Parent Education Night – Montessori Madness!

Fort Collins Montessori School • Sep 28, 2018

The FCMS staff invites you to join us Thursday October 11 starting at 6:00pm for our second Parent Education Night. We are excited to engage you in a group discussion around the best-selling book on Montessori education over the last three years, Montessori Madness!

This book is widely used by schools, teacher training centers and parents as an accessible introduction to Montessori. This book traces the journey of our family as we wrestle with questions of how best to educate our children. It explores why we eventually choose Montessori school and what we have since discovered.

Montessori Madness!

Montessori Madness! follows one family with young children on their journey of determination, discovery, and delight. Learn the who, what, when, why, and how of Montessori education. This book makes an aggressive, humorous and passionate case for a brilliant method of education that has received too little attention, very likely because it is based on a revolutionary, dangerous, and shocking concept: children love to learn!

We invite you to order Montessori Madness! for yourself or check it out at the library. We will be covering Chapter 7, The Sensitive Periods. For parents who are not able to order the book, you may read Chapter 7 here.

This event will be hosted at the Elementary Campus but will be a collaboration between Primary and Elementary Guides and intended for parents of children of all ages. We would appreciate your personal perspective and any experiences you can share.

  • Have you ever witnessed your child in a “sensitive period” OR a sudden internal desire to learn something or master a skill?
  • Can you remember a time when your child asked, “help me do it alone?”
  • What are the obstacles to follow the sensitive periods?

We know we need to improve our traditional school system, both public and private. But how? More homework? Better-qualified teachers? Longer school days or school years? More testing? More funding? No, no, no, no, and no. Montessori Madness! explains why the incremental steps politicians and administrators continue to propose are incremental steps in the wrong direction. The entire system must be turned on its head. This book asks parents to take a look one thirty-minute observation at a Montessori school. Your picture of what education should look like will never be the same.

Thank you so much and we look forward to another great Parent Education Night!

Excerpts From Montessori Madness!

“Montessori is about a kid with a stick, digging a hole in the mud—hands dirty, engaged, fascinated, uninterrupted.”

“Effort is pleasurable; it puts one in a good mood. It “furnishes energy” and brings “life and enthusiasm.”

“I learned that teachers are the enemy. Not that I disliked all my teachers—I actually liked quite a few—but I learned that it was wise to privately regard them with wariness, guardedness, mistrust, and fear. By a stroke of the pen, they held the power to alter my standing with myself, my peers, and my parents.”

“Help me to do it alone.”

“One moment the ghosts and witches were excited to be dressed up in a scary or transforming costume, enjoying the feeling of surprise at seeing how their friends had dressed up. The next moment they were being forced to compete with one another to see who was better. It was sobering to see adults imposing a competition, a ranking system, on a perfectly happy and content group of kids—kids who were valuing each other’s creativity and enjoying each other’s company.”

“Human excellence is not achieved by obtaining high test scores. Excellent humans emerge as they become insightful, wise, just, resourceful, courageous, and original. They excel because their environment allowed them to develop these qualities by themselves.”

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