I never expected to end up teaching. Although my older brother is a teacher, I never considered entering the profession myself. I enjoyed my own schooling, but I harbored doubts about the educational system.

I particularly resisted the idea of education as a means to some prescribed end. I never viewed my own education as driving me toward college and career, but rather as a chance to learn about things that interested me. In high school, college preparation was never my goal. I opted out of senior-year math class to focus on subjects I enjoyed. Looking back, I know I made the right choice. In college, I met with professors during office hours because their work fascinated me, not to help me secure a summer internship. I would rather spend summers mowing lawns at a state park or volunteering at the free summer lunch program. Education should be about exploring what you love, questioning who you are, and gaining the tools to imagine and live a fulfilling life, not about fitting into a mold to maximize your earning potential. If there is more to life, there should be more to education too.

Perhaps that’s why I returned to my old high school as a teacher myself. Or perhaps it was simply because I had failed to curate a career to step into after college. After a stint there, I went on to teach elementary school children. Over the years, I had watched my older brother, an elementary school teacher himself, build beautiful and meaningful relationships with his students – how he made sure his chronically tired fourth-grade student had a bed at home, and how his third-grade class cried when he changed schools. I felt nervous, believing younger children were harder to reason with than high school students, but I decided to give it a try.

Nothing in my prior experience had prepared me for my first day in front of thirty fifth-graders. At the end of it, I was exhausted, and this was before I had taught the kids anything. A day of repeated attempts to quiet ten-year-olds whom you do not know while remaining on your feet nearly seven hours straight with hardly a bathroom and water break is enough to turn even the most hardened sceptic into a champion of higher pay for teachers.

It didn’t take long for me to start wondering what I was doing there and what kind of system I had found myself participating in. Some students resisted the assigned work at every step. One girl had a game of repeatedly trying to see how far she could get into playing a Rihanna remix out loud on the iPad before I told her to shut it off. Others acquiesced to my seemingly arbitrary demands. They dutifully completed the worksheets I passed around. The resistant group frustrated me; the submissive group concerned me. Was this teaching? Was obedience and submission all there was to education? Was the way things were set up preventing me from providing my students a good education? After just a few weeks teaching in the elementary school, I became disillusioned with conventional education and started looking into alternatives.

That’s when I came across the work of Dr. Maria Montessori. One of the first female physicians in Rome, Montessori chose to work with disabled children, and later with the impoverished. After launching a career in the medical field, she was offered the position of kindergarten director for a newly established housing project for poor families. The kindergarten was envisioned as a way to keep the children from damaging the building and troubling the locals while their parents worked. As a biographer writes, “Devoting herself to kindergartens for poor children in the most disreputable neighborhood in the city may seem like a step down, especially just when she’s starting to build an academic career. [Yet] she has understood that changing the world starts with children, possibly with poor children.” Maria viewed this new mission as her calling. Thus was born Montessori’s “Children’s House” in 1907, in San Lorenzo, a working-class district of Rome. Montessori and the building custodian’s untrained daughter oversaw fifty poor children aged two to six.

For Montessori, education held a deep spiritual significance. She understood the relationship between adult and child (and the obligations of the former toward the latter) in light of her Christian faith:

The sounding of the depths of the soul brings to light an accusation against those who have been recognized as the guardians and benefactors of humanity. But since almost all are fathers or mothers and many are teachers or entrusted with the care of children, the accusation covers the adult world in general, the society responsible for the children. This startling accusation has something apocalyptic about it, it is mysterious and terrible like the voice of the Last Judgment: “What have you done with the children that I entrusted to you?”

Montessori speaks of the possibilities of the classroom. After a poetic passage explicating the process through which a young child acquires speech (a process that includes no “lessons” or “direct instruction”), she writes:

A divine command is breathing upon this helpless being animating it with its spirit. This inner drama of the child is a drama of love. It is a great reality unfolding within the secret areas of his soul and at times completely absorbing it. These marvelous activities wrought in humble silence cannot take place without leaving behind ennobling qualities that will accompany the child through life.

Montessori presents many remedies to the challenges and limitations I witnessed at the schools I taught in. She made me want to be a part of her kind of education. And the reverence and awe with which she speaks of children nurtured in me a desire to work with even younger children. She writes:

Finally, one day as I looked upon these children with great respect and affection, I placed my hand upon my heart and asked, “Who are you?” Were these perhaps the little children whom Christ had embraced and of whom he had said, “Whoever receives this little child for my sake, receives me,” and again, “Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God as a little child will not enter into it.”

While she is credited with creating the “Montessori method,” Montessori did not come up with a theory and then impose it on children. Observing the children in her care, Montessori writes, “There was no method to be seen, what was seen was a child. A child’s soul freed from impediments was seen acting according to its own nature.” She continues:

Before elaborating any system of education, we must … create a favorable environment that will encourage the flowering of a child’s natural gifts. All that is needed is to remove the obstacles. And this should be the basis of, and point of departure for, all future education.

She soon observed an awe-inspiring change in the children in her care. In one of her first schools, children orphaned after a devastating earthquake “had experienced a spiritual renewal which freed them from sorrow and abandonment and given them a new birth of joy.”

In one of her most famous passages, she writes:

We know how to find pearls in the shells of oysters, gold in the mountains and coal in the bowels of the earth, but we are unaware of the spiritual germs, the creative nebulae that the child hides within himself when he enters our world to renew mankind. If the spontaneous forms of organization … could be admitted to the ordinary schools, this would work wonders.

Indeed, “The child, a free human being, must teach us and teach society order, calm, discipline, and harmony.” It is in this way that education can lead to a renewed humanity.

Maria Montessori instilled in me a desire to give the children I had met in the schools what they deserve: a schooling experience that develops and expands their natural curiosity and wonder, allowing them to flourish into autonomous and graceful persons existing within a larger community.

How does Montessori propose we accomplish that? First, she observed how children acted and what they gravitated toward and away from, how they engaged with their peers and with the prepared environment of the classroom. Over time, patterns began to reveal themselves. Montessori responded by providing materials and activities that corresponded to these natural impulses of the child until what we now call the Montessori method emerged. She often quipped that the children revealed the method to her. It differed in many ways from conventional schools at the time, in which children were, as Montessori observes, akin to “butterflies stuck with pins, fixed in their places.”

Children in conventional schools were not given the freedom to develop their own potentialities; their will was entirely subordinated to that of the adult teacher. As is often still the case, teaching meant telling, and learning meant listening. The adult actively teaches; the child passively learns. Montessori offered a radical reorientation of the educational space when she discovered that “education is not something the teacher does but a natural process that develops spontaneously in the human being.” The task then becomes one of meticulously preparing an environment in which this natural process can unfold.

One way to approach this preparation is to begin with the premise that children are naturally curious and want to learn. Montessori writes, “Our care of the child should be governed not by the desire to ‘make them learn things,’ but by the endeavor always to keep burning within them the light which is called intelligence.” The educational environment can either snuff out this light or keep it alive; often it does the former.

Learning in a Montessori classroom is multimodal: children learn through motivated, effortful, repeated, trial-and-error interactions with the environment, using all their senses A particularly exciting “work” (the name given to all purposeful and effortful activity children engage in) involves children tasting unmarked liquids (chosen by the adult) and then matching them to their like pair. Children develop their taste discrimination.

Once introduced by the teacher, the materials become scaffolding, allowing the children to discover knowledge and skills on their own as opposed to being “taught” something by the teacher. Famously, when an adult observer asked a child in a Montessori classroom who taught her how to write, the child replied, “Taught me? Nobody taught me.”

Montessori classrooms are generally composed of thirty or more children, with a three-year age span. This might seem counterintuitive, as we’ve long been accustomed to associating smaller class sizes with higher educational quality. I thought I knew this for a fact; I’d seen how hard it can be to corral large numbers of children. What I discovered was that while this nearly always holds true for conventional methods of schooling, the Montessori method thrives with large class sizes. This is important for peer-to-peer learning and modeling as well as the development of social cohesion without constant teacher interference. Because the environment and method foster self-determination, each child works at his or her own pace.

Montessori also discovered that when given large periods of uninterrupted work time (at least three hours) young children are capable of sustaining attention and working purposefully with little adult intervention. This also struck me as foreign. In the classroom, I was constantly redirecting children’s attention. Everyone knows kids cannot pay attention. However, when I began to consider the infant or the toddler, I began to see what Montessori saw: a child engaged in deep focus, patiently working toward a goal. The teacher carefully observes (and takes notes on) each child in order to track their development and introduce materials and concepts at appropriate times. Montessori believed in the necessity of helping children to develop self-discipline through the spontaneous activity of their own will. They should work because they want to, not to avoid punishment by an adult authority.

It’s hard to articulate a method where so much of the work lies in the careful art of paying attention. And through decades of continued observation and experimentation on multiple continents with a wide diversity of children, this method has been tested, refined, and validated. Neuroscience and child development research has corroborated many of Maria Montessori’s discoveries.

Moving from theory to practice, from the century-old writings of Maria Montessori to the Montessori school nearby, I encountered some problems. As I continued my self-study of Maria Montessori’s works, I began working at different Montessori schools. I learned that the term “Montessori” is not trademarked, so any school can operate as a “Montessori school” regardless of its fidelity to Maria Montessori’s vision.

At one school I worked at, tuition cost nearly $40,000 a year. The reservation of resources for the wealthy is not unique to Montessori schools: we see it all over the system of education. However, it is particularly disappointing and confounding in the case of Montessori because she began her work with the poorest of the poor. A method revealed by the efforts of poor children has become the reserve of the elite. I wanted, and still want, it to be more than that.

I began reading books that addressed this specific issue. I even found a handbook for implementing Montessori in public schools. These initiatives encouraged me. I came to find out that there are some high-quality and affordable Montessori programs around the world. However, these are on the margins of an already marginal method of education.

That is to be expected; ours is a world in which prime resources and advantages are reserved for the rich. I’ve worked in elite college prep schools in Manhattan, and I’ve worked in Title I public schools (schools with a high percentage of children from low-income families) in small-town Ohio. The disparity is shocking. At the prep school in Manhattan, I would fill my lunch plate with beef, roasted potatoes and carrots alongside a salad with grilled chicken, asparagus, and mixed greens and recall the children at the Title I school digging through the “share bin” for an extra cheese stick.

As a Christian, I couldn’t ignore Maria Montessori’s own faith. Whether her work with the poor was animated by this faith or by necessity, I cannot help but see some sort of divine mandate in it. Accounts of Montessori schools from the twentieth century describe religious sisters operating classrooms for children displaced by disasters, with injured soldiers building materials for these children.

There is a remarkably human quality to all of this. Montessori’s vision has no horizon. She is not concerned with getting children to write proficiently at age four. That can occur when her method is applied well, but for Maria Montessori this kind of achievement is beside the point. What she is concerned with is total transformation, renewal of the entire person, and thus the entire society: “If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children.”

So why don’t more schools adopt Montessori’s wisdom and method? To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, it is not that Montessori has been tried and found wanting but that is has been found difficult and left untried. The method is exacting in what it asks of the child, but also in what it asks of the teacher and the parent. Early on, Maria Montessori would not let parents send their children to the school if they did not practice the principles of her method in the home. She even envisioned a religious order being formed dedicated to providing Montessori education to children: The Servants of the Children of Light.

We can imagine Montessori education provided by a voluntary apostolate to the poor animated by divine love. But need this apply only to Montessori education? Could we perhaps imagine education as a whole in such a regard? Many already do. And the workload and pay given to teachers in underfunded schools certainly implies that such work is a voluntary apostolate animated by divine love.

The problem, of course, is that there aren’t enough volunteers. If we take seriously the importance of education, we’ll need to direct the money needed. We’ll need to provide more than a median hourly wage of $12.12 to early care and education workers. And if 90 percent of brain development occurs by age five, perhaps we need to spend more than 5 percent of public education dollars on early childhood education.

The problem with Montessori education is that there is not enough of it. And where it does exist, it is either prohibitively expensive or poorly implemented. We’d first have to reimagine the role of the school in society. Montessori said that “the method is a small thing.” It is not a panacea for all of our ills. It is merely one method of education that has proven, time and time again, age after age, study after study, to be a remarkably effective method of education and child development. It means to view the child as a whole, viewing education as an aid to life.

Can we imagine how our approach to education might change if we saw it as holding the spiritual significance Montessori did? I have no answers, but I have more questions. Why do one out of five students report being bullied? Why is child suicide higher during the school year than it is during the summer? Why do Christian schools not look much different from secular schools? 

I am not optimistic about the future of education. I know how difficult it is to be a teacher today. I know how difficult it is to be a child. And I can’t help but believe that ours is a society that simply does not care about children.

But I am hopeful. What Maria Montessori discovered all those years ago in the slum of San Lorenzo rings true even today. Children still contain within them the light we call intelligence. It still remains for the adults in the room to keep this burning. Every day we still have a choice. To snuff or to fan the flame. And on this choice our future depends.