To Reap the Benefits of Early Childhood Education, We Must Look at Teaching Methods

It’s well established that investing in early childhood education has a greater return on investment than any later period. If we care about our children’s futures, then we cannot ignore how foundational the early years are in setting them up for success.

The importance of the early years doesn’t arbitrarily start at age three or four, though, because it’s not merely a matter of age. As a new study revealed, a traditional approach to teaching preschoolers can cause long-term harm even where the opportunity exists to support long-term strides. In other words, sooner isn’t automatically better — and could even be worse than nothing.

Researchers of this latest study found that traditional preschool actually worsened academic performance in later grades and caused an uptick in behavioral challenges. As reported by Psychology Today, cited possibilities to explore include:

The opportunity behind early learning is rooted in honoring how children learn, which is a natural process that begins at birth. During your child’s first six years of life, their drive to learn is innate, and their capacity to process information through mere absorption is distinctly powerful. But, if we interject with a system of teaching that doesn’t authentically honor learning as it unfolds for the child, then this can become a great threat to both their love of learning and their capacity to learn.

At Guidepost, we’d venture to say that the same could be researched and discussed for elementary and adolescent education, where traditional methods of teaching continue to clash with what we know about how students are naturally motivated to learn.

This is part of why we opened our schools: we saw the need for change — at scale and across the ages.

It’s time we took a closer look at the Montessori method as a meaningful path forward to solve for these gaps. Education reform is too often framed as either traditional or progressive — the latter of which is commonly referenced as “play-based” — but Montessori is neither. Montessori education stands alone as a path that preserves a core foundation of knowledge, but not at the cost of individuality, creativity, and agency.

This balanced approach demonstrates positive learning outcomes later in life, as recently noted in this study led by Angeline Lillard that looked at the long-term benefits of Montessori.

“What surprised us is that pretty much everything in the sink turned out significant — on almost every survey, people who had spent at least two years in Montessori had higher well-being than people who never went to Montessori,” Lillard said in a Psychology Today report. “This was true even among the sub-sample who attended private schools for their entire pre-college lives. We also found that the longer one had attended a Montessori school, the higher their level of well-being.”

Also see this topic discussed at Montessorium, our educational think tank, with their Feb. 2 newsletter, “Does early childhood education matter?”