Blog 9

The basis for the pedagogy for Montessori is that we are restricted in schools by desks and furniture and we don’t get a chance to learn different ways. We also are punished and rewarded with objects and he thinks the reward should be the inner happiness and inner learning then physically getting a prize. He said that is too much based on rewards than on your brain. He also believes that punishment is just for shame and that it doesn’t really teach you anything. You should want to do good in your life. School furniture keeps the kids in desks and not learning in the way they want to. Let’s say a kid wants to sit in the floor or stand, teachers don’t allow students to learn in that way and be different. Furniture is a restriction. Freedom he believes will make you learn more and have different inner feelings. He believes in the knowledge of how you work and learn is from the inside not on prizes and punishments.

Dewey says that thinking is grounded in experience and that teachers can only improve the ability of the mind to think. Thinking should be based on personal experience first, then about the actual subject in school. In classrooms that don’t show real world experiences they only learn what the teacher thinks not what they need to know to face the situation in real life. Teaching should be more based on real world then just school. That’s the problem he sees in teaching is that most teachers are teaching wrong. The conditions for thinking should be to let them experience. The introduction to a subject should be something based on something real world like and not academic. Schools don’t always have a way to show real life experiences in the classroom because they just can’t. To think you have to know something and gain knowledge and use that knowledge to figure out something new. Thinking is creative and this is how you make new ideas. The education system is difficult because they don’t have the needs to teach the experiences they need to. Teachers need to teach students to think using real life experiences and then they can teach the material based on that. Teachers should engage students in things that require thinking and not something that has already been thought out for them. Ability to think for their self in real world situations should be the goal for schools.