that the world is knowable, that they have power to understand it. They can find their own answers. This leads to the desire in children to improve the world, not simply sit back and let it die because of some unproven god’s “will.”
Secular educators empower children with a sense of self; they give children a sense that they can make a valuable contribution to the world. Children in secular schools take pleasure in learning, because the things they are learning are true and can be shown to be true. Children in secular schools suffer zero cognitive dissonance. Not only that, but children in secular schools are taught not only to value the truth, but how to seek it out.
If religious “education" is child abuse, then secular education is child liberation.
LAST WORDS, THE FINAL NAIL IN SANTA’S COFFIN
None of this is to say we should avoid teaching religion in secular schools. In spite of its evils, religion is prevalent in all we do as educators.
Religious paintings permeate the subject of art, religious people made strides in science—demonstrably in spite of their religious beliefs—religious music is the staple of the Western, African, and Native American musical traditions, religions are a staple of every human civilization. Not that any of this has any bearing on whether religion is true. Religion is simply integral to the human experience.
It may surprise you to hear that this author supports teaching religion in schools. Every classroom should break out the History Question Charts and discuss the beliefs of different civilizations. Children should learn about Aztecs sacrificing humans, about Buddhist Kamikaze pilots ramming their planes into boats, about Christians leading crusades against Muslims, and on and on.
The difference, of course, is that religion, all religions should be taught, and no one religion should be taught to be the “true” religion—setting aside the fact that “true religion” is an oxymoron. Advocating for one religion over any other would be tantamount to indoctrination.
In learning about all religions, children learn that religion is purely a mythological construct, a byproduct of human evolution, and nothing more. They learn that religion arose from the need for humans to believe in a higher power so as to explain what they didn’t understand. When lighting struck a preshistoric bush, those early humans ascribed the phenomenon to a god. As we learned about how lighting works, we dropped the belief in Thor.
Likely, human need to believe stems from our evolutionary ancestors’ desire to survive. A superstitious human walking by a bush 250,000 years ago and hearing a rustling in the bush might immediately think there was a lion in the bush and run. Whether a lion was in the bush or not, that human would survive to reproduce. Whereas, the more studious human, who investigated the rustling in search of an explanation would get eaten by the lion. Thus, superstitious, fearful people survived to pass on their genes to us. Hence: religion.
None of this is to say religious people are stupid or fearful. This author wants to be absolutely clear that he has nothing against religious people. Religious beliefs and their propagation are the targets of this article.
People can be religious if they want to. But when it comes to educating children, they must leave their religion at the door. Religion has no place in education. Children will always reach the correct conclusion if given the tools to observe reality in an unbiased manner, with a mind toward questioning everything rather than making up answers.
It’s no more imperative for a person to teach the tenants of their religion as it is for this author to teach the children Dungeons & Dragons.
In other words, offering children a healthy exposure to all beliefs ensures that they don’t pick just one, or take just one in particular to be true. The philosopher Daniel Dennett says it best in his book Breaking the Spell: children should be taught about all religions and customs from all human civilizations at all times. Because an informed public is the hallmark of democratic education.
As the setting sun drew its orange-pink shades over the dimming day, I found myself on the verge of sleep, lulled by the sound of the wheels and the slow rocking of the bus, when I was startled awake by Christian and his friends arguing in the seat in front of me. Curious, I poked my head in to ask what was up.
“Mr. Michael,” Christian gasped, “Santa Claus totally can’t be real.” “No?” “No way. Listen, even if he spent only five minutes at each house, in a 24-hour period that would only be about 250 houses. There are way more houses than that in Paris alone!”
As he scrambled to get the words out, his friends scribbled figures on napkins, trying to do the math. They looked up from their figures, laughing, giddy with the excitement that comes from discovering the truth, likely relieved to no longer be suffering from cognitive dissonance.
These children used math to come to the truth. They used their own skills of logic, reasoning, and simple long division to uncover the lie that the jolly fat man brings them presents. “It doesn’t matter, though. Santa Claus is still a fun story,” Christian reassured me. Cue the heartfelt rendition of “Santa Claus is Coming To Town” echoing throughout the bus.
Indeed, if nothing else, religions tell stories. There is nothing wrong with stories. Stories teach us things, stories keep us in line, stories help explain the world, serve to entertain us, or coerce us into certain behaviors. Secular educators can also tell stories, and for the same purposes. The harm comes when horrific religious stories are properted to be true.
In the end, we come back to the titular question of this article: what place does religion have in education?
The ethical, responsible educator can only answer the following. As information, as a mere historical comparative survey, as an antidote to a child’s indoctrination into any one particular religion, the teaching of religion, as mythology, as a human construct, as the byproduct of human evolution, holds an important place.
For helping the child to discover what’s true about the world, for helping her to gain critical thinking skills, for helping her to learn self-actualization and eschew appeals to authority over appeals to evidence, as a means to avoid faulty fallacious thinking, as a means toward fostering in them morality, and as a means to stave off abuse, the answer should be clear: in education, religion holds no place whatsoever.
Works cited for the claims in this article are available upon request.
This article is dedicated in loving memory to Samuel Paty, an educator whom I did not know personally. Mr. Paty was beheaded in Paris in October 2020 at the hands of Islamists for the crime of teaching critical thinking. May the physical stuff that made up Mr. Paty live on as it dissipates back into the universe, and may the beliefs of the Islamists who killed him die out forever at the hands of other responsible secular educators everywhere. Rest in peace, Mr. Paty.
I wrote an article recently for a journal in La Rippe, Switzerland that I thought I’d share with you. The article was made from a discarded chapter of the book Making Music in Montessori, about why we should teach music in our classrooms.
You can print, read, share, and distribute a PDF of the article here.
A great deal of people have the mathematical formula i + c = n emblazoned in their brain, where i = a musical instrument, c = children, and n = noise. As Mario Montessori wrote in his 1956 article about his mother’s music program, many adults believe children “should be seen and not heard” (Montessori 1956). Perhaps this explains why so many teachers avoid making music in their classrooms. For the children to work on music, they must make sound, and where else but in a Montessori classroom should the environment be sound-free, so the children can concentrate as they occupy themselves with their various activities?
Many teachers even balk at playing music in the background during in the work period, for fear the children won't be able to concentrate. Their fears are not unfounded. A study conducted by Mark Lemouse for HealthGuidance.org, found that people of all ages were more productive in an atmosphere of silence than in an atmosphere in which music was playing (Lemouse 2015). Perhaps because of this, music gets a bad rap in traditional classrooms; it requires making sound, and sound distracts.
But, to put it lightly, silence seldom prevails in Montessori classrooms. According to Phyllis Pottish-Lewis, “A perfectly functioning classroom should be noisy” (Pottish-Lewis 2014). In the Primary, the atmosphere buzzes with children moving, speaking, and going about their individual work. In the Elementary, the children’s conversations, their debates, and their collaborations often generate background noise.
Plus, studies about the perils of having music playing in the background while children work contradict each other. One study conducted in 2010 corroborated Lemouse’s findings. Researchers gave three groups of college students a reading comprehension test while music played in the background: one group listened to Hip Hop, another group listened to Classical, and the third group listened to no music. The study concluded that “the participants who scored the highest in the reading comprehension task were the control group who performed the reading task in silence” (Choi 2010).
Another study published online in Educational Studies, however, found that when calming music played in the background during children’s work it “led to better performance…when compared with a no-music condition” (Hallam, Price, Katsarou 2010).
With everyone contradicting each other about whether music affects or ruins children’s concentration, should you or shouldn’t you have music in your classroom?
The short answer; you must.
When you share music with your children, you create community, you develop in them all of the same skills as other academic pursuits like Math and Language, you provide opportunity for refining Grace & Courtesy, you help your children with emotional control and body regulation, and, most importantly, you have fun.
Merriam Webster defines community as “a group of [people] leading a common life according to a rule.” This is precisely what the children do when performing an authentic folk song or singing game together. For the length of a performance the children non-verbally agree to live by not just one, but a plethora of unspoken “rules” that govern their behavior to the benefit of everyone.
Some of the “rules”, such as “Use your best singing voice”, or “Keep your hands to yourself” come from the teacher as necessary to maintain discipline. But many of the “rules”, such as what movements to perform at what time, or when to lead and when to follow, arise naturally from the form and structure of the music and from the performance etiquette passed down from the generations of people who have performed the folk song or singing game before.
In a community of individuals, knowing and abiding by the “rules” is essential to the group’s survival. People refine their behaviors in order that everyone in the group has a pleasant experience. Because the above rules are inherent in music-making, and because music comes naturally to human beings, it follows that every musical experience gives children natural opportunities to practice community-building behaviors, such as interdependence, friendship, peaceful coexistence, and communication.
People in a community depend on one another. If a child refuses to join hands with another, or if he pulls on the other’s arms, or sings in a loud, disruptive voice, all of the children lose out on the benefits of the experience. Consequently, the child’s relationship to his companions changes over the course of a musical performance or singing game because “he needs his companions more; he approaches them confidently, he accepts and abides by their wishes” (Forrai 1998). When children make music, they depend on and learn to accept each other. This acceptance creates goodwill among the children as they enjoy the musical experience.
These feelings of goodwill and enjoyment lay the groundwork for lasting friendships. When a child finds in one of her companions a good dance partner, for example, she feels happy having found someone she can trust, someone who matches her movements and enthusiasm. In that way, “friendships are formed” (Forrai 1998). When the child is called upon during a song or singing game to be that good partner, she approaches her companions with amicability and confidence. Not only does each child find friendship among his peers, but the whole group develops a positive relationship with their teacher as they share the excitement of the game (Forrai 1998).
As the children form friendships during a singing game, the relationship between the individual children and the group takes on a special meaning. When child participates effectively, her newfound skills give her a sense of belonging. At the same time, the other children develop greater respect for that child if she “can sing in tune and is a good organizer” (Forrai 1998).
Those who rebel against the will of the collective, on the other hand, by walking the wrong way or singing in a funny voice are easily corrected and redirected by the group in accordance with the demands of the song. During music games it’s easy to get positive feedback when the child participates as a valued member. Others smile at him, sing with him, harmonize with him and imitate his movements. The child’s impact and role in the group is clear. In sum, “the child who has enjoyed taking part in an activity easily finds his place in the group and is happy to play with the other children” (Forrai 1998).
It turns out that the key to building community and the key to making music are one and the same: communication. Children learn valuable communication skills when they take part in musical activities.
As the teacher explains the rules of a song or game, the children practice listening and following directions. Often, they have to do so at the spur of the moment, such as when a “caller” calls out motions to perform during a square dance. Children watch people and imitate their gestures during imitation games. Whenever children are called upon to switch partners, they alternate between taking charge and leading or stepping back and letting themselves be led.
Through music games that involve role play, the child’s “emotional world becomes richer, more varied, deeper” (Forrai, 1998) and he learns to express his feelings. Give him enough experiences to play different characters and express different emotions, and before you know it the child will lay the corner stone for community-building: empathy.
Be that as it may, people often emphasize music’s importance in affective terms and forget that “music develops the child’s intellectual faculties. [It] brings the child’s cognitive abilities into play” (Forrai 1998). Who hasn’t run into this bias before? A consultant or administrator walks into a busy classroom where music is thriving and asserts that the musical activity, although undeniably fun, was ultimately distracting to those children who were trying to engage in “academic” work. It’s a cliché among educational circles of all stripes to draw a line between “the arts” and “academia.”
The fact is that music is academic. Music exercises more parts of the brain than almost any other single activity. Just listening to music helps children, especially those with learning difficulties, to access parts of their brains that function poorly or not at all (Foran 2009). Work on music achieves many of the same cognitive goals as any of the other work in the classroom.
Specifically, music helps develop the child’s memory (Forrai 1998). While work in music may not help the child to memorize his math facts per se, a math equation has but one solution, whereas a song has a melody, a structure, a series of gestures, and multiple stanzas full of words for the child to hold in his mind, not to mention a whole host of memories associated with the joy of performing or listening to the song.
According to an article by Lucille M. Foran, “Research has shown that children with high levels of music training have an increased ability to manipulate information in working and long-term memory” (Forai 2009). Indeed, when a child learns a song, he memorizes a rich variety of complex stimuli. In a call-and-response, or echo song, a child’s short-term memory is exercised as he recalls the words, melody and gestures that he heard only moments before. In a larger scale song, such as a folk ballad, the child’s long-term memory comes into play to help him learn multiple stanzas.
Some song structures require the child to memorize multiple stanzas as well as a refrain. When a child revisits a song at a later time, he remembers not only the words, melody, and movements of the song, but he also might remember who he played the song with, how much fun he had playing it, even what the weather was like when he played the song. Even babies as young as 8 months have shown the ability to recognize a familiar piece of music after a two-week delay (Parlakain Lerner 2010).
What’s more, songs can be presented in different forms to trigger the child’s memory. You could take a familiar folk song and hum the tune, tap out the rhythm, or sing a little bit of the song and that would be enough to spark the child’s memory. Indeed, “as a consequence of an organized aesthetic experience, a single rhythm, movement or word may recall [the] entire song” (Forrai 1998).
Plus, when the child hears that single rhythm, melody, or sees that movement, he can remember a wide range of things about not only the song itself, such as its key or the structure, but also his experiences performing it. When was the last time you remembered all those things when presented with a math fact?
In addition to developing the child’s memory, singing and performing musical games and songs stimulates the child’s imagination, especially when child is immersed in musical situations in which he acts out roles and creates an imaginary world (Forrai 1998).
The game that accompanies the Anglo-American folk song “Oats and Beans and Barley,” for instance, calls for one child to stand in the middle of a circle of singing children and mimic the movements in the lyrics. Everyone uses their imagination as the child in the middle takes on the role of the farmer, scattering his imaginary seeds and standing with his thumbs tucked into his imaginary overalls (the apparently universal gesture for “farmer”).
During a game played to the tune “Green Grows the Willow Tree,” the children stand in a scattered formation pretending to be trees while one child wanders among them. When the wandering child touches one of the “trees”, that tree morphs into a human companion for the child, and the two sit on a bench and watch the rushes sway by the river, until the first child herself become a tree, leaving the second child alone to wander the “forest” and repeat the cycle. This game invites the children to not only take on a role, but to change roles, all the while using their imaginations to transform the everyday world of the classroom into a rich, fantastic magical forest.
At the same time that music develops the child’s memory and imagination, it also enhances thought processes, such as recognizing differences, logical thinking, pattern recognition, and math skills. During his musical experiences, for example, the child encounters concepts in opposite pairs like fast and slow, loud and soft, long and short. Comparing opposing pairs aids in the formation of concepts as the child observes, comments on, and analyzes their differences (Forrai 1998). The ability to perceive the parts of a song which are same or different helps the child recognize patterns, which is critical for building early math and early reading skills (Parlakain Lerner 2010).
When the child is confronted by the inherent logic of the song or game and must conform to its unspoken rules and etiquette, or when he perceives the structure of a folk song or piece of music, and holds it in his mind, he also develops logical thinking. A child refines his logical thinking and reasoning skills when he modifies the words in well-known songs or asks other children to fill in the blanks in singing, such as in the song “[Dante] had a little [fish], whose fins were bright and orange” (Parlakain Lerner 2010). Further, “Current brain research reveals that the audition of [music] may increase spatial intelligence or the ability to form accurate mental images of physical objects” (Marchak 1998).
It’s well known that music benefits the brain because the form and structure of the sounds and the pattern of the melodies suit our mathematical mind. Many songs, for example, include counting, such as “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe”, “Five Little Monkeys”, and “The Animals Came in Two by Two”. They rhythm and repetition in songs helps children to recognize number patterns (Parlakain Lerner 2010).
Speaking of the mathematical mind, music also paves the way for abstract thought. When a child perceives tones as occurring on a vertical high-low spatial axis, when he talks about the “beginning” or “ending” of a song, when he describes fast, active sound wave vibrations as “high”, he is using abstract thinking skills (Forrai 1998). Because, unlike other arts, music doesn’t exist until it is recreated by the child and perceived by the other children, the child and his audience must form an abstract understanding of the piece being sung, composed, or created.
But if you ask which area of development music benefits the most, the majority of people will mention language skills. “By engaging the cerebellum, the motor cortex, and the frontal loves [of the brain], music…plays an important role in language development” (Foran 2009). Music helps children with language and literacy skills in multiple ways. For one, music gives children an easy-to-enter window into practicing language and deciphering meaning (Parlakain Lerner 2010).
Long Anglo- and African-American folk ballads, such as “Sweet Betsy From Pike,” contain colloquial words and references from the American pioneer days, inviting children to make meaning from words used in a different time and culture. The Spanish folk dance “El Gato y el Raton” allows children the opportunity to travel and immerse themselves in a different language and culture.
Offering music in a child’s home language supports dual language development, especially during the first six years, when the child is in her sensitive period for language (Parlakain Lerner 2010). Even singing in languages unfamiliar to the child, or singing nonsense songs, helps the child to make meaning from words, especially when the melody or the music contains a certain emotion.
In the lovely, minor-key song “La Mar Estaba Serena,” a group of sailors find themselves trapped at sea adrift on a raft during a rainstorm. Singing the sad melody and acting out the part of freezing castaways, the children can’t help but decipher the meaning of the song’s lyrics.
Even rhyming songs benefit the children’s language skills. When children learn to sing and participate in songs that rhyme, they develop phonemic awareness, which is how well a child can hear, recognize and use different sounds. Children who experience regular participation in music that rhymes are able to distinguish different sounds and phonemes and are therefore more likely to develop stronger literacy skills over time (Parlakain Lerner 2010).
What’s more, because the child must be an active participant in the experience of making or listening to music, his general cognitive development is enhanced. He is an active learner, throwing mind, body, and senses into the song or game. Indeed, the best part about music is that it generates feelings that spur the child on to further activity.
Dr. Montessori said that “Knowledge can best be given where there is eagerness to learn” (Montessori 1991). Work in music definitely sparks the child’s eagerness to learn. Whether his musical experience involves dancing and singing or just listening, the child wants to repeat these musical experiences and to relive his enjoyment by singing to himself, organizing games, suggesting songs to the teacher, or inviting his classmates to sing (Forrai 1998).
The child finds inspiration in Cosmic Stories about composers or about the history of music and wants to listen to that composer’s music, or create his own original music. If a piano lives in the environment, the child wants to touch it, to play it, to experience the enjoyment of making sounds herself. Music becomes an academic discipline that the child wants to experience again and again.
Yes, you read that right: a piano. You may be thinking that having a piano in the classroom proves a recipe for chaos. After all, from an adult mindset, a piano is an easy outlet for a precocious child.
The bored child, after all, can press lots of keys down at once, bang on the keys with her fists, elbows, or forearms, or play “Heart And Soul” until everyone in the room becomes driven to distraction. A piano makes sound, and sound is distracting.
But by bringing a piano into your classroom, you send even the most precocious among your children the message, “I trust you. You will care for this musical instrument and use it responsibly. You will use it to beautify our classroom with wonderful, not distracting, sounds.”
After all, every object that we add to our environment comes with freedoms and responsibilities. Why should a piano—or any other musical instrument for that matter—be any different? As Plato said, “The most effective kind of education is that the child should play among lovely things.” That big glossy black box with its pretty white and black keys, each of which rewards the child with the instant gratification of a beautiful sound, rules the Kingdom of Lovely Things.
“Ah,” sayeth the voice in your head, “but handling such a fine object responsibly is too great a challenge for a child.” Answereth this author: “A child needs opportunities to rise to that challenge.”
The piano is that opportunity.
In order for your small practice society of children to meet the challenge of having a piano, however, they must first recognize that the piano carries with it certain freedoms and responsibilities. Suppose any child has the freedom, for example, to choose the piano as a work choice. The responsibility that balances that freedom is that the child must actually work.
Work at the piano might mean bringing in literature from the child’s lessons outside of school and practicing her repertoire, or composing at the piano for follow-up. Work could also mean playing a duet with a friend. Maybe a child wants to play the right-hand part for “Heart and Soul” and teach another child the left hand part. This also constitutes work.
Playing random noises, mindlessly repeating the same song, acting silly at the piano with a partner, however, are not responsible uses of the children’s freedom to play the piano.
Second Plane children, with their sensitivity to fairness and justice (Travis 1999), embrace this distinction. Once the children understand their freedoms and responsibilities, they can work to develop for the classroom some rules of piano etiquette.
Etiquette for the piano begins with the question of when the piano could be played. The children could establish a rule that anyone could play piano during the work cycle, provided it doesn’t disturb anyone. As soon as the piano gets to be distracting, a child may walk up to the pianist and politely ask him or her to close the dust cover. If that happens, the child playing piano has to stop, no matter what, and both children have to find other work. This bit of etiquette will likely come from the children after a fruitful discussion.
In fact, the children love opportunities to come up with new rules of etiquette. This should come as no surprise. After all, in Montessori environments “[The children] often establish their own rules, their own code of ethical behavior…”(Travis 1999). This is as true in music as it is in any other area of the classroom. Other rules of etiquette the children came up with can center around how loudly the piano should be played, how many people should sit at the piano at one time, etc.
So, you see, as adults, we shouldn’t fear pianos in our classrooms, for along with the piano comes an opportunity for the children to discuss, debate, and craft a whole set of new rules for their tiny society.
It’s one thing to establish etiquette for the piano, but children in the Second Plane will also need to know the reasons why such etiquette should be in place. The reasons to have piano etiquette ought to be simple. Allyn Travis writes, “Sometimes the reason a certain courtesy is expected is as simple as the fact that this is how we show respect for another human being (Travis 1999).”
Respect with regard to the piano means making sounds that are beautiful, sounds that blend into the atmosphere of the classroom, sounds that sit in the background of the colorful tapestry of sounds in the classroom, sounds that don't distract or annoy the other children. When a child plays the piano during the work period, like a violinist on the Esterhazy estate accompanying one of the prince’s feasts, she shows utmost respect by humbly providing a service, lending her talents to the ambiance in the room.
Further, she models deference to the other children and inspires the other children to want to play. She shows her respect for the other children by being mindful of how her music affects people’s work. If another child comes to her to ask her to stop playing, she shows respect by gracefully complying. If a child is already playing the piano when she wants to play, she shows respect for that other child, and for the rest of the children, by waiting her turn.
When children are aware of the reasons why they must comply with classroom etiquette, when they understand this level of respect, they rise to it. What was before just a classroom with a piano transforms into a hallowed space where children make music to benefit their own “spirit” and the “spirit” of every child in the room.
Should the children sit down at the piano to play and renounce the rules of etiquette, as many adults convince themselves they will, we can take comfort in knowing that their “spirit” is not completely in danger, for, in Montessori we have some quick lessons that serve as provenders of the “spirit" which we call Grace & Courtesy.
Once the children establish etiquette for the piano, you can design a unique set of Grace & Courtesy lessons specific to the piano. Such as:
• How to invite a friend to play the piano with you.
• How to accept or decline such an invitation.
• How to quietly raise and lower the dust cover.
• How to quietly position the bench.
• How to get help positioning the bench.
• How to ask someone to play more quietly or to stop playing.
• How to accept someone’s request that you stop playing.
• How to thank someone for playing piano for our community.
These Grace & Courtesy lessons “catch the child’s interest…using humor and role playing. If [you] show the children through a funny little skit what happens when the [undesirable] behavior is carried out, [you] can catch their attention and involve them in thinking about how the situation could be handled differently so that the results turn out more positive for everyone" (Travis 1999). In other words, “[You] role play doing something incorrectly and have the children show [you] how to do it properly” (Travis 2009).
At the piano, these little skits can be quite funny. One teacher used to demonstrate how not to play the piano by teasing his bouffant into a wild, unruly mess that he and the children eventually dubbed his “composer hair.” Then he sat bolt upright on the bench, tucked in his upper lip, jutted out his chin, made a face like he was sniffing manure, and banged out the most abrasive, outrageous, deafening chord he could manage. When the children’s laughter died down, they articulated the drawbacks of such behavior.
These little humorous role play lessons are not the only times when children can learn Grace & Courtesy, because they play an important part in many of the songs, singing games, and role plays that the children can perform together. When two lines of partners dance together in a French folk song like “Sur le Pont d’Avignon,” the niceties of bowing and curtseying must be observed.
When a child takes a partner in the Anglo-American folk song “Bluebird, Bluebird,” or bumps hips, shake hands, and hug during the African-American song “Shoo-Rah,” they learn to treat each other with respect and kindness, to give and take, to be a leader or accept someone’s leadership, to abided by each other’s wishes, and to go with the flow.
In short, music affords the children wonderful opportunities to “develop kindness, respect, humanity, good will, altruism, mercy, charity—all synonyms of the word grace—as well as consideration, favor, dispensation, indulgence, service, privilege—synonyms of the word courtesy” (Travis 1999).
In addition to the benefits discussed above, performing music supports children’s ability to self-regulate. Consider a game called “Grizzly Bear,” in which a circle of children run screaming in all directions after they sneak toward and wake a child pretending to be a sleeping grizzly bear in the middle. You wouldn’t think a game like that could accomplish anything but rile the children up. But to see how even a game like “Grizzly Bear” is beneficial to the children’s ability to manage their emotions, control their bodies, and develop valuable social skills, let’s agree on what “self-regulation” means and what it looks like.
Self-regulation, the term that refers to a child's ability to manage “one’s emotional state and physical needs” (Parlakain Lerner 2010), “is critical to a child’s mental and physical health. Healthy emotional regulation is connected with higher academic achievement, lower levels of negative emotionality, higher levels of empathy, and higher levels of social competence” (Foran 2009). On the other hand, failure to self-regulate has been connected with later diagnoses of major mental illnesses, including psychosis, borderline personality disorder, and drug and alcohol abuse, among others (Foran 2009).
According to an article by Kate E. Williams, the skills children need for self-regulation come in three varieties: emotional regulation, attentional regulation, and executive functions. Emotional regulation skills encompass the extent to which a child can move back and forth between heightened emotional states and states of equilibrium, or calm. Children who can easily find calm and composure after being excited or upset have learned emotional regulation skills. Attentional regulation skills are required for children to proceed with a task when there are distractions present. A child who can stick with a difficult task or return to the same task after taking a break has good attentional regulation skills.
Considered to be the higher part of the human self-regulatory system, executive functions control a child’s behavior and cognition. Executive functions are especially relevant to music because they consist of the specific processes of memory, inhibition, and mental flexibility. You’re already read about the benefits of music on short-term and long-term memory. Working memory is a child’s ability to actively maintain information in short-term storage for use in executing a specific task. Children display working memory skills when they perform an ordered series of movements, such as patting the knees, clapping once, and then clapping their partner’s hands.
Inhibition refers to a child’s ability to inhibit behavior as required at a particular moment. A child with good inhibition skills can wait for a cue before touching an instrument, refrain from calling out randomly during a song or game, or wait for a cue before touching a body part during, for example, a game of Simon Says.
A child displaying flexibility can switch her attention or cognitive set between distinct or related aspects of a given object or task. A flexible child can, for example, hear a melody and focus on the words, ignoring the melody, then hear the same melody and focus on the melodic contour, ignoring the words (Williams Lewin 2014).
As it turns out, during a performance of “Grizzly Bear,” the children exercise self-regulation skills in all of the above areas. After the children run screaming from the grizzly bear trying to tag them, they must calm down again in order to select a new grizzly bear and proceed to quietly sneak up on it. A child committing to the role of a sleeping grizzly bear while all of the other children sneak toward you trying to suppress giggles displays attention regulation skills.
In a performance of “Grizzly Bear” the children develop their executive functions as well. They work on inhibition, for example, when they commit to their roles and resist the urge to make extra movements or do something to inhibit the game. Singing the melody of the song once, being chased, calming down, and then singing the melody again requires the children to flex their working memory muscles. And finally, switching attention from the entire group singing the song’s melody, to running from the grizzly bear, and then focusing back on the whole group, as well as keeping track at all times of where everyone is in the song, was an exercise in flexibility.
You can see that active music participation increases children’s self-regulatory functioning (Williams Lewin 2014). Studies corroborate this assertion. Children in a study conducted in 2011 by A. Winsler and colleagues were given a battery of tasks that required them to demonstrate self-regulatory skills such as waiting, slowing down, and initiating or suppressing a response. The group of 3-to-4-year-old children receiving weekly Kindermusik music and movement classes showed better self-regulation skills than those not enrolled in any structured early music classes (Williams Lewin 2014). Furthermore, arts-enriched preschool environments that include music have been found to improve emotional regulation skills in low-income children when compared to non-arts enriched programs (Williams Lewin 2014).
In addition to self-regulatory skills, participation in music helps children with so many other much-needed emotional, body, and cognitive development skills. Below, you’ll find a breakdown of the additional emotional, body, and cognitive development skills that the children practice during a single musical performance.
Emotional, Body, and Cognitive Development Skills Practiced in a single Singing-game Performance
EMOTIONAL, BODY CONTROL, AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT SKILLS PRACTICED IN A SINGLE SINGING-GAME PERFORMANCE
Socio-emotional Domain
socio-emotional skills
The children share with each other the experience of singing, moving, and playing roles together. They encourage their fellow participants by chasing and tagging and committing to the role. They communicate with each other, helping each other be aware of where the group is in the song.
understanding emotions
The performance evokes feelings of joy, of fun and connection with their fellow classmates.
cooperation and relationship building
The performance is a team effort. Every child has a specific role that contributes to the success and enjoyment of the experience. All during the piece, children switch from actively singing and moving to running and being tagged. The children develop friendly attitudes toward each other as they appreciate each other’s performances, cooperate, and drop their inhibitions.
Self-esteem, self-confidence, self-efficacy
Playing a grizzly bear, the children develop a sense of confidence as they express movements and ideas in front of the others. They feel that they are “capable”, and “smart” as they sing with one another within the fabric of the piece. They feel that they have something valuable to contribute to the performance.
sharing and taking turns
The children take turns being chased and being the grizzly bear. They accept their fate when they are tagged. They enjoy being the center of attention as the grizzly bear and they enjoy blending in with the crowd when they are waking the grizzly bear.
cultural awareness
Before the performance, the children are given a brief story of the history of the song and its cultural origins.
Physical (motor) Domain
gross motor development
The children use the muscles in their legs and trunk to run, to imitate the grizzly bear sleeping, to jump up and chase the others. They express their joy by clapping and calling out.
fine motor development
The children use the muscles in their lips and mouth to sing the song’s melody. They use the muscles in their fingers to hold each other’s hands while creeping up to the grizzly bear, or to make shushing motions by raising an extended index finger to their lips.
balance
The children move their bodies to the music, stepping to the beat as they sneak up to the grizzly bear.
body awareness
The children are careful not to collide with others as they run from the grizzly. They respect each other’s personal space.
bilateral coordination (crossing the midline)
The children may clap to the beat, which requires crossing the midline to join the hands together. Percussion instruments, such as a guiro, triangle, or tambourine can also be added to the song.
Cognitive Domain
counting
One child “counts in” to begin the performance, saying “A-one, a-two, a-one, two, three, four…” The children count internally as they step to the beat of the song. They count how many steps to walk in a circle with joined hands before turning inward and walking toward the grizzly bear in the middle.
steady beat
The entire group agrees on the pulse of the basic beat. Children may play the beat on percussion instruments, pat the beat on their knees, or clap their hands to the beat.
memory
The children hold in their minds the melody of the song. They form a mental impression of the structure of the song. The performance creates joyous memories. The children sing the melody after the performance is over.
discrimination or observation of differences
The children perceive the loudness of the moment when everyone shouts “Mad!” or softness of the moments when everyone is sneaking up to the grizzly bear. They perceive differences in the timbre and tone of the various instruments used during the performance.
pretend play and symbolic thinking
The children take on the role of “grizzly bear” or “doomed camper” as they either pretend to sleep or sneak around in a cave trying not to wake the bear.
With so many prosocial and cognitive benefits of music making, it’s a wonder more Montessori teachers aren’t making music in their classrooms.
Recall that the Montessori curriculum comprises “the whole universe, its furnishings, its inhabitants, and all of their stories” (Travis 2009). Music, the language of all human beings everywhere, is a part of that universe. We can’t leave it out. In her book To Educate the Human Potential, Montessori writes, “we see no limit to what must be offered to the child, for his will be an immense field of chosen activity” (Montessori 1991). This all-encompassing approach is what Montessori called Cosmic Education. Let’s briefly review what we mean by Cosmic Education.
In a lecture on given in 1976, Mario Montessori sums up his mother’s plan for Cosmic Education. He says, “We believe that in the cosmos there is harmony; that everything there is in it, both the animate and inanimate, have collaborated in the creation of our globe, correlating in doing this, their single tasks. But we think that among the innumerable agents which participated in this creation man has had and has a very important task” (Montessori 1976).
From this statement we can glean two important things. First, that everything that exists, from the tiniest quantum particle to the most massive black hole, contributes to help the universe subsist and is, therefore, interconnected. Second, that within that interconnectedness, human beings have a very special place. Perhaps, even, human beings have an even higher place than any other agent of creation in the universe. Mario says, “[Man] has detached himself from nature to create—with his work—something above it, a supranatura” (Montessori 1976).
So, an important component of Maria Montessori’s plan of Cosmic Education is to make the child aware of the interconnectedness of all things and of human being’s special role in the shaping of not only the make-up of the universe, but also its fate. I can think of no better subject than music for accomplishing these aims.
If “The trick with Cosmic Education is to highlight how the subjects are interconnected and interlinked” (Travis 2009), then when it comes to music our task is easy. Music is intimately intertwined with all of the other subject areas in our curriculum.
I’ve already mentioned above music’s connection with language and mathematics, but what about history? When we think about composers, performers, and musicians that have come before us, we explore their stories in order to interpret their music. What’s more, music carries with it the sounds of another time, another culture. All music, whether it’s Gregorian Chant or Balinese Gamelan, transmits the sounds and emotions of its era or its culture across time to our ears. When we hear a pentatonic scale plinked out on a koto, we are transmitted to ancient Japan, when we listen to a Bach fugue oozing out of a pipe organ, we can almost feel the high, cold stone walls of the cathedral surrounding us. Music’s link to history is obvious.
Is it a stretch to say music is linked to Geometry? Not at all. If we consider a string, and divide that string in different places, upon plucking it, we find that it resonates at different pitches. Now imagine that that string is a line, and the distances between the points on that line create ratios that represent different musical intervals. The ratio of an octave, for example, is 2:1. In other words, divide a string in half and you get an octave. The ancient Greeks discovered this. It’s almost like magic.
Of course, there’s no magic in it, it’s just the way our wonderful universe works. Is it some kind of sorcery that the interval of a fifth, called perfect, has a ratio of 3:2, which corresponds to the Greek Golden Ratio? The ancient Greeks didn’t think so. Whole structures in music are based on the Golden Ratio. Chopin built his Etudes and Nocturnes around it. Many pieces of music climax two-thirds of the way through. This is the Golden Ratio. An octave can be thought of as a perfect fifth plus a perfect fourth. Once again: Golden Ratio. We also see geometry in the construction of musical instruments. In fact, the geometric shape of the interior of a musical instrument, whether cylindrical or conical, has a deep impact on the instrument’s timbre. Consider the difference between the sound of a flute, which has a cylindrical bore, and a trumpet, which has a conical bore.
What about biology? Can we find a link between music and biology? Indubitably. Musical instruments are made of different kinds of wood, each of which resonates slightly differently, producing different sounds. The sound board of a piano is a thin sheet of wood. When a hammer strikes a string, the sound board picks up on the string’s vibration and, because it's much bigger and can move a greater volume of air, amplifies the sound. Soundboards are often made of spruce, cedar, or rosewood. Guitars, mandolins, violins, and lutes employ soundboards.
Biology is also a source of inspiration for many musicians of the Romantic era. Beethoven, though technically a Classical composer, found inspiration for his Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 6) in nature. The symphony tells the story of an artist waking up in the countryside and going for a stroll alongside a brook. The first movement sets the mood and the scene, while the second movement describes all of the sounds and impressions of a babbling brook. In the next movement a storm comes and breaks up a gathering of country folk before the storm passes and everything is cheerful once again.
Many pieces of music were inspired by nature. Olivier Messiaen incorporated bird calls into his work. Camille Saint-Saëns wrote his famous Carnival of the Animals, with its beautiful Swan. From Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, to Debussy’s La Mer (The Sea), nature abounds in music.
Art and music are intimately connected as well. When we describe tones we often talk in terms of colors. We call a whole genre of music “The Blues.” Many of the most famous musicians, such as Duke Ellington or John Lennon, were also visual artists in their own right. Ellington, in particular, loved to incorporate colors into the names of his compositions, such as “Mood Indigo”, “Black and Tan Fantasy”, and “Magenta Haze” (Venezia 1995).
An entire movement in visual art called Impressionism, in which artists eschewed structure in their pictures and instead sought to capture a particular mood or a particular light, was imitated in music by French composers like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel, though the former hated having his music described as “Impressionist”. The comparison isn’t entirely unfair, though, as Debussy’s music rejects tonal structure in favor of drifting, aimless sounds that give us an impression of feeling and light.
Musicians often find inspiration in visual art. One of Debussy’s most famous pieces of music, La Mer, is said to have been inspired by one of the most recognizable images in Japanese art: The Great Wave of Kanazawa. The Russian composer Modest Mussourgsky wrote his Pictures at an Exhibition about a spectator walking through a gallery during an exhibition of his late friend’s art. Each section of Mussourgsky’s piece depicts a different painting in the exhibition, and all the sections are linked by a melody depicting the spectator strolling from one painting to the next. Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote his famous Isle of the Dead after viewing a painting of the same name by Arnold Böcklin. A more modern example is Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park With George, a play inspired by Georges-Pierre Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Grand Jatte.
In addition to being inspired by visual art, music notation can itself be visual art. Traditional music notation, with its pretty black and white stemmed ovals and its waves and contours, is pretty enough, but in the 20th century, composers began to experiment with other ways to get their ideas across. Instead of notes on a staff, composers used shapes, colors, lines, or combinations of all three to create visually arresting scores that, although they “made life difficult indeed…for composers and conductors” (Evarts 1968), were compelling to look at.
As new sounds, such as electronic tape and synthesizers, were incorporated into the orchestra, so there arose new methods of notating those sounds. Compositions by John Cage, Steve Reich, Brian Eno, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, among others, are just as notable for the graphic layout of their scores as they are for the sounds they represent (Stamp 2013).
In an article in the art and music journal Leonardo from 1968, John Evarts writes of the musical notation of his contemporaries, “Perhaps within a few years these picturesque squiggles, graphs, and fantasies will be considerably more admired for their visual appeal than for the music they were intended to communicate” (Evarts 1968). How prophetic! Some galleries show exhibitions of graphically notated musical scores. Back in 1986, the Serpentine Gallery exhibited musical scores by Stockhausen, Cage, Duchamp, and others in a show called Eye Candy: The Graphic Art of New Musical Notation. Music and art go hand in hand.
You might think it difficult to find a link to music and Geography, but a consideration of what Geography means in a Montessori classroom will make the link apparent. Under the umbrella of “Geography” we have, for one thing, the workings of the universe and the formation of the earth and our solar system. Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher and mathematician was interested in music. He suggested that each planet in the solar system, while spinning, emitted a unique musical note. Put together, these notes emanating from the planets make a musical scale (Marchak 1999).
Other musicians, like Gustav Holst, who composed the symphonic piece The Planets, were fascinated with our solar system. Here on earth, music existed long before human beings thought to organize it. Nicole Marchak, in her article The Grace of Music postulates that music probably evolved “from essential rhythms of the natural world”. She assumes that “homo sapiens had the ability to make noises through the larynx…for the simple pleasure of being in tune with the sounds of the natural world such s crackling twigs, rustling leaves, babbling brooks, roaring rivers, and animal cries” (Marchak 1999). All of this speaks to the physical universe being an inspiration for, and a catalyst for the invention of music.
When we think of Geography we think of science, and there is wonder and fascination in the science of music. In fact, from the time of Pythagoras, music and science have been intertwined. Music is made of sound waves emanating from a vibrating body, traveling through the air, and reaching our eardrums. Sound waves travel through air in the same way waves travel through water. Sound is like light in some ways, because both are waves that emanate from a definite source. But unlike light, sound can’t travel in a vacuum. Children find great pleasure in the study of the science of sound.
As interesting as it is to explore music’s link to other areas of our curriculum, thinking about homo sapiens brings me back to my other point about music and its link to Cosmic Education: music is a uniquely human achievement.
Sound is a natural phenomenon. Other animals perceive sound in their environments, but it takes our human brains to organize sound into music. To do this, human beings make use of their three unique gifts: the imagination, the hand, and love (Travis 2009). Thinking back to those early human beings, “at some point sound evolved into speech with the growth of the human brain and the formation of groups of humans” (Marchak 1999).
Probably concurrent with speech, human beings started making sounds with objects or on their bodies. Eventually, they began to use their imaginations to envision devices that might make different sounds. They envisioned things they could beat on, blow through, or pluck. With their hands, they built early musical instruments. We know this happened because, music has always been a part of “the heritage transmitted by all human groups all over the world” (Marchak 2009).
As music developed, human beings began to figure out ways to write it down. Composers from the Greeks, to the Medieval period, to modern times, notated and passed on their music for others to enjoy. They held organized sounds in their minds and used their hands to write them down.
Therein lies the love. Out of love for humanity, composers of wrote down their music so as to transmit it to all of us who came later. Thanks to their efforts, we can listen to their beautiful music and share in their feelings. What’s more, these composers invite us to participate in the music. For, music doesn’t exist until we create it either by conceptualizing it in our minds, or by recreating it.
Unlike a piece of art, which exists without our efforts, a piece of music must be performed and heard in order to have shape. Imagine if that were true with visual art. A painting like Picasso’s Guernica would not be a painting at all, but a set of instructions on how to paint it. What is a musical score but a blueprint, a set of instructions for how to create a piece of music?
Composers drew us these maps, gave us these gifts, out of that human love that extends beyond time and space. In a way, the organization of the sounds of the natural world, the harnessing of sounds and the building of musical instruments so humankind can make and combine all manner of different sounds represents another aspect of the supranatura—the structure that mankind has built over nature—that Mario Montessori talks about. Music fits in with Cosmic Education because it is another testament to humankind’s triumph over nature.
Having established that music is a vital component of Cosmic Education because of its link to all subjects and because it is a unique testament to the achievement of human beings, we see that it can’t be left out. If we’re really implementing Montessori’s plan of Cosmic Education, then music is mandatory. “The presentations that the elementary teacher must be prepared to give must encompass all subjects, since Dr. Montessori’s aspiration was to give the older child the universe. Children should be working in the areas of biology, geography, geometry, history, mathematics, language, art, and music” (Pottish-Lewis 2014).
Montessori teachers transmit Cosmic Education through presentations, lessons, and “by giving story after story after story after story” (Stephenson 2002). Stories about music, about composers, about famous compositions, and about musical instruments and ensembles, inspire the child and spur her toward Great Work. When we tell these stories, we can make connections to other areas of the curriculum. We can appeal to the elementary child’s characteristics and get him fired up to learn more. Through stories about music, along with the other stories we tell, the child can begin to wonder about his contribution to humanity and his place in the universe.
Suppose someone were to write a rebuttal to this article, replacing the word “why” in the title with “don’t” and “imperative” in the subtitle with “detriment.” The article could be buttressed with studies that support the counter argument that music is a waste of time, that music causes chaos in children, that it’s superfluous, that it’s a distraction, and that it is in no way as important as the other more “academic” subjects. Even if this person could amass enough studies to shoot down the idea of music being beneficial, there is one thing that even the most pro-silence study could never deny: music is fun.
The smiles on the children’s faces when performing folk songs and singing games can’t be ignored by even the most cynical, most die-hard anti-arts educators. The children become absorbed in their collective excitement at making music together. They unite into one, 30-headed joyful being, moving, singing, playing instruments, and experiencing the same joy of music making that human beings for millennia have experienced.
The word music comes from either the Greek word musike, or the Latin musica, and it refers to the Muses, who, through their art, had the power to banish all grief and sorrow. Music is for communication of our spirits, of emotion beyond words. Mario Montessori wrote that “[music] mirrors the sentiments of men when joys and sorrows overflowed channels of expression offered by language” (Marchak 1999). He adds that music allows the [child] to “thrill” with other [children] and to be “transported by a flood of sound that fuse it with other [children] similarly uplifted” (Montessori 1956). Dr. Montessori herself initiated the inclusion of musical experience in her vision of the prepared environment (Marchak 1998).
After all, music, being important in daily living, good for brain development, helpful in improving emotional and body regulation and the mathematical mind, and, above all, fun, ought to be a vital component of the Montessori curriculum. If it’s good enough for the founder of our practice, it’s good enough for us.
Ae-Na Choi, M. S. L. a. J.-S. L. (2010). Group Music Intervention Reduces Aggression and Improves Self-esteem in Children with Highly Aggressive Behavior: A Pilot Controlled Trial. Advance Access Publication.
Evarts, J. (1968). The New Musical Notation: A Graphic Art? Leonard, 1(4), 405-412.
Foran, L. M. (2009). Listening to Music: Helping Children Regulate Their Emotions and Improve Learning in the Classroom. Educational Horizons, 88(1), 51-58.
Forrai, K. (1998). Music In Preschool (J. Sinor, Trans. Second Revised and Expanded Edition ed.). Fitzgibbon, Australia: Clayfield School of Music.
Hallam, Susan, J. P., and Georgia Katsarou. (2010). The Effects of Background Music on Primary Children’s Performance. Educational Studies, Volume 28(Issue 2).
Lemouse, M. (2015). Will Background Music Affect Your Concentration? Retrieved from http://www.healthguidance.org/entry/11767/1/Will-Background-Music-Improve-Your-Concentration.html
Marchak, N. (1999). The Grace of Music. Grace and Courtesy: a Human Responsibility. AMI/USA Conference (Oak Brook, IL, July 23-28, 1998), Rochester, NY.
Montessori, M. (1956). Man’s Spiritual Expressions: Music & Language. Retrieved from http://montessorinuggets.blogspot.com/p/mans-spiritual-expressions-language-and.html
Parlakain, R., Lerner, Claire. (2010). Beyond Twinkle, Twinkle. Young Children.
Pottish-Lewis, P. (2011). Elementary Classroom Management: How to Implement Cosmic Education. New York, NY: AMI/USA.
Pottish-Lewis, P. (2011). The Elementary Child as a Member of Society: How through understanding and implementation of Montessori principles an adult can manage an elementary classroom to fully aid the child’s development.Rochester, NY: AMI/USA.
Pottish-Lewis, P. (2012). Music: Beethoven. Association Montessori Internationale - Elementary Alumni Association Journal.
Pottish-Lewis, P. (2014). The Artistry of a Montessori Teacher. New York, NY: AMI/USA.
Stamp, J. (2013). 5 1/2 Examples of Experimental Music Notation. Retrieved from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/5-12-examples-of-experimental-music-notation-92223646/
Stephenson, M. E. (1991). Lecture on The Construction of Man. Montessori Institute of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI.
Stephenson, M. E. (2002). The Core of the Elementary Classroom: “Help Me to Help Myself.”. Rochester, NY: AMI/USA.
Travis, A. (2009). Lecture on Cosmic Education. Montessori Institute of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI.
Travis, A. (2009). Lecture on Freedom and Responsibility. Montessori Institute of Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI.
Travis, A. (2009). Lecture on The Construction of Man and the Human Tendencies. Montessori Institute of Milwaukee training lecture, Milwaukee, WI.
Venezia, M. (1996). Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers: Aaron Copland. Children’s Press.
Venezia, M. (1996). Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers: Igor Stravinsky. New York: Children’s Press.
Venezia, M. (1997). Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers: Duke Ellington. New York: Children’s Press.
Venezia, M. (1997). Getting to Know the World’s Greatest Composers: The Beatles. New York: Children’s Press.
Williams, K. E. Early Childhood Self-regulation Through Music. Retrieved from https://theearlychildhoodresearcher.wordpress.com/2014/12/10/early-childhood-self-regulation-through-music/
I apologize for the lack of YouTube videos since the start of the summer. I’ve been busy with creative projects this year, as well as recovering from a death of my mother, which happened in August.
I promise to get back to making YouTube videos very soon. Many of you have sent me lovely feedback and comments on how useful the videos have been. I appreciate your helpful tips.
As much as I enjoy doing the videos, truthfully, I haven’t been happy with the quality of the videos, so I’ve been investing in some equipment that will help me to light them, film them, and just generally make them more entertaining and useful. You can look forward to weekly updates in the new year 2022.
Hi, again! This post doesn't have to do with music, but it does pertain to Montessori education. I was inspired to offer you some materials in light of this newest confinement and school closure in France.
During these times of distance learning, if you’re like me, you’re tired of throwing worksheets at the children, tired of loading them up with cheap, laminated facsimiles of the Montessori materials, and tired of scrambling for days leading up to a vacation—a time when the children need more than ever stable, level-headed adult role models—to get materials together for the children to bring home.
I wanted to create something simple, clean, easy to reproduce, and multi-faceted to give the children, so that they could do at home the kinds of dynamic projects we ask them to do in class, rather than just wasting their time filling in blanks, or cutting out fake Montessori materials, or pestering their parents to show them what to do with a set of laminated stamp game stamps. I wanted something that the children could work with independently and get a lot of mileage out of, and yet something that for us would be easy to make. I envisioned packets of multi-faceted and cross-curricular learning material.
So, in pursuit of these goals, I decided on a theme and used that theme to create ONE work packet for children that contains zero, count them, 0, worksheets, but which covers all eight Montessori subjects.
My theme was a visit to another country. Recently I put together a packet about Iceland. This single packet invites children to learn about the history of Iceland, study its geography, and solve mathematical story problems concerning life in Iceland, including calculating how much gas would be needed to drive around the island, or how to cook a certain Icelandic cuisine. The packet accesses Geometry by asking children to calculate the surface area of a fictional Viking hut that was dug up by archaeologists and analyze the use of line and shape in an abstract painting. In the language arena, the packet has quotations about Iceland for the children to analyze and interpret, as well as symbolize with grammar symbols.
The Music section explores the life and music of the critically-acclaimed Icelandic pop singer Björk. In the Music section, the packet directs children to listen to a live radio recording Björk did when she was 11 years old. Then it invites them to compose their own music and create original electronic beats a la Björk using an online app called Incredibox. In addition to all of this stuff, the packet has critical thinking questions for the children to answer as well as small ideas for writing and creating follow-ups like timelines and maps.
In all, this ONE simple packet contains more than enough for a child to dive into in one or two weeks of confinement. These packets only took me about 3 hours to put together, far less time than printing, laminating, cutting, and distributing hundreds of fill-in-the blank documents. They are intended for children in a 9-12 class, but my immediate colleague and I have designed others for children much younger. We gave these packets to our 9-12 children last year, and they loved them. The parents raved about them.
Still, I think these packets could use some tweaking to make them perfect. So, I’m offering them to you for download, hoping that you might be able to use them with your children, but also hoping you can look them over and give me feedback on how to make them even better. After all, we’re here to learn from each other.
I would love it if you would download them and use them as you see fit. If you find anything that needs tweaking, or if you have ideas that would make these packets better, I would love to hear from you.
Here are the packets on Spain, Italy, and Iceland.
More later!
Hi! Welcome back. Composing with color is a great follow-up children can do after a lesson about music or art, or after the study of a painter or painting. It works like this:
First, the child examines a painting and analyzes the colors in the painting. The painting could be a famous painting by a notable artist, or it could be the artwork created by one of the child’s classmates. It doesn’t matter. The goal is to make a list of the colors in the painting. For this example, my friend Timothy used a self-portrait by Gaugin.
Next, Timothy took out the tone bars and selected a scale strip. He went with the Locrian scale. (If you want to know what a Locrian scale is, go to your tone bars and pull down all the white tone bars, then play the notes from Si (B) to Si (B). Then, Timothy chose a color to assign to each note in the scale.
Timothy picked yellow for 2, purple for 3, red for 4, pink for 5, brown for 6, orange for 7, and black for 8
Next, Timothy came up with a melody that reminded him of the painting. To notate his melody, he colored in the squares on the grid paper using the colors that correspond to the notes. He came up with the idea to write the number in the box in the same color. (Clever lad.)
The result was a pretty grid of colored squares! I could imagine other applications for composing using colors. Maybe Timothy could use the notes in his melody in a new painting and use that painting as a kind of musical score. Instead of a grid of squares, he could write his melody in colored splotches or lines. You and your children can probably come up with a million possibilities as well.
Here is Timothy’s melodic interpretation of Paul Gaugin’s painting. If you want to play it, you can get out your Locrian scale strip and see what it sounds like!
Have fun composing with colors! More later.
Hi! Welcome back to the blog. You know, the Green Staff Boards don’t just help the child learn the notes on the staff; they can also be a nice tool for composition. After you give a lesson on the introduction to the musical staff (or even before, as the child doesn’t need to know the names of the notes to compose) the child can write some melodies by placing the blank black chips on the lines and spaces.
After that, the child can copy his or her notes from the Green Boards onto 5-line staff paper.
If you’ve given the literacy lessons, encourage the child to sing the notes as he places them on the staff board.
Remind the child of these simple guidelines:
Keep your melody within an octave, from Middle Do (Middle C)—that’s the note on the first little ledger line below the staff— and,
Make sure to place the notes one after another, instead of stacked on top of each other.
When the child is satisfied with his or her melody, he or she can then cut out the melody and glue it onto a score!
Finally, now that the melody is glued onto the score, he or she can add parts for percussion, or piano.
And there you have it. This is a great follow-up for any lesson in your music album.
Check out the YouTube channel for more follow-up ideas. More later!
After a lesson about the celebrated Russian-Soviet composer Dimitri Schostakovich (1919-1975), who was noted for using a haunting melodic theme derived from the letters of his name, Karl wanted to write a melody derived from the letters of his own name.
To accomplish this, Karl used note names from various systems, from the English system, to the Japanese, Indian, and even Byzantine systems. You can find a breakdown of different note naming systems here. I also included a list in my book.
Karl at the piano working on his musical cryptogram.
Karl was lucky: every letter in his name corresponds to a note! As a result, he was able to create a long beautiful melody.
While Karl has yet to produce a full-length composition using his cryptogram, he enjoyed the first step in the process. I hope you did, too.
More later!
After a lesson about key signatures, the children had a great follow-up idea that I wanted to share with you.
I had introduced the lesson on key signatures from my Montessori album by telling the children a story from Making Music in Montessori. I asked them to imagine being a knight on horseback in medieval times approaching a stately castle at the entrance to an unfamiliar but lovely new kingdom. Flapping on the ramparts of the castle you see a heraldic flag displaying the coat of arms of the monarch of that kingdom. In music, the monarch of a kingdom (a scale) is called the tonic.
We can think of a key signature as the design on that heraldic flag! Whenever you go to play a piece of music, you’ll see, at the very beginning, the heraldic symbol of the monarch, or tonic, that rules the particular kingdom that all of the notes in the piece inhabit.
For me, key signatures do indeed resemble coats of arms, with their lovely sharps or flats perched like little ravens in a pleasing, organized pattern on the horizontal black and white staff lines and spaces, all next to that elegant, sweeping clef symbol.
If you think plain black and white stripes are perhaps a bit dull for a flag design, consider this flag of the French region of Brittany:
Not the most beautiful flag (I can here my Breton friends exclaiming “Sacre bleu!” from here), but I think you’ll agree it at least resembles a musical staff.
Anyway, for follow-up the children ran with the imagery and created little castles with key signature flags on their ramparts.
Behold: the simple, elegant, striped coat of arms that sits atop the gate to the kingdom of Do, or C, in the English note naming system. The children got the idea to write the name of the key’s tonic on the door. Clever!
And here be the kingdom of Re (D), with its stately tower housing, no doubt, the queen’s extensive music library.
Alas, pictured in this photo are the entrances to the kingdoms of Fa#, Do, Re, Sol, and Si. (F#, C, D, G, and B, respectively.) Notice the intimidating triple prison towers of the castle of Fa#, with the architect’s use of the “#” sign as an ornamentation. The kingdom of Fa# is full of pitfalls for the weary traveler indeed.
And here are all of the castles of the sharp keys in order from left to right, displayed, appropriately, on top of the classroom piano.
Well, I hope that gives you a useful idea. More later!
Welcome back! Children love opportunities to play the classroom piano. A fun way to get them playing and improvising their own music is to have them sit at the piano in front of a lovely photograph, such as a bucolic landscape scene or a famous painting, and improvise some music that corresponds to the image.
After a presentation about the origin of the universe, some children wanted to follow-up by composing their own music. So, we got out a book of Hubble space telescope photographs. The children found their favorite photos of a distant galaxy, or star scape, or nebula, and played whatever came to mind.
Now, I like to give the children limits when they do creative work. Limiting their palette of colors or materials when they to artwork, or limiting the scale or number of notes they can use when writing music, actually helps the children be more creative. It also gives whatever they create the sense of unity and variety that is so important in great art.
Since space is black, I asked the children to improvise using only the black keys. Of course, there is a practical reason for limiting the children to the black keys; the black keys of the piano form a pentatonic scale (a 5-note scale that contains no half steps). The notes in the pentatonic scale sound great together in any combination. The children can have fun exploring and touching the keys without worrying about clashing notes and dissonances.
The child could also use only the white keys, since the sun seen from space is white (not yellow, as it appears to us on earth). The only problem is that the white keys contain half steps, which tend to clash.
Of course, if a child wants dissonance and doesn’t mind a few notes that clash, he or she can feel welcome to use whatever keys he or she chooses. Still, I would find a way to limit his or her note choices.
For your listening pleasure, here’s what Ebeniezer, the child in the above photograph, played to while looking at a photo of a spiral galaxy. (Apologies for the background chatter.)
Isn’t it lovely how photos from space can inspire music? The children can play their improvisations, as Ebeniezer did, to accompany the afternoon work cycle.
That’s all for now. More later!