must learn to think beyond the status quo, says Philip Bujak, recently
retired chief executive of the Montessori St Nicholas Charity.
Perhaps the founding precept of the Montessori philosophy is the notion that the prepared environment is key to all learning in the very young. For well over a hundred years, Montessori philosophy and the teacher training have centred on the ways and means in which a prepared space works in tandem with the teacher to enable the child to learn both independently and at their own speed, interacting with what they have around them.
Montessori philosophy teaches us that this interaction will be different for every child, and in this sense is a creative process. The prepared environment of a Montessori classroom is by and large quite formal, but within that formality individuality is able to flourish, as long as - and this is the nub of the issue - that the teacher is intellectually and emotionally gifted enough to encourage and exploit what the child has locked within them, and to relate this to what the environment can provide to encourage individual creativity. Sadly, in my experience, the majority of Montessori teachers do not display this gift.
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