Keeping Maria Montessori Alive.

“In my harsher moments, I used to speak of schools as a system for systematically destroying people’s minds. I would amend that and say ‘for systematically aligning people’s minds so they all think alike.’ This helps communication, it fosters the ability to work together, and it crumples originality. It crumples the ability to see and observe.” –– Ted Nelson: A Very General Lecture

I wrote down some questions about technology and education, and sent them to Alan Kay. His reply started with “Hi Saad, Lots of questions,” but in typical Alan style, he went on to answer every one of them. “Maria Montessori was one of the great educational minds of all time,” he replied to one of my questions about education. And that’s how I started to know who Maria Montessori was.

There’s a Montessori school in our city, but for 20 years, I had never bothered to learn what the word “Montessori” meant. A sombre feeling fell over me. For all this time, my curiosity had ironically been educated out of me by the systematic aligning of my mind with that of the world. I had stopped thinking, I had stopped learning, but now I was going to trust Maria to teach me. From that day on, the name “Montessori” would have a profound new meaning to me.

Alan had once again set me on a new path of discovery, and if I wanted to gain an understanding of education –– the way I had gained an understanding of computers by understanding Doug Engelbart and others –– I had to understand Maria. I had to get good at shifting my context of thinking as I learned about the history of education. I would also have to remember Einstein’s words: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking that created them,” because they would ensure that I continued to think in paradigm-shifting ways.

During my previous conversation with David A. Smith, I sensed that education was an important part of his mission with Croquet. Like the future of the computer, the future of education was about bringing back the past, I was convinced. We had to bring ideas back from different points in history, package them together, and send them off into the world, and by learning about Maria’s ideas, I would know how to help bring back the ideas of education that had fallen short of being understood and implemented, the way the computer had fallen short.

I hadn’t yet thought enough about the philosophical reasons for why computers and education were intertwined, but I felt that they were both subcomponents of a bigger idea. When you want to reinvent an idea that has subcomponents, you have to reinvent each subcomponent separately. And then through art, engineering and science, you would weave the subcomponents together. By reinventing the subcomponents, the totality could be reinvented, and computers and education were two of the key subcomponents, perhaps the most important ones. The two missions — the reinvention of computers and the reinvention of education — were handcuffed together.

Croquet would need all the support it could get from school teachers, principals and students, and I hoped that Montessori schools around the world would warm up to these ideas of the future. I started imagining Alan, David and Bret Victor visiting schools and universities around the world together, spreading their ideas about computers, education, philosophy and life.

As I read Maria’s book “The Absorbent Mind” I started to understand the importance of children in society, life and the progression of civilization:

“The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was. In order to form a man great powers are necessary and these powers are possessed only by the child.”

Children instinctually knew how to teach themselves:

“It is not the professor who applies psychology to children, it is the children themselves who teach psychology to the professor. This may seem obscure but it will become immediately clear if we go somewhat more into detail: the child has a type of mind that absorbs knowledge and instructs himself.”

Teachers had to relinquish their ideas of authority over children and think differently:

“We, the human teachers, can only help the great work that is being done, as servants help the master. If we do so, we shall be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul, to the rising of a New Man who will not be the victim of events, but who will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society.”

It started becoming clear to me that children would set off the next computer and education revolution. If we empowered children with these ideas –– that it was they who were going to invent the future –– I believed we would have their worlds of imagination, curiosity and authenticity guiding us on our journey.

And so now, Maria Montessori had joined Doug Engelbart as another crucial person whose ideas would have to be kept alive in the mission to reinvent the computer. I wondered who would be next to join.