Season 6, Episode 3
A conversation about reclaiming education from collectivist systems and strengthening family choice.
Topics: parental rights; AZ/state policy
Transcript
Auto-generated transcript with light cleanup. Words may be imperfect; policy names and guest names reviewed where noted.
Marsha when we when we first got got your name in the email. It's it's Marsha. How do you say the second part?
I'm a lara. I'm a lara. Is that Italian?
Yeah. Cool. I can change my name here. I Told Matt.
I was afraid that it was too too big for the Screen, but it looks differently. There it is. Yeah, so so the Montessori method was started by an Italian, right?
Mm-hmm And there's a big Italian population in Chicago, right? Oh, yeah. Huge. Yeah.
From especially from the Calabrian area. Calabrian Sicily. Yeah. Oh, cool.
Montessori herself. She was the first woman doctor in Italy. And she graduated in about nine 1890. And she went through a lot of struggles to do that.
For example, she had to dissect in a separate room from the men. She had to argue to get into medical school, but she was an amazing genius. So did you want me to say any more about the story of that of her?
Yeah. And in just a second, so Matt we're live, right? And let me retweet it on my ex account. I want to make sure it's it's up and running.
Yes, it is. Okay. Yeah. So for the listeners right now, everybody's watching us on X right now.
I am Corey DeAngelo, executive director at the Educational Freedom Institute, also a senior fellow at the American Culture Project. My co-host today as usual is Matt Nielsen. He's the co-founder of the Educational Freedom Institute. And we have a great guest today.
I kind of teased what we're going to talk about a little bit in an ex post just a second ago. Her name is Marcia Famelaro Enright. She's based in Chicago. And I'm really excited to talk with her today because she actually started and ran a Montessori school from the ages of three to 15 for over two decades in Chicago.
And it was ranked one of the best Montessori schools in Chicago on at least two separate occasions. And now she has founded a new initiative called Reliance College. And we want to talk to her about that as well today. So everyone, welcome.
And we want to welcome you, Marcia, for joining us today on the Educational Freedom Institute podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I'm honored. Yeah, I'm honored to have you with us.
You have more books behind you than us. So I need to clean up my act over here. They're pretty messy. Yeah, I've got to ship you a version of the parent revolution soon and we can add to your bookshelf.
But there's any room. If there's any room with. So the tweet that I put out is that we're going to talk a little bit about Montessori education. And I have a feeling that a lot of people in the school reform movement like the idea of Montessori education, but they might not have a sense of exactly what it means.
Could you get into a little bit of that history of the Montessori type of education, and what it means for the average listener? And then a little bit about your experience of starting one of the Montessori schools in Chicago. Well, Montessori education was started by the first female doctor in Italy, Maria Montessori. After she went through a lot of struggles to get into medical school and then after she got out, she worked at a clinic for what was called retarded and autistic children, the orthophonic clinic.
And she noticed that when they were brought their food, they would spend a lot of time playing with it. And she realized it was because they were so deprived of sensory experience in this institution and this asylum that this was the only simulation they got. So she developed, she studied what had been looked at in the last the 200 years before her. This is in 18, the 1890s in education and she came across some materials.
They're kind of like games that were invented by a Swiss educator named Pesto Losi and she started using them with the with the retarded children. And lo and behold, they ended up passing the state exam for normal children. This made her almost instantly famous and everybody was just raving about it, but she was sitting there thinking, well, what are normal children learning if these poor children can pass the state exam?
So a few years later in 1906, there was a apartment complex in a very poor area of Rome called San Lorenzo, where these that a businessman's benevolent association had built. And they had all these families in there, very poor families who worked at factories. And they had a problem because the children were at home by themselves and they were vandalizing the building. So they asked Montessori to come in there and start a school.
And that's where she started her first, what she called the Casa de Bambini, the children's house. Because the way she viewed education was more that it needs to be an all-encompassing environment than just a place to do academics. And she brought in her materials, which are like games that teach you mathematics and language and history and these things. And for the young children, you do a lot of sensory materials.
And there were many wealthy mothers involved with supporting this school. So they brought all these toys. The interesting thing was the children did not, they were not interested in the toys. They wanted to use the materials because what Montessori did, she was an exceptional scientist.
She recognized by direct observation what has now been validated by years and years of double-blind research over the years about what kind of educational environments are best for children. And by the way, there's an interesting book by a University of Virginia psychologist named Angeline Lillard, in which she married into a famous Montessori family here in the United States, the Lillards. And the way that family talked about Montessori, she thought it was almost like it was a cult or something like that. And she thought this was strange.
So she started researching it. And on the way, she ended up becoming totally enthralled with a whole method. So she wrote a book called Montessori, The Science Behind the Genius. And what she did was talk about what modern scientists discovered are the best methods for development and then show how they're supported in the Montessori classroom.
So should I keep going? Yeah, so I want to hear a little bit about, so it started in Italy. How did it get to the United States and other countries with just kind of word of mouth type of thing?
And why is it spread so much over centuries and it's still around same name, same type of methods? And what kind of pushed you to start your Montessori school in Chicago too? So let me explain a little bit about the method and then that'll help everybody understand it. So the Montessori method is a very different way of organizing learning and the classroom than traditional learning is.
The materials are on low shelves. Montessori did a lot of inventing of things for children like child size furniture and a jungle gyms and these low shelves where all the materials were put on in order of their difficulty and in their subject area. So all the art materials are together are the language materials, the science materials. And the child can know where they are in the curriculum by where they are in the shelf of the material.
And the materials are very sensory oriented because she discovered that as well especially young children need a lot of century motorwork in order to even grasp the concepts that you want them to understand. So for example, there are literally hundreds of Montessori math materials that teach you mathematics from these beads that are single beads are units 1 to 9, 10 in a bar is called a 10 bar, then 10 together in a square is 100 square and 10 of those together is a thousand cube. So even a three year old can see the instantiation of what the numbers mean. And they can do arithmetic a three or four year old can do arithmetic into the thousands using these materials.
If you look, there's a lot of videos on YouTube now showing how these materials are used. So if anybody wants to look them up that's I would recommend that. There's also, for example, in the preschool what's called a trinomial cube which is a puzzle which parts represents the terms of a trinomial equation. So for example, if you remember it'd be something like a cubed would be a small cube, a squared b would be a rectangular solid, c cubed and the puzzle all goes together.
The children learn how to put it together when they're very little. And then as they get older they start to learn the names of each of the pieces. And then when they end up learning algebra they've got like a real object to their mind that represents what the what the equation is. And this is really important.
We've had we had children who I've interviewed now that they're in the working world and they still remember the materials when they're doing mathematical problems in their head. So what makes this method different from what they're doing in the public schools in general? And yeah, so what's the main difference?
You've got the materials. The child works at their own individual pace. So children are given the, in small groups, they're given lessons on how to use the materials. They can decide what they want to do first, what they want to do second.
In other words if they come in in the morning and they really feel like doing math they do that first and then they can have a snack and then they each have a job in the environment to clean up to keep their environment clean so they might feed the fish. And then they might do their work with the movable alphabet which is the letters are all in sandpaper. And so so that you get it into your fingers because she figured that there were two aspects to learning to write how to the shape of the letter and how to control your arm. So there's different materials to learn how to do that.
And so the child can go at their own pace. They're not compared to other children. They don't have to work with other children but but most of them want to because you know we're naturally very social. We like to work with other people.
And it's a mixed-age classroom because it gives a very wide range of materials to work on and because the older students become the models for the younger students. And you know how if you have to teach something you learn it better so the older that helps to really solidify the older students learning. The classes are in three-year-age groups so there's three to six-year-olds, there's six to nine-year-olds, there's nine to 12-year-olds, 12 to 15-year-olds. And it's there's different so the three to six-year-olds are very sensory motor.
There's a lot of work in that. They do art, they do, there's a whole station to learn of what they call practical life where they learn how to do washing. And what it's interesting because the washing setup actually teaches you logic and order because there's clean water, there's the dirty dishes, there's a place to wash it, then there's the tools, then there's a place to dry it. And so you're learning all those things together.
Also, the classroom is organized in a way the teacher figures out how to lay out the shelves so that what you want is as much as possible for the materials and the environment to be self-correcting so that the child figures out what the right way to do things is themselves. And if they've got the right answer, for example, themselves. So this seems like it's more so student-directed learning through experiences as opposed to this top-down kind of force-fed facts down your throat kind of thing that we see in the public school system. Could you theorize as to why there's a difference there?
Are there public school systems on a widespread basis introduced monetary methods? I don't think there are. Do you have any?
There are monetary programs in different public school systems around the country. They're not extensive. If they run wholly by Montessori-trained people, they tend to be run well. I've seen years ago I went to one in Milwaukee that was wonderful.
And there's a certain feeling as soon as you go into a Montessori school, there's a certain feeling because the children are happy. They're interacting with each other very peacefully. They're intensely working on their work. They have a nice relationship with the teachers and they're quite self-possessed when it comes to talking to adults.
You'll see that. I was going to say another part of the curriculum is called race and courtesy. They're taught to do things. Montessori discovered that in her first school that all the children had little naughty noses and so she brought up her hand kickerchief and she kind of gave a demonstration of how to blow your nose discreetly and they all clapped afterwards.
She figured out that it was because they were embarrassed by the fact that and they were being chided all the time by the fact that they were dirty and icky and all this and she was showing them how they could take control of that. So as much as possible the children are given a lot of self-direction. They're guided. They end up becoming self what we call self-disciplined because they enjoy what they're learning so much that they want to be able to do more of so they can be very patient.
If they work on a material they can work on it as long as they want then they have to put it back in the shelf the same place so the next person can use it and everybody learns a kind of patience in the classroom because they know they can work on it as long as they want. Would you say that would you say this is more or less difficult for the teachers running the show and maybe it's easier in some ways and more difficult in other ways. What would you say?
Exactly. I think you've got I think you hit it right on the nose. It's harder. It requires a lot of thinking on the part of the teacher.
The teachers are supposed to be observing the children and taking notes almost every day and figuring out okay this child needs this lesson next in order you know they're ready for it and okay this child has this problem how are we going to solve that. I'll give an example. So we had a child who came in at fourth grade had never learned hadn't learned to read and the teacher didn't want to embarrass him by bringing out the the alphabet that was in just block letters that we used for the three to six year olds so she ordered a cursive alphabet that was in sandpaper and so then everybody in that class thought that was really cool and he could learn to read because of that. So the teachers are very a really good monitor sorry teacher is very in tune with the children and is always trying to figure out you know when a child misbehaves if you have a good environment like this that's very supportive of child development I just want to step back you know think about it anybody who knows two year old children knows that it's really really hard to stop them from learning right yeah they are constantly learning so what happens when children are eight years old and they don't want to go to school well the problem is the environment the environment is not suitable to their learning needs and this is what the Montessori system gets around and Montessori students just love their school they I had many parents write to me over the years telling me my child loves school so much that when he's sick he lies to me so he won't miss school and so how does it look different for like 14 year olds I know your Montessori went up to 15 in Chicago yeah is it is it you know the teachers give them certain topics they need to research or how does that work at the older ages they have a lot of projects that they do they're doing you know more difficult work so as the child gets older he starts he or she starts learning in a more abstract way so the abstract learning is is um introduced as they go along but they still use materials even up into into middle school you could use math materials and it depends on the child so you try to see well what is a particular picture child doing do they do they think that they've mastered do they demonstrate that they've mastered this material if not if they need that material to think about math then we let them do it because in the end they end up having it um uh cemented in their mind so much better and it's funny because uh one of our graduates talks about how he thinks about he's certain oh i'm saying this before he thinks about these certain materials when he's doing math problems you know and um and it's interesting too because because it's all individually paced children that have any kind of learning difficulty you know that maybe have hard a hard time learning how to read or doing math which i've noticed over the years that a lot of children that are artistic have a problem with this and all i can figure is that there's something about the way the artistic mind works that makes it hard for them to see those symbols as a complete abstraction but anyway going back uh they they don't they they keep their self confidence and they keep they develop a tremendous work ethic so the children that are you know rocketing ahead and don't have any problems they can go as far as they want in the learning and the teachers will provide them more and more things to work on the the and the my story thought that in middle school the way that their development worked was so socially oriented which we all know how socially oriented adolescents are that it was very difficult to engage them academically and so she thought that they should be on a farm where they have to learn all their subjects in relationship to real work and so the really good monetary programs that can do it they have for example a building program and they learn geometry with learning how to build a building um they they run a bed and breakfast on the farm for their parents uh they raise crops they have animals and the thing is in a hero what's interesting it becomes self-discipline because they know that if they don't feed those animals the animals are going to die so the teacher doesn't have to be always nagging them oh you have to go do this you have to do that and there's a lot and they learn a lot of biology along with doing the botany and biology doing that so um it's uh it's a different if it's it's a really different setup and when you think about it i mean back and say the end of the 19th century 12 year olds were cabin boys on ships going around the world right so they're quite capable when they're adolescents and the trouble is warehouse adolescents at high schoolers to sit have to listen to what other people are saying all the time they don't know where and they're ready they don't you know they don't learn anything and they they memorize it for the test oh does Montessori do any standardized testing as like a checkup type of thing or uh most most of the schools do uh at our school we always consider it what we call a practical life exercise in other words they were going to have to do standardized testing when when they left Montessori so let's give them practice beforehand so i have a question for you i'm sorry you froze for a second or i did um i have a question for you your school which was called council of does it first just real quick is it still around yes yes it's in blue island of linoi now there's a website council of Montessori and a wonderful woman who worked for us for a long time in the head of the school now that's great so my question is we were doing a little looking beforehand and that you went from ages three to fifteen and you mentioned earlier that you do them in age groups of so the highest age group i think you said was um 13 14 15 so i'm in my experience anyway i've usually associated Montessori schools with just the younger grades kind of elementary school age kids only can you tell me is that comment have i just not been exposed to enough Montessori programs or is that common no interestingly so you know cori asked me earlier how did Montessori uh what happened how did she become famous etc well just to go back to that because it's relevant to your question just to go back to that um as i said with her first school the results were so astounding the the children in the first school that she ran ended up being as astounding as the school in the ortho as the children in the orthophonic school institute uh because she had these children from very very uh and i don't mean this in a nasty way but ignorant parents they didn't know much they were like country people had come to the city to work in factories and after three months the children were literally healthier without changing their diet and Montessori did a lot of measurements of everything as she went along to to see the progress of all the children and that was the one of things she discovered and the children brought their lessons home to the families so they they would teach them how to be cleaner how to cook all kinds of things like that um so all of this see she was connected with these business people and these wealthy people so it made her almost instantly famous um because by the end of the first year the children were just doing amazing in the school and so this brought people from all over the world to see what was going on and there was there was this time like the beginning of the 20th century when there was a lot of interest in educational philosophy and in pedagogy and so there was a kind of interest in the culture to begin with the worldwide culture and she got people from all over the world coming and they started a training institute and then she started lecturing everywhere and so John Dewey who was a quite famous over here got wind of it and he invited her over in the 1915 she came over to the United States and she toured around the United States and in fact they had a working Montessori classroom in the middle of the San Francisco exposition of 1915 so these children were all working and not paying any attention to the thousands of people who were going around them because they were more interested in what they were doing than you know these people in the um in the exhibition hall so that happened but then after that there was a professor at Columbia University Teachers College William Hurd Kilpatrick who was one of Montessori's disciples and he decided to write a book called the Montessori System Examined and he basically trashed the system and this made it kind of out of fashion in American circles from about 19 I think that book was published in 1918 between 1918 it discredited in academia you know so in American circles it was kind of discredited and the school so Dewey originally liked Montessori but then turned on it because he he supported the pressure model right um he he supported a very he was a progressive and he lead in the importance of the social aspects of education that you needed to be socialized a certain way and he actually knew a lot about education if you read him he knew a lot and he recommended different kinds of activities like sewing and carpentry and things like that to be introduced in the classroom but his emphasis was on the social relationships and socializing the student for this this society it was I mean in my opinion it was it's very collectivistic so once so once some of the experts turned on the Montessori method what happened then did they just read it out of society and I mean the teachers the colleges weren't supporting it then you know after that and it basically went out of business in the United States except for a few schools here and there and then in the 1950s an American woman who was dissatisfied with education here discovered it over in Europe and brought it back so he was Nancy Rambush McCormick and she started the American Montessori Society and so it started out to get back to your question man so it started out with just the preschools the the children's house three to six and then started spreading all over the place and one in the I would say in the last 20 30 years there's been a lot of development of elementary programs in the United States a lot more than there ever were but of course it's still not super read and they different groups have tried to get it into the public schools there's a there's a lot of problems though with that because it requires the teacher to do things be differently trained I mean it's a total different attitude that you have to have as a Montessori teacher well and so that's a good point right because states states of course are responsible for district schools government run schools and all of them want some kind of accountability and usually that comes in the form of state standards that result in a state state examination and I can see how using Montessori system might really get in the way of addressing those state standards on rate not saying that that it's harder to centrally plan it's not yes because such so much of the learning seems like in going different ways right instead just being forced into a box group group by age and then test it each year is that the case Marcia oh that's definitely this definitely one of the big problems and I mean and the other problem is that a lot of people think teaching is about dispersing their knowledge to the waiting receptacles right and yeah that's not the best way to learn it's it's it's interesting because a lecture if you think about it you have to really be mentally active when you're listening to a lecture to to follow what the argument is and of course if you get lost in the argument you can't stop it and ask the teacher you know some teachers will let you stop and ask a question but in a typical lecture you can't and it's it's a it's and a lot of lectures aren't that interesting either so that the there's a there was a very interesting study done by the Annenberg Foundation and Bergenst to Brown about one year ago through MIT I think it was and it was called I don't know if the videos are still online it was called a private universe and what they did was they took some of the best students in a class and then they asked them about something that they had just been taught I think in this case it had to do with what caused the seasons and when they asked them in detail their understanding of what caused the seasons oh my gosh the confusions that they had the best students too the best students and then they wouldn't talk to the teacher and the teacher thought oh you know yeah I made it perfectly clear and my students followed it and but obviously she didn't know and one of the duties about the Montessori system is that you're doing and there's two kinds of assessment you can do formative assessment and summative assessment summative is what you do you teach a whole bunch of things and then you test the student right formative is you check what they understand as you go along and that way if they're getting confused you can you can write them more quickly and keep them on the path of learning so Montessori is about all about formative assessment because the teacher is watching what they're doing with the materials and and the student if the student thinks that they are mastered the material they asked to be tested out of it so they show the teacher how they know how to use it and that way they can see whether they fully understood it but in many respects the materials are let the student know themselves whether they have the right answer for example if for the three to six year olds there's a the knob cylinders so there's a long bar of wood and it has different size wooden cylinders in it with a handle knob on it and the student takes them all out and then they have to put them back well if they don't put them back the right way they're not going to all fit and as much as possible that all the materials are created to be the self-correcting way even for the older children so yeah the formative assessment is just so much more powerful because you're ensuring that the person is understanding as they go along and it's not they're not having to do it at the same pace as everybody else right they're doing it at their own pace so yeah I think otherwise I mean I went I went to public schools all through K through 12 and you know I did most of my learning at home when we were doing the the homework and then we go sit in the lecture and I'd have all the answers all prepared already yeah and I think about today when I'm learning something I talk to people about things I watch videos I interact it's based on what I'm interested in and so I'm definitely going to remember what I'm actually thinking about and it seems like with the school system if we flip that on its head and we pretend that during those years of our lives we we learn completely differently when we actually don't and then we we forget all these things that we learned throughout those years so I think it's a to huge problem hopefully more of this bottom-up approach to education can flourish so in Chicago how how did you get your school started what what made you think guys is something I want to do and yeah how was that experience well what happened was when I was a kid I really loved learning and I was really frustrated about all the kids goofing around in class all the time like interrupting the learning until I realized they were frustrated and I said to myself okay I don't want that for my own children I'm going to find a method of learning or a method of school that well they're going to keep their love of learning and when I was about 20 I read some articles by Beatrice Hessen about the Montessori method and I said this sounds exactly what I want and then I went and read everything I could about it and learned about it and then I sent my son who's to a local Montessori children's house of a classic place and he did well and I sent my other children to and when it got to be for elementary there was a Montessori magnet program here in the neighborhood and I went to visit it but it's at a public school and so if you got the one teacher who knew the Montessori nothing really well the class was beautiful you went the other one they didn't know what they were doing so I didn't want that I wanted real Montessori program and and that program now is just a mess over there but anyway so I found a local a small private school nearby he went there for three years and then that school had to move we tried to get it I'd gotten to know some other parents and we tried to get it to move over to our neighborhood which was very interested in Montessori a lot more interest here and they didn't want to so I had also remembered this really brilliant Montessori teacher who had taught at the preschool and now was teaching an hour away from home so I said to these other women well what do you think if we start a school ourselves we had found a space and we put it so that happened in like March of 1990 we opened the school in September of 1990 and it opened as a as an elementary school then this teacher thought it was a great idea because she'd always wanted to do it but couldn't organize the whole thing herself and we started with 17 children so that's great my children how how did you get from council oak and doing that for 26 years to reliance college and tell us what reliance college is and what you do sure so reliance college is going to be a new college in the Chicago area with a uniquely designed challenging liberal arts program combined with real-world work every year and with learning in things like economics writing special programs and logic finance and so we want to prepare students to be able to be the entrepreneurs of their own lives professionally and personally I got there because my own interest in teaching was young adults and I could see decades ago what was going on in the colleges how they're being taken over by the leftists and the progressives and they were edging out over the years they were edging out edging out edging out anybody at a different point of view and they were changing the curriculum they were getting rid of classic texts because they were the dead white males and all kinds of things that I thought were very detrimental to young adult learning and and I didn't think they were particularly most of them are particularly organized to prepare a young person to for their own life so I had this idea that and and also especially what does a person who lives in a free society need what skills what knowledge what abilities do they need you know detokeville for the audience there's a famous French aristocrat who came over here in 1832 into the United States and he toured around any wrote a book that's still influential to this day called democracy in America and one of the things that he he's famous for is that the principles that he noticed then or the characteristics he noticed then are still true today in so many respects of us here in the United States and one of the things he noticed was that the original people who came over the pilgrims in New England they came over for an idea they didn't come over as adventurers or anything like that and they came over with their families and they actually were very high in their intellectual ability so they were a very unusual group of people and they basically were left alone by the British for about almost 200 years because they were a backwater so in that period he says they had an apprenticeship of freedom and this was the way that they learned how to self govern so they had a lot of experience with that but where do we have that experience today and this is on top of not being taught you know civics and US history and all these kinds of things that are that people have noticed are a problem lately but also where do you have an opportunity to learn self responsibility self discipline hard work and figure out what you want to do with your life it's so that's how it seems it seems to me that most universities now most most people go to them will want to have a four-year party in some cases but then two to have that piece of paper and Brian Kaplan wrote about this in his book the case against the case against education but it's all about signaling to future employers that you can jump through hoops for four years and it's not really about learning anything does reliance college kind of flip that model on its head a little bit is there a different approach to signal to employers that hey we're we're we're we're ready for life we're ready to to do a good job on on the market oh we're very focused on that we're very focused on what do people need to be capable and to to show to employers that they're capable of what so many entrepreneurs have told me they're looking for people who can problem solve who can take responsibility who can think who are creative and they have a hard time find there's there's many places that have a hard time finding people like that because that's not what you're taught in school so we're very focused on that and I want to say that so I had this idea about starting a college decade ago and what I did was in the summer of 2009 I started a week-long program called the Great Connections that is a kind of compressed version of what we're doing at the college I put everything I knew about optimal education for that age level in it and by the end of the week I was even surprised at the outcome and this happened every year where the about 75% of the students tell me my life has been transformed because now I can judge anything for myself because that's a big focus of what we're doing in the program the way the classes are run is not about the teacher telling you what a particular writer is saying but about the teacher helping you figure out yourself what this writer is saying and figure out in a dialogue with the other students and the beauty about this kind of dialogue it's not a debate it's a you you have to learn how to listen to the other person and reflect to them do you understand what they just said and what is the what is their reason and their evidence from the writers from the text that you're reading for their opinion and you learn all different ways of the way people come at the same material so what happens is the students end up developing a big toolbox kind of like you're making your mind into a Swiss army knife right yeah because uh you you're learning lots of different ways to approach or to reason about the same material uh wait so the students aren't just yelling at each other and saying to the racist and uh trying to get at each other canceled that they disagree no no it's interesting what happens is well we have very specific principles that we follow in the dialogue uh which encourage people to really understand each other and to be careful and since you have to use reason and evidence for whatever you're saying and the other person can ask you what did you mean by this or you know what's the context or what where's what where in the writer this person that we just read does he say this or that or does she say this or that so you can really examine all the evidence together and the students end up becoming very close friends because of it it's interesting because one of the first one of the students who came he's an engineer now and he came in 2009 and he said he he told me the secret of this which I didn't realize before he said well in class you're learning how the other person's mind works by hearing their reasoning about the same material that you're looking at and then out of class you get to know them personally in a lot of ways and he says so you end up knowing them better than almost anybody else you know and this is one of the reasons why and because they're doing this work together they you can see over the course of the time they come in all nervous you know they think I don't I'm gonna tell them you know what to do or whatever and as it goes along we're showing them how to have a valuable opinion how to how to understand things themselves and and how to have a valuable opinion that they can back up and they have this relationship with these other people that's very supportive with each other they're really trying to understand so it's you see them relax and you see them become excited and self-confident that I can do this yeah I have something valuable to say I can do something good in life so have you taken what what you had in those kind of compressed you said they were weak long to start so is is reliance college just taking that idea and stretching it out over a longer period of time a lot in many ways yeah yeah so the program is organized um so in Montessori in the lower levels we have what's called great lessons where when we want to introduce the subject matter for example biology we'll have a great lesson in the origin of life and it'll be a dramatic lesson you know it'll be a question well where did it come from and how did it happen so our program for the um the college students is going to be all organized by questions for example the first year the students will be studying um where am I it's kind of the basics of philosophy where am I how do I know it how do I live how do I live with other people so it's metaphysics epistemology ethics and politics and we also study aesthetics but there but it's driven by these questions within that framework of um you know well what what did various writers say and we have we try to use mostly what's called great books or the classics and the reason being that these are the writers that have been the most influential in civilization and some of the best thinkers so you get the benefit of you most people don't realize how influenced they are by these people because their ideas have infiltrated everything and the whole way that we we look at the world you know um so we think they're really valuable to to read and it's kind of eye-opening when you read some of them I'm like wow oh this is where that idea came from you know um and so what we're doing is we're going to present different questions of philosophy or origin of light origin of the universe how did mathematics start where did science start what what is trade what are the origins of civilization what are the downfalls of civilization what is freedom what is free will all of the all of the readings all of the discussions are organized around these questions and as much as possible we always try to relate what we do what we're reading in the classroom to what happens in the world in other words what's the consequence of holding this idea if I if I hold x idea and I try to live by it what is that due to me so in this way the person becomes it learns how to reason really well how to read really well understand almost any subject um and understands if I accept x wires the idea this is going to be the consequence of it for me so this way they can be much more independent about and aware of the ideas that they've accepted because most people don't realize that they've accepted a lot of ideas um and they're being their life is being organized by those ideas that maybe they didn't choose they just accepted because that's what they grew up with that's interesting isn't it so all of us unsure have started reading a book with a question in mind and maybe even a couple of questions and when you start reading a book with a question that already in your mind you read that book in a really different way then if you just pick up a book and start reading it and certainly in a very different way then if you're assigned the book to read right so that's a really interesting approach and I can imagine that if you also um structure your classes around questions so that not only now are you opening a book with a question in mind before you even start it you're going to a class with a question in mind that would be a really I would think it would be a a way to just kind of reframe your approach to learning altogether wouldn't it?
Well the thing the beauty about people bringing questions is that that's what they need to know right they're asking this question because they're they want to know the answer to it so it's great motivationally and it's also a way for the instructor to have an idea of well what does this person understand and what don't they understand right right got that going on um oh gosh there was something I meant to say oh well maybe it'll come back to me so instead of a question like that after 101 class it's a or a history of civilization from medieval times instead you're asking specific questions like we're gonna answer these four or five questions during this class and yeah it's an interesting way to to frame it sorry Corey go ahead yeah so Marta I um I noticed earlier you had mentioned the word collectivism when referencing John Dewey and his buddies uh structuring the education system here and I also noticed uh I couldn't help but notice that you wrote an article at the daily economy at AIER where I'm also a visiting fellow American Institute for Economic Research back in 2022 and you had mentioned that you know America was kind of trending towards authoritarian tendencies in some ways and how education can kind of save democracy in a sense and could you kind of just give us some more details on how fixing the education system or or expanding reliance college to a more uh to a bigger population of students how that could fight back against authoritarianism mm-hmm yeah I just want to mention that on top of this the academic side of our program every year the students will be doing a uh will research a problem in an area of professional interest and they will have to figure out a solution to it or at least how to get to a solution and implement it if possible we're going to put them together with mentors in that area and um this way they will have an opportunity to try out the profession that they're interested in before they actually go into it because you know there's last students that go to college and they major in something then they get out and they just don't like the work at all and then they're kind of it ends about what to do and the other thing is we focus a lot on um the kind of skills that students need to be successful in the workplace so there's a great deal that's involved with um self-reflection and goal setting um and checking on how what your progress is all these kinds of things that that they need um and it's also individual on the one hand the program is got some all required things to do that we do together but then we also have individualized tutorials in which the student decides okay I want to read this or I want to study this and they're going to have a private conversation with the tutor um and if you think about it the classroom is a mini society right so it reflow it how you treat people in the classroom is where you can develop habits on how you deal with other people um so if you have a classroom that's authoritarian and where the teacher is saying uh which is interesting today you know we have a lot of these these teachers that um are punishing kids for not having the right opinion or the what I hear from a lot of college students is I just shut up in the classroom because I know I'm going to say something and I'll get a bad grade because of it or you have teachers who for example uh I think there was somebody at Columbia who did this was giving extra credit if you went to one of these protests uh yeah that was reported so it's um that shapes the ethic in the classroom right and it shapes what you learn so if you if you have a classroom in which the teacher is treating the students with respect and people are taught how to collaborate in a very peaceful way and uh share knowledge with each other and develop their relationships um work in teams and and uh figure out how to to work outside of class together it's a it's a whole different experience the the apprenticeship right is a whole different experience yeah that that's great so what are your future plans for um reliance college you mentioned it's not open yet but it will be yeah we're we're running our summer program we're still running our summer program this summer we did last summer and uh it will probably be we're we've been doing this one day program I'm doing one in Dallas on Saturday called the Lion's Day to give people like a little taste of what we do uh right now we're we're we've got about 20 balls in the air of course uh there's a lot of legal things you have to go through uh we're raising the money um I'm building the team I have I mean I'm not too worried about uh the academic team because there are a lot of people out there who are very highly qualified and they are um really dissatisfied with with trying to teach in the current system it's more what what matters to me is whether the teacher buys into our whole approach and whether they can wrap their mind around the whole approach this is what's different between a Montessori student I mean Montessori teacher and your traditional teacher it's a completely different attitude towards the student of that you're trying to figure out what does this student need if the student is misbehaving well what's what is what are they frustrated about that's making it difficult for them to learn making them act out or anything like that and so you you um I have a completely different attitude towards your students you know you're you're a helper yeah so so you're you'll get your academic team wrapped up that shouldn't be an issue what are some other uh things you're working on now as you prepare to to launch well we we have to submit a bunch of materials to the state of Illinois to get approval to open um we're going to rent space initially it's rather than you know uh invest in real estate um still the program gets up and running we are very sure that we're doing it the right way um I don't I don't think it'll be a problem to get academically rated pretty well because of the way the program works so I think that'll happen pretty soon um and uh yeah so there's all that all those practical details yeah yeah what are your what are your what are your thoughts on the school choice program getting asked two years ago in Illinois and now lawmakers coming after homeschoolers oh it's just it's just so terrible I mean it's just but you know the teachers unions the teachers unions own Illinois politically now and they don't think it's in their interest to allow homeschooling or school choice or anything like that and it's really really unfortunate I mean there there was a program here in fact I spoke to the fellow who started it today called invest in Illinois in which individuals and corporations could give private scholarship money for kids and they would get a tax credit for it so the Illinois the Illinois government stopped that last year um it's really it's really unfortunate so I think there was 15,000 scholarships that got ripped away from students because of that yeah crazy and now they're coming to to regulate homeschoolers with homeschooled declaration forms and if you don't do it you get 30 days in jail for truancy and the ironic thing that this was a very laissez-faire state for education for a long time you you basically had to be open a certain number of days file the health code the fire code and you were fine you could use whatever the academic program you wanted and but I guess the teachers unions are finding it threatening so and there's you know so many kids exited the Chicago schools for example 36,000 since 2019 yeah the Wall Street Journal has reported that it's 10% of the student population in a few years six years exactly so they got to stop the the last escape hatch which is homeschooling they already took away the scholarships now they're trying to well and those are the families that are care about their students you know the ones that are homeschooling I mean it's a joke that they're worrying about truancy rates because of homeschooled because there's plenty of truancy going on in public schools yeah of course yeah clean up your own house before you come into my house yeah exactly so would you say Montessori is I guess it's a it's a teaching method it's not necessarily homeschooling or not right because it can be done in a private school and you could do it at home too would you say most Montessori methods are done in a private school setting or or as opposed to homeschooling most most monetary programs are in a private school setting yeah there's some public schools as I mentioned and there's some people who do there there's some programs that aid parents that want to do Montessori homeschooling I don't know exactly how this organized I would I would wonder whether those parents that were doing it developed a co-op so that they could share materials because one of the most expensive aspects of the program is these materials you know that you that you buy but they're really they're really important for how much how much do you think those materials would cost the average family if they wanted to do a Montessori you know um three to 13 three to 15 years old yeah it would be thousands of dollars there is a book called teaching Montessori in the home that has by Elizabeth Haynes stock that has instructions about how to make your own materials but if you've got the full complement it's thousands of thousands of thousands of dollars you've got all sorts of materials about how you achieve anything that is hard for you in general it is not just logic that kind of the even if I do a lot of our research because today is the first time on a day when our how you do it as an elderly lady say grab your hand over your hands hold your hands your hand over your hands hold the hand over your 15 years old OK so I'm going to talk about my first experience of youth working on my first experience of We've had kids who went on to become, oh, this was kind of funny. So we had our first graduating class was of five. That student went on to go to Whitney Young High School, which is a huge public high school here in Chicago, 5,000 kids. He ended up becoming a leader in a protest against testing, even though he always got 99 in his test.
We've had students who got on to become designers at Google, engineers running engineering programs at Amazon. This is just from our little small school. And there's a very interesting book that came out a few years ago by a researcher at MIT called The Geekway, and his name is Andrew McGaffey. And it's about how, well, it starts out talking about how he went to Montessori School and then was put into a regular school, and he was like, oh, what's this?
He didn't like that at all. Then he came across research that some other people had done that found that an unusual number of CEOs in the tech business had been Montessori students. The researchers had found that and were kind of shocked about it. But this author basically connects the dots between Montessori education and why that CEOs would have had Montessori.
And you know, Sergey Brennan and Larry Page of Google talked about Barbara Walters about 20 years ago. Yeah. I want you to plug your book, which is a teaching freedom education for a free society. Could you give us a quick rundown of the main points in the book?
It focuses on this issue of how the classroom is a micro-society. How do you help people develop the skills and the attitudes and the knowledge they need in order to live in a free society and to be able to advocate for it and to defend it? So I examine the whole concept of, well, what goes on in a classroom and how the environment of the classroom in all respects physical, psychological, social, academic, how those things influence the way people learn. And to consider those when you're doing your teaching, if you want to encourage this kind of person or that kind of person.
I really liked your quote from my favorite part of this interview today was the classroom is a mini-society and how, I mean, just thinking about that and how top-down the public school system was when I was a kid and I'm sure it's the same way now, can kind of, that's how people are going to enter the world, right? And they're going to be OK with authoritarianism. They're going to be OK being told what to do. And I think that's part of the reason why when COVID unfolded, everybody would just kind of threw their hands up, even though the rates were kind of low for mortality, all things considered, relatively speaking, and beyond the two weeks to slow the spread, people kept just throwing their arms up and allowing the lockdowns to persist.
I think the school system in its current form might have contributed to people just saying to heck with it, we're going to do what we're told. Yeah, it seemed like fear was a big factor that they'd really scared everybody out of having reasonable judgment about it, about what was going on. I mean, just the issue of was it a lab leak or not?
I mean, it seemed obvious to me. It couldn't talk about it, yeah, you couldn't write it. Yeah, I mean, it seemed obvious to me from the moment that you found out where it started that it must have been from that lab. And that's another kind of good example of how knowledge is not dictated by central planners, right?
It's just people figured these things out. You had the internet going crazy with all this stuff. I think there were viral YouTube videos at the time getting shut down of people racing the giving evidence for the lab leak theory and them studying COVID and whatever evidence was at the time. And you couldn't talk about those things because the experts said, no, basically they didn't want people to, you know, they thought it was racist or something to even make that argument.
And it wasn't politically correct at the time. And I guess it didn't fit whatever the narrative was that was approved by my mainstream media. Well, the logical fallacy of ad hominem against the man was everywhere and shut people up like crazy. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so Marcia, a lot of people are watching this right now and I think that you're probably one of our favorite guests up to this time. But I do want to respect your time at the same time. And we've been on for over an hour, one of our longest shows. We told you before we got on, we would cap it at an hour and then maybe go at least 30 minutes.
So I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. If there's any other, we got to have you on again, actually, because this was such a good conversation. It's what our listeners, it's information that they're looking for. I think a lot of people are excited about alternative forms of education.
I think the Montessori thing is something that people kind of know a little bit about, but they want more information about it. This reliance college as a kind of a destructor in the higher education system and how it's something different than the leftist that have controlled the rest of the higher education system for a long time. I think it's desperately needed at this moment. And I'm glad that you started it.
And I'm glad there are people like you leading the way to show people that there is another way, that there is a better way, and how this can affect the rest of society. So thank you so much for joining the Educational Freedom Institute podcast, Marcia. It's been a real pleasure. If there's anything else you'd like to plug your ex-handle, again, her book is Teaching Freedom, Education for a free society, anything else you'd like to add on.
Well, I'm really touched by what you said. And thank you so much for having me on both of you. I really appreciate it. I do have an article that I came out recently with an online journal called Cosmo in Texas, which has a lot of my basic approach and analysis of what's going on in education in it if people want to read it.
I'm looking for it right now. And it's called Teaching for Freedom. And it says it's a PDF from March 2025. So I'll add that to the show on X so people can go check it out as well.
And I'll tag you so that people go follow you. And I just wanted to mention that we are running a summer program, July 26th to August 2nd here in Chicago. It's our week-long program. And people are interested.
Go to our website, Reliance College. And I really appreciate being able to speak to you. Thanks, Marsha. Thank you so much.
We'll have you on again, hopefully soon. And have a great rest of the week. And keep on fighting. Thanks, Marsha.
Thank you, you too. Thank you for listening. You can find EFI online at efinstitute.org on Twitter at ef underscore institute and on Facebook at Educational Freedom Institute.
