The Work of Education
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war."
From The Writer's Almanac (8.31.08):
"...today there are more than 5,000 Montessori schools in the United States, 300 of which are public schools. A study in 2006 published in the journal Science tested public school children in inner-city Milwaukee, some who had won a district lottery to attend the public Montessori school, and a separate control group who had entered the Montessori lottery but did not get picked. (This was to account for differences in home environment between the sorts of parents who want their children to attend Montessori; in this study, every participant's parents had wanted their child to enroll in Montessori.)"
"The study showed that five-year-olds who attended Montessori had better vocabulary and math skills, as well as better social problem-solving skills — that when presented with stories of behavior dilemmas, Montessori children used 'a higher level of reasoning by referring to justice or fairness to convince the other child' to share. Twelve-year-old Montessori children were deemed to have written essays that were 'significantly more creative' and that employed 'significantly more sophisticated sentence structures' than their non-Montessori peers, though their spelling and grammar skills were at an equal level."
