Preparing for Virtue

Every day, and over the course of our whole lives, we make countless choices: from those that are significant and life-altering—like what career(s) to invest in, what friendships and romantic relationships to pursue or end, or where to live—to the small choices that make up the fabric of daily life—like what to eat for breakfast, whether to go to bed early, or how to best use our time in the evenings and weekends.

As parents and teachers, we want to prepare children to face this vast array of decisions with confidence and integrity. Whatever our view of what is right and virtuous, we want them to have the capacity to make choices with conviction and to follow through with corresponding action. Yet, Montessori believed the traditional methods for building this capacity, rather than supporting children, stunt them.

Under many traditional models, the child’s freedom to make choices is severely limited or eliminated altogether. In many schools, for example, the child is told when to move and when to sit still, when to speak and when to be silent, what work to do, with whom, and for how long—even when to use the bathroom! Under this model, it is the adult’s responsibility to make good choices for the child and it is the child’s responsibility to comply and emulate good examples.

To illustrate the cruelty and impracticality of this method, Montessori provides an analogy to the child’s physical development, saying:

Montessori believed that we couldn’t expect children to build the capacity to make good choices if they were prevented from making choices in the first place. Instead, she believed it was essential to help the child actively develop his agency—his ability to exercise independent judgment, to make confident decisions, to follow through on his intentions with appropriate action, whether positive or inhibitory, and to persist in his choices across time.

She contends that the child’s developed agency, or will, is fundamental, saying:

Her basic point is that before the child can explicitly ask how he should use his mind to direct his actions, determine which virtues he should cultivate, decide whose character he should admire and seek to emulate, or plan the course of his life, he must first develop the capacity to make his own choices and follow them through. Without this capacity, his intentions become lifeless. Like the person who dreams of becoming an accomplished writer but never picks up a pen, the child’s intention to do what is right and good is inconsistently or ineffectually translated into action—it’s hollow.

But, just as the child practices recognizing phonemes in speech before learning to read, practices fastening zippers, buttons, and clasps on dressing frames before dressing himself independently, or masters the binomial cube before learning to perform binomial expansion, Montessori believed the child can also practice the foundational skills that comprise agency. Namely, he can be given an ever-expanding freedom of choice.

Setting the Child Free

Montessori knew that when she declared the child should be given freedom, most people would immediately imagine chaos, saying:

But after observing children closely, she saw the child and the possibilities of his freedom in a radically new light, asserting:

Montessori’s idea of the kind of freedom that enables the child to practice and develop his agency, therefore, is far richer than the mere freedom to simply declare his desires or act on his impulses. And it is certainly not the expectation that his parents, teachers, or reality itself will meekly submit and cater to his whims. Rather, the child is given the freedom to connect his choices to his actions in reality. He’s given the freedom to commit.

The 3-year-old in a Montessori classroom, for example, who decides to have a banana and toast for a snack, who projects what he needs to acquire it, who acts resolutely to gather his supplies, and then persists through any difficulties—the banana that is hard to peel, the butter that is difficult to spread—is doing more than professing a desire. He is making a commitment. His choice of snack is not a proclamation made in a vacuum, a goal disconnected from the means to achieve it. Instead, his choice of snack is inextricably linked with all the work entailed in acquiring it. To this child, a choice naturally implies all the responsibility required to make it a reality.

The ability to make this kind of committed choice doesn’t develop automatically, according to Montessori. Nor, once made, are a child’s choices automatically good. An unattended child can easily flit capriciously between possible choices without making a commitment, or he can commit to destructive and dangerous actions. Freedom, while necessary therefore, is not sufficient. What the child needs to support his freedom, according to Montessori, is a prepared environment. He needs a structure that is designed to entice and encourage him to make certain choices and to enable him to follow through on those choices with maximum independence.

And so, in a Montessori environment, the child finds interesting, challenging materials, designed to engage his natural interests and to inspire him toward mastery, and which he can only use for their intended purpose. He finds child-sized implements which enable him to follow through with appropriate action to meet his needs and care for the environment, and which require him to follow logical step-by-step instructions. He finds a teacher and a community of peers that respect his concentration and allow him to think, move, choose, and commit without interference or interruption, and who expect the same respect from him in return. He finds intelligible routines that provide a framework for understanding the world and for acting with security and confidence. He finds, in short, an environment fully prepared for his freedom.

Through the repeated experience of choosing, following through, and persisting within an environment prepared for his freedom, the child develops his agency. And the more developed his agency, the greater amount and complexity of this goal-oriented and mastery-focused work he is able to choose, leading to yet better-developed agency. This recursive process of choice leading to commitment leading to still more challenging choice and commitment is how the child develops the mental resources to face a vast expanse of choices in the adult world. It’s what enables him to make plans on the scale of his whole life, to decide the best actions to obtain his goals, and to act with integrity so that his decisions do not remain mere intentions. It’s how the child builds a personality prepared to later choose and enact virtues.

While there is much to be said about this later development of specific values and virtues, for Montessori, it is the child’s developed capacity for decision-making and follow-through that enables him to acquire any virtues in the first place. It is the child’s developed agency, the ability to choose and commit, which has been bolstered, encouraged, and given abundant opportunity for practice within a prepared environment, that prepares a child for the demands of virtue.