What Montessori and Waldorf both intuited is that children have a natural state which is optimum for learning. I too disagree with many aspects of how they get there, but the orientation matters.

I even saw this growing up homeschooling, where arguably no institution is involved.

Homeschooled kids who hated learning and mostly felt no one cared what they thought were taught with textbooks.

Kids who were homeschooled with unschooling, Montessori, unit studies, or basically any other form of student-directed learning seems “in themselves.” They we’re curious, relaxed, interested in the world, helpful.

Their parents could be weird, they could be raised in a cult, still it held up.

There really is a fundamental gap in “what a human being is for” between authoritarian and self-determinate approaches.

Authoritarians truly have no idea what they are trading for in order to enforce the “values” they pretend to have. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work to introduce human-first approaches to education institutions. Authoritarians recognize this approach as one they can’t relate to and they are afraid of it. Even when teachers, parents, and students are willing, authoritarian admins will completely shut it down.

There’s one reliable way to distinguish these systems - tune into your kid as a parent and believe what you are feeling.

It can hard to do in the face of societal expectations & realities, it’s even hard for me sometimes and I have a lifetime of choosing my own path.

“Most Likely to Succeed” is an incredible body of research from Harvard on this and the documentary that goes with it hits even harder.

Parents/guardians who care about their kids deserve to trust their intuition about what they need.