In Montessori education, the concept of the authentic is held in high regard. To live in accordance with truth, goodness, and beauty, children of any age must engage in authentic work. Otherwise, they will become obsessed with possessiveness. We discussed in depth Maria Montessori’s idea that authentic work is necessary to awaken to authentic love.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your comments!
Profile
Yati Obara
Editor-in-Chief, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1989. CEO of Motherhand and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Holds an M.Eng. and is an AMI-certified teacher. Focused on Montessori developmental theory and AI. Mother of two.
Hiro Obara
Publisher, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1990. CEO of StudyX and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Works as a software developer and game designer. Father of two.
To be genuine or to be fake, that is the question.
Hiro
Today’s theme for the 3 to 6 age group is “real work.”
Yati
As opposed to fake work, right? Not pretend cooking. Actually making real food, cleaning, tidying up, doing laundry, and so on.
Hiro
Yeah. Western educators make a big deal out of this and call it “Practical Life exercises,” but honestly, why not just call it “daily life”?
Yati
I get why they want to add the word “exercises,” though.
Hiro
The key point is the work itself. So what kind of work? Work that uses the hands. Do plenty of hands-on work, and you’re all set.
Yati
Well then, that wraps up our 3 to 6 discussion!
Hiro
[laughs] I’m being told this isn’t very scientific…
Yati
All right, let’s dig deeper into what real work means.
Hiro
Instead of heading toward toys, fantasy, or video games, do as much real stuff as possible. The best environment for that? A farm.
Yati
Farms are overflowing with real work.
Hiro
Harvesting vegetables, tilling soil, hauling what you’ve picked, sorting produce, packing boxes. There’s all sorts of work kids can do. And here’s a classic farm-kid confession: I was made to help out constantly, and honestly, I hated it. [laughs]
Yati
So you didn’t like it! [laughs] But there’s work at just the right difficulty level for children aged 3 to 6, and that’s rare. Most real work is either too hard or too dangerous for young children.
Hiro
Right. On a Montessori-related note: Maria Montessori, you know, pretty much abandoned her own son...
Yati
Phrasing! [laughs]
Hiro
...she placed her son with a farming family.
Yati
True. When I first heard that, I thought how painful it must have been for her not to practice her own educational ideas with her son. But once I understood farm life, it made so much sense I almost wondered if she did it on purpose. Maybe the “Children’s House” was modeled after “children on a farm.”
Hiro
She probably did choose it deliberately, partly because of the rural setting and partly the idea that if you want something done, ask a busy person. If you need someone to raise a child, ask people who raise things for a living.
Yati
Exactly. It’s all connected. Humans are part of nature, so someone skilled at nurturing plants is often good at nurturing children, too.
Hiro
Right. When we say “farm,” we tend to picture just crops, but traditional farms raised livestock as well.
Yati
Cows, horses. They used to put them to work. If you can get a cow or horse to work, maybe getting a child aged 3 to 6 to pitch in isn’t so hard after all.
Hiro
Here’s another Montessori-related anecdote. Jeff Bezos is famous as a Montessori child.
Yati
He comes up almost every issue. The founder of Amazon.
Hiro
Bezos didn’t attend a Montessori elementary school. But when he was young, his mother remarried, and his maternal grandfather, a former military officer, started a ranch in Texas after retiring.
Yati
You know a lot about this.
Hiro
Every summer, Bezos went to that ranch. He did farm chores like building things, even constructing a crane, I heard, all while working alongside his grandfather. He loved it. And he kept going back every summer from age 4 until about 16 or 17.
Yati
So he got his “secondary” experience there, too.
Hiro
Exactly. As a young child, Bezos went to a Montessori preschool. For elementary, he was in a gifted program called the “Vanguard Program,” which nurtured curiosity and exploration, but he never did Montessori elementary.
Yati
Mm-hmm.
Hiro
Still, he had plenty of real-work experience on that ranch. That’s where he learned how to work.
Yati
I see.
Hiro
Bezos has said that time was “the best.” All kinds of tasks, castrating livestock, treating his own injuries. He did it all.
Yati
Mm-hmm.
Hiro
They’d start early in the morning, then break for lunch at the house and watch soap operas on TV together. He said he loved that.
Yati
Sounds like a Japanese summer vacation.
Hiro
Remember those shows that came on at 1:00 and 1:30? America had the same kind of thing. On rainy days, he’d go to the library, which was full of science-fiction novels. He’d read them endlessly and let his imagination roam.
Yati
That’s a great balance.
Hiro
Totally. Pretty ideal, actually, farm work plus intellectual stimulation. “Plow when it’s sunny, read when it rains.” Now Bezos is focused on space. This is turning into a Bezos biography rather than Montessori talk, but he runs Blue Origin, a company building spacecraft for space transport. By the way, he hasn’t retired from Amazon. What sparked it all? Watching the Apollo moon landing at his grandfather’s house when he was five.
Yati
In Montessori terms, that’s right in the “hero worship” period, when children find role models.
Hiro
Right. Astronauts, aerospace engineers, rocket scientists became his heroes, and Bezos headed into the STEM world.
Yati
Even without Montessori elementary, he gave himself a cosmic education.
Hiro
Exactly. That’s why Blue Origin’s rockets are named after legendary astronauts, like New Shepard, New Armstrong, and so on.
Yati
I didn’t know that.
Hiro
He’s serious about it.
Yati
Speaking of our 0 to 3 discussion, does Bezos have big hands?
Hiro
I’ll let everyone look that up themselves, but he’s surprisingly short. His laugh, though, is huge.
Yati
[laughs] As for whether his brain is big, well, he writes beautifully. There’s a piece he posted on Twitter when he launched the Montessori-inspired Day 1 preschool, and it’s definitely worth reading. He also tells Amazon employees to “write long documents.”
Hiro
“No PowerPoint. Write a six-page memo.” That’s brutal for people who can’t write.
Yati
I couldn’t work at Amazon.
Hiro
Apparently, many Americans can’t write, or read, for that matter.
Yati
Really?
Hiro
That’s partly why “AI writing” is such a big deal right now. Lots of people struggle with reading and writing, so these tools are popular. When someone says “keep emails short,” it’s often because they can’t handle long text. They blame being busy or short on time, but the real issue is that long reading feels painful. Hence the appeal of 140-character limits and photo- or video-based social media.
Yati
Makes sense.
Hiro
Anyway, I got sidetracked. The point is, Bezos grew up doing real work. He’s also involved with the Long Now Foundation and helped build the 10,000-Year Clock.
Yati
A clock that chimes a different tone every day for 10,000 years. On the site, Bezos, again writing beautifully, describes the clock as “a symbol for long-term thinking.”
Hiro
He’s also donated around $200 million to the Smithsonian to help build museums.
Yati
Of that, $70 million went toward renovating the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, and $130 million funded a new educational facility called the Bezos Learning Center. It sounds like a museum-based learning space. Maria Montessori once said, “The school should have a ‘museum of machines.’ The machines should be of a suitable size for children to take apart and reassemble, to use and repair.” This center might embody some of those ideas.
Hiro
Amazon’s headquarters also has a greenhouse called The Spheres, where they collect plants from around the world and conserve species.
Yati
So even as an adult, he keeps doing real work.
Hiro
Exactly.
Yati
I feel like children’s natural interest in real work is being commercially co-opted. When their imagination blossoms and they become curious about people in other countries, their lifestyles, clothing, and cuisine, that interest gets hijacked by Disney princess dresses. But when that curiosity emerges, I also wonder: what counts as real work in that context? Montessori has map materials and tools that show how people live around the world, but still…
Hiro
Maybe the real work is making friends around the world? On a related note, I think it was Will Wright who said there are two types of people: producers and consumers. When something moves you, some people say “Wow, that was amazing” and stop there. Others say, “Great, I’ll use this as inspiration and make something myself.”
Yati
Like reading a great manga and starting to draw your own.
Hiro
Or eating delicious food and deciding to cook it yourself. So the Disney thing is more about people who tend to consume. Consumers, in a way, are at a disadvantage. You could say their hands haven’t developed fully.
Yati
Instead of buying the dress, you could design and make your own. This connects to something Maria Montessori wrote: “Love guides the child not toward possessing things but toward the work that can be accomplished with them. And once work begins, people engage with one another, because no one can work alone. This is how life evolves. Interesting work elevates the individual and enhances the value of personality.”
Hiro
Mm-hmm.
Yati
She continues: “But if the individual is prevented from acting, love turns into possessiveness, and instead of cooperation there is conflict. Instead of collaboration, opposition arises. This great revelation comes from the child.”
Hiro
Heavy.
Yati
And then: “There are two paths of personality development: becoming a person who loves or becoming a person trapped by possessions; becoming independent and working in harmony with others or becoming a slave to possessions and hating others. These correspond to good and evil, heaven and hell. One path leads to supernatural perfection; the other leads to degradation below our true nature.”
Hiro
That’s long. I’m not good with long texts. Could you summarize it a bit?
Yati
Oh, come on! [laughs]
Hiro
Seriously, though, AI isn’t the only thing advancing; robots are, too. Household robots are already here, so how we relate to AI and robots is becoming an important question. They shouldn’t just be servants; we need to become friends with them. Cooperation instead of competition.
Yati
With a kind heart.
Hiro
Exactly. And for that, as we discussed in the brain issue, we need to train the prefrontal cortex, and that means working with our hands.
Yati
I’d like to add a few points we didn’t cover in the 0 to 3 article about spending time in nature, since it’s relevant to the 3 to 6 stage as well. Researchers have long studied how early nature experiences influence later biophilia and environmental attitudes. Nature experiences are associated with improved cognitive function and academic performance, as well as lower rates of mental illness in children.
Hiro
Interesting.
Yati
Maria Montessori also recommended Boy Scout-style activities for elementary-aged children, and I think this applies to 5 and 6 year olds, too. Kids who are hooked on Minecraft may actually be interested in real-life survival.
Hiro
Scouting is survival training. What to do if you get lost in the woods, how to survive if you’re swept away by a river, how to tie knots, how to secure drinking water and food. Practical knowledge.
Yati
We don’t know any of that, do we?
Hiro
I’ve been learning from the blog of Yajin Mu, a Japanese survivalist blogger who writes about wilderness skills, but I still have a long way to go.
Yati
Let’s explore this further in an upcoming issue on nature education.
Hiro
To sum up: the more real work you do, the more your hands develop; and the more your hands develop, the better you get at real work. Whether children enter that positive cycle determines whether they grow into people who do great work or merely consume commercial products. It sounds harsh, but that’s the message in Montessori’s writings.
Yati
True. Maria Montessori was always saying things that stirred controversy.
Hiro
Indeed. And we’d like to keep stirring things up ourselves.
Yati
As advocates for children.
