Get Wokeism Out of Montessori (Part II)
In The Montessori Child, I wanted to share how Simone Davies slid in more and more propaganda over the course of her works. She began with The Montessori Toddler, which did not stray too far left field, but by her latest book, the only thing a parent could take away from it was that your child must become a solider for justice, a woke warrior, a “peaceful protestor,” and an activist for the Marxist cause.
I will now take the time, if you can stand it, to read every bit I could pick out in her latest book that made my hair stand up on end. If you cannot handle the level of woke language worked into this popular parenting guide, then I urge you to just skip to the end or risk losing all your hair.
Now, a lot of these passages I’m not going to comment on since I understand that my audience is smart and can already point out the obvious leftist talking points just from reading (or hearing) them. But I will jump back in when something may not be as apparent. Let’s begin:
1. We can encourage them to think about the planet and their responsibility to protect it; to serve others in our community and, as the child gets older, further afield; or to participate in such events as the Montessori Model United Nations—a forum where children from around the world act as ambassadors of different countries and present their policies—if the resources or a scholarship are available (Davies and Uzodike, 92).
2. “This is a good time to have conversations about equality vs equity and fairness” (Davies and Uzodike, 93).
3. “We can help our child see that they, too, can work to have an impact on others in their community and the world. In this way, they start to explore their cosmic task” (Davies and Uzodike, 94).
4. Raising antiracist, antibias children is intrinsically linked with raising a Montessori child. It stretches from how we spend our money, to how we show up in our communities, to finding ways to take action in the face of injustice.
A helpful framework for this work is the four antibias education goals developed by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards.
Goal 1: Each child understands and values their own identity. We are all made up of an intersection of identities, including race, ethnicity, gender, religion, economic class, family structure, neurodiversity, differing abilities, languages, and so on.
To build a strong sense of self, we can help our child see themselves (their skin color, hair type, family structure, language, etc.) represented in:
-Books and storytelling
-Artwork, posters, and photographs
-Toys, such as dolls and puzzles
-Art materials, such as skin-tone crayons or paints they can mix to replicate their own skin tone
-Songs, dance, music, and instruments
Part of understanding who they are is also recognizing any privileges they have. Which of their identities gives them access, ease, or “invisibility” and which identities do not?
Goal 2: Each child understands and values others’ identities. We can build on the work we have done on Goal 1 by helping our children get to know other people in our community, through real experiences.
We can look for toys, books, artwork, exhibitions, and other media that represent human diversity and center Indigenous children, Black children, children of color, Asian children, families with same-sex parents, people who are disabled, and members of the LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent communities. […]
We can go further and try to ensure that our friends, doctors, and other people in our daily life and communities represent a broad spectrum of identities. We can venture outside our communities to other neighborhoods or towns that are different from our own. We can notice what things are the same and what might be different. […]
Goal 3: Each child can identify injustice and recognize that it hurts. We can help our child recognize injustice, unfairness, and stereotypes that are aimed at them or others. We can help them become critical thinkers by asking questions like “Who is not in the room?” or “Who does this disadvantage?” We can model asking questions when we hear something in the news, read an article or social media post, walk past a billboard, or overhear our children talking. Antibias educator Britt Hawthorne encourages us to help our child identify the problems in the system rather than the individual. When our child asks, “Why do those people live under a bridge?” it is an opportunity to talk about things like the cost of living in our city and how our city hasn’t invested in affordable housing.
We can help our child challenge binary categories and learn to center others. They can learn to appreciate other cultures, not appropriate them. We can acknowledge the native landowners where we live and explore ways in which individuals and society can redistribute resources. As our child learns about who holds power in society, they can also learn to critically analyze the effects.
Goal 4: Each child feels empowered to take action in cases of injustice. We can ask our child what action they’d like to take. We can help them draft a letter to the local government. We can encourage them to stand up for themselves or someone else if they see prejudice or discrimination. “That’s unkind.” “That hurts me/them when you say that.” In times of crisis, they may want to donate money they have saved or find hands-on ways to help and support individuals in our community who may be living on the margins.
We can help our 6- to 12-year-old child develop their sense of fairness and empathy. But these conversations can happen far earlier, with our babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. As their adults, we need to educate ourselves so that we can guide them in these critical conversations and model calling people in and out when we see or experience injustice. […]
A note on books
We learned from Britt Hawthorne that there are different types of book collections. There are affirming books (in which children see themselves represented), books for diversity (which represent many types of different children, people, and families), books for social justice (including books that include harmful stereotypes or other content that we want to critically analyze together with our child), and books for activism (about how others have taken action in the past and how we can take action now). We can think about the purpose of the books and how we will use them as we add to our book collections and when visiting the library. Some books we will want to make sure we read with our children so we can discuss what we see, and others we will be able to leave on the shelf for our children to explore on their own (Davies and Uzodike, 106–8).
5. Appreciate, don’t appropriate. To be mindful of how we spend our time and money, we can seek out tours from locals rather than large companies and avoid buying cheap trinkets from the markets and instead buy fewer but better-quality and more authentic items made by local or Indigenous people. We teach our child that appropriation begins when people profit from what they saw, learned, or bought on their travels (Davies and Uzodike, 137).
6. “We highly recommend Britt Hawthorne’s book Raising Antiracist Children and the book Anti-bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves by Louise Derman-Sparks and Julie Olsen Edwards, both of which have useful examples of how to have discussions with children about race, gender, class, and ability” (Davies and Uzodike, 159).
7. Children will learn about sex and relationships in many ways. Whether we like it or not, they are and will be receiving and exposed to information, images, and conversations about sex. If we can be the first point of contact or introduction for our children, then our children are more likely to check what they hear against what we have told them instead of vice versa. […] It starts in the first year, as we ask them before handling their bodies, saying, “I’m going to pick you up,” then pausing to allow them time to process this and give us permission. […] When we name our child’s body parts, we can use the correct names… (Davies and Uzodike,162).
8. Using gender-inclusive language and ideas. Gender encompasses a person’s body, expression, and identity. While many of us grew up with the binary categories of male and female, there can be many different gender expressions, including gender-fluid, agender, and trans.
We want every child to feel that they are accepted as they are, however they present. No one can tell a child how they feel. Our child or their schoolmate may feel outside the gender binary. To make everyone feel most affirmed, we can consider:
-Keeping our language gender-inclusive; for example, by saying, “You’re becoming an adult” (instead of “You’re becoming a man/woman”).
-Modeling using our pronouns when we introduce ourselves: “My name is Simone and my pronouns are she/her.” This will show how we feel most affirmed and help others reflect on the pronouns they use to feel most affirmed.
-Questioning the idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys, that toy stores have toys for girls or boys, and that clothing stores have girls’ or boys’ clothing.
-Allowing children of any gender to show emotion, dress up in their parent’s clothing, wear clothing that they feel comfortable in or would like to experiment with, play sports or not, and consider any career path of their choosing (Davies and Uzodike, 163).
9. Simone remembers walking with her family through the red-light district in Amsterdam to a café. Oliver—then around 10—asked why there were women standing in the windows in their underwear. Simone didn’t avoid the question and instead gave a simple answer about prostitution and what it was. He didn’t ask anything further, and they continued on to the café. […] If we live in a cisgender, heteronormative family, the child will have absorbed this as normal in the first six years. Regardless of our family constellation, we can teach them to respect all types of families (Davies and Uzodike, 164).
10. “In addition to teaching them about their changing bodies and sex, we also want to help our children accept their bodies and all bodies in their diversity. This includes hair texture, skin color, height, and shape” (Davies and Uzodike, 165).
11. “As Montessori families, we want to instill an attitude of solving problems with others in nonviolent ways and not have guns in our home” (Davies and Uzodike, 174).
12. In her book Raising Antiracist Children, Britt Hawthorne shares a powerful message about beauty from Trisha Moquino (a highly respected Indigenous Montessori educator): “You don’t need to wear makeup to be beautiful. Our grandparents taught us not to rush into wearing makeup. They stated that our creator made me the way I was supposed to be and that I was fine that way, I was beautiful that way.” This is one of the messages Trisha has shared with her girls when talking about self-love in their family over the years.
The same book also has us think critically with our children:
-About corporations selling products to make us look “right.”
-About the use of Photoshopped images and the messaging in advertisements.
-About setting boundaries around body-shaming—that no one is allowed to make fun of someone’s body size or shape. We can say, “Bodies are just bodies. All bodies are worthy bodies. It’s not okay to comment on someone’s body.”
-About valuing all bodies, including bodies of all colors, abilities, sexualities, and genders.
-About saying, “I love my body; it belongs to me” if someone comments on our body.
-About how everyone is allowed to choose what they wear.
-About learning to have respect for disabled bodies and to recognize where we have privileges and immunity and how we can advocate for others in the community.
-About how disability can be both visible and invisible.
-About learning more about body positivity from The Body Is Not an Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor (Davies and Uzodike, 166).
13. “The information shared can be applied to any difficult world events, from war to the climate crisis to natural disasters to a school shooting. Harrowing events happen around us, and we can help our children process them even when we ourselves may find it difficult to comprehend them” (Davies and Uzodike, 175).
14. “The same principles can be applied to conversations about the climate crisis. We can acknowledge the facts, let them know what is being done, tell them we also sometimes feel worried about it, and make a plan for what we would like to do as a family to combat climate change” (Davies and Uzodike, 177).
15. “There’s an African saying that it takes a village to raise a child. We can’t raise our children in isolation. We work with others, including immediate family members like our partner (if we have one) and other children […]” (Davies and Uzodike, 178).
16. “Critical minds that seek to make a change in the world toward social and environmental justice” (Davies and Uzodike, 189).
17. “We can also inspire our children by pursuing our own interests. Whether it be ceramics, religion, permaculture, activism, sports, playing guitar, or skydiving” (Davies and Uzodike, 190).
18. Is our community diverse and a source of different experiences and perspectives to our children? […] Can we reconnect with the land and support the Indigenous people? Can we volunteer in our community in a way that we find fun? […] Communities hold us, and we hold them. Communities challenge us, and we challenge them. Communities celebrate with us, and we celebrate with them (Davies and Uzodike, 193).
19. Addressing our biases
In her article “Understanding Implicit Bias: What Educators Should Know,” Cheryl Staats tells us that everyone—regardless of our race, gender, or age—has implicit biases, “the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner.” Our unconscious mind will operate faster and contribute to decisions we make before our conscious mind is even aware.
The good news is that we can do something about our implicit biases. First, we can identify where our conscious ideals differ from our automatic implicit reactions, and bring them into closer alignment. Second, we can increase our contact with people of different religions and ethnicities, as well as people who identify in ways other than we do. When we don’t encounter these people in our community, we might follow people on social media with different beliefs, backgrounds, and experiences to ensure that our perspective remains as broad as possible. Last, we can seek exposure to folks who show up in nonstereotypical ways, including those who break occupational gender norms and those with lived experiences that are different from our own.
Our aim is to eventually reduce the difference between our implicit and conscious understanding of the world. This is important work to reduce our biases and allow our children and any child in society to reach their full potential (Davies and Uzodike, 197–8).
20. Adolescents have a sensitive period for justice. They are developing their moral compass further. The adolescent continues to explore the morality that they began to acquire in the second plane, but it’s no longer about things being only equal. They can see people’s strengths and needs and consider what is right. They are also ready to think about systems and if they are fair or systems of oppression and power. This combined with their growing self-awareness and love for being in community makes them ready to be activists for change (Davies and Uzodike, 209).
21. “Adolescents will remind us that they want to express themselves, not blindly follow what we might choose for them. This could be what they study, the sports they play, the hobbies they pursue, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, their religious beliefs, their gender identity, or whom they are attracted to” (Davies and Uzodike, 216).
22. “They also need to feel part of something bigger than themselves. Outside of school and home, they can find a cause that aligns with their passions and join a group to help raise awareness or funds. The cause might be animal welfare, human rights, climate change, or peace for war-torn areas” (Davies and Uzodike, 218).
I must now go wash my mouth out with soap. Okay, there are what Ayn Rand called “package-deals” all over the place here, such as allowing children to study what they are interested in and choose their “gender identity” and then what clothes they want to wear. Did you notice that two of those are normal freedoms you would give your minor child but not the other? This has been a common conservative talking point in the media these days, so I won’t dwell on it too long, but allowing children to make the decision to irreversibly mutilate a part of themselves is absolutely not the same thing as giving them the option to wear jeans or khakis to school on Monday. Children are, of course, allowed and encouraged to make independent choices when they are very young, but those choices are reflective of whatever the parent is okay with and deems as safe for their child. The choice between jeans and khakis still means that the child is not going to school naked at the end of their decision. The outcome is acceptable and reality-oriented, whereas choosing to be a girl when your child is a boy (due to his endowments down there) is anti-reality.
The first recorded promoter of being “anti-reality” was Plato who influenced Kant who influenced Marx who influenced every college graduate since the 1960s who are now your everyday environmentalist, activist, democratic socialist, woke warrior, free Palestine chanter, and, sadly, many suburban white mothers who soak up this flaming garbage because their friends all do it to their children too. However, I’d venture to guess that most of these women are still too unread to understand where these ideas are stemming from. They will deny any naughty word like “Marxism” and “communism” to touch their front step, yet all they spout out are Marxist diatribes that are backed up by the “legacy media.”
I remember taking a philosophy class solely dedicated to Marxism because it wasn’t hard to find offered in our school. Within the first few weeks, the class was given a handout of a 1950s-looking housewife with, if I remember correctly, a child in the kitchen. Our professor taught us that this was staring evil in the face; that this was not a life any of us wanted; that this was the very chains of capitalism on display.
I had to unlearn so much of my college education and now my research into parenting because Marxist thinking has told me not to do the very thing that has so far made me the happiest—working from home in order to raise our child and care for my husband in a house filled with love. Ayn Rand says in her book, The Romantic Manifesto, that “Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.” Well, my entire higher education consisted of destroying all the definitions I had come to know in my earlier years, back when reality mattered to my teachers. I learned cause and effect; I learned about gravity and space; I learned how to properly do the dishes and care for myself at home. Living in the world of reality was what made me happy, and Marxism tried to take that away from me.
Now, I have heard various Objectivist people voice concerns over swinging too much in the “opposite direction” of the religious right. They are seemingly just as worried about Christians teaching creationism to your children as the liberals teaching them about their sexuality. However, based on my experiences so far, no one has ever forced their beliefs on me. If I had ever gone to a private Christian school, then perhaps I would have been asked to pray every morning, but then I would be allowed to live in the real world again. (And if creationism was presented, then I would hope it would be alongside evolution. Not to mention that when you are presented with reality most of the time, I don’t believe that the creationism theory would stick for most rational students). I would learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. But what happened is I was sent through the public school system and once my lessons in algebra were done, then we would have assemblies on gang members who did wrong and are atoning now, appealing to the children. I had my English classes followed by health classes on how sex works before I even had any body hair. The state-run school system forced their own agendas on us from at least the fifth grade in my case. The leftist propaganda is sneakier and more pervasive than ever, so pervasive that people no longer even recognize when they are in the world of reality and when they are not. Those lines have become so blurred that you are seeing what is happening in real time to the Democratic Party as it fails to grasp reality at all. So, no, I am not worried about the religious right whose views are more obvious and less pervasive than the woke left in this day and age.
However, I’ve gone a bit offtrack, so let’s come back to this Montessori parenting book. Maria Montessori never wrote about gender identity, bias, injustice, and so on. The closest you could get was to her desiring world peace through raising children properly, by following the child. These modern women are trying to sneak in their cultural Marxism without anyone saying a peep about it.
I have made content before explaining that colorblindness is the way because race, gender, religion, and the like do not matter in the workplace. Davies and Uzodike (who, by the way, is a Nigerian Montessori parent who was brought in as a co-author after the first book. I assume that is because Simone Davies was feeling “white guilt” in continuing to write her own books on Montessori as a white Australian who now lives in Amsterdam). She probably felt this way because leftists today want you to believe in the original sin of being born white. Therefore, any child who is white is supposed to feel guilty from as early an age as parents can just get them to understand that they have “privilege.” This woke religion is just as bad as the religious idea itself of original sin. No child, a blank slate, should be made to feel guilty for being born a certain race or gender, something wholly out of their control. Society’s concern should be based on merit, on who can do the job and nothing else. Now, socially or within the home, there is a natural hierarchy to make life as pleasant as possible for those within a family. The father brings home most of the money; the mother cares for the children in the home; they work as a team to send the newest generation off into a better world. I do not come to these conclusions because I am religious but because I have eyes. I have read and seen countless examples of family structures that work and ones that don’t work, just as I have seen cultures that succeed and cultures that fail. Do not allow the leftists to use the moral relativism card on you. For example, Palestine is not a good culture, and Israel’s is because individual rights matter.
Children should be taught that there is a right and wrong in life, which aligns with reality. They need to know that whatever kind of private parts they have do not matter when they are focused on learning about the world. Those parts only come into play when they are ready to have sex and/or start a family. It is that kind of unimportance that will allow them to grow out of any awkward stages unharmed. Children should be taught that the pigmentation of their skin doesn’t stop them from learning or achieving anything. Their youth means they have that much more time to explore their interests, whatever those may be. Children should not be concerned with finding another child that looks different from them and exposing themselves to their world if they are uninterested in it. Children should not be taught to solely focus on others as opposed to themselves or concerned with using what another child tells them are their pronouns. Children need an environment that is based on reality and encourages them to follow their curiosity. Learning should be fun and a way of building a child’s sense of self and thereby their self-esteem. Childhood is not a time for parents to brainwash, scare, or victimize the ones they are supposed to love and care for. Childhood needs to be tethered to reality—yes, people may look different from each other, but it is what they value that is important. Are they a void, a moocher, a looter, a mystic? Are they an egoist, a lover of knowledge, an independent thinker? Are they promoting a primitive, tribal culture, or are they advocating for an enlightened, individualistic, freedom-loving civilization? Are they good or evil? All human beings are born a clean slate and as long as they keep their eyes open, they will see and choose to live in the world of reality. It is only when others obscure their sight with falsities about the world that the threat of irrationalism enters the picture and dims the light of truth. Do not lead your children astray or their chance at happiness on this earth dies.
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Links: https://www.pexels.com/photo/teacher-writing-on-the-blackboard-8087931/; https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-an-updated-pride-flag-12641808; https://www.rawpixel.com/image/11536696/womens-rights-png-diversity-illustration-transparent-background; https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-a-sign-4676369; https://www.amazon.com/Montessori-Child-Children-Creative-Compassionate/dp/1523512415; https://www.rawpixel.com/image/15333744/png-vintage-mother-holding-baby ; https://www.rawpixel.com/image/15287880/retro-woman-holding-roasted-turkey; https://www.rawpixel.com/image/15160417/png-vintage-family-dinner-illustration-transparent-background
Views Expressed Disclaimer: Please know that while I consider myself an Objectivist and my work is inspired by Objectivism, it is not nor should it be considered Objectivist since I am not the creator of the philosophy. For more information about Ayn Rand's philosophy visit: aynrand.org.