Considering Private Education?

Although academic outcomes are the main reason to consider a private education for your children, there are also other compelling reasons

By Mary Crystal

The comparisons between a private and public education usually focus on outcomes, specifically in terms of test scores and grades in the next level of education. These are good reasons to send a child to a private school, but they are not the only reasons, and academic performance is not the only reason why parents choose private schools, nor why they choose a particular private school.

A sense of community and belonging is very important to both students and their parents. Public schools offer this through sports and extracurricular activities. Sports get everyone involved, foster school loyalty and a sense of belonging to those who may only know the school song and colors and do not actually play sports. And most private schools have sports and activities that promote school loyalty and a sense of belonging. But there is more to a community than cheering a team.

Real community in a school setting begins with people knowing each other. Private schools have smaller classrooms, which allow even the shyest of students to know the names of others and most impor- tantly to be known by others. Lifelong friends and future networking often begin at school.

Community, whether big or small is based on a set of shared values. Parents can choose a private school based shared beliefs. For example, religious families can send their children to schools that promote and teach their religion and it values—something a public school cannot legally do. This, not only fosters belonging, but brings together a preexisting community. There are many choices when it comes to shared values promoted by private schools.

Private schools also foster community by specialization. Some schools have a strong emphasis on sports and athletic accomplishment, drawing students who want to excel in these areas. Schools can also emphasize an academic discipline such as math, science and languages. Students gifted Some schools help gifted students by specializing in music, art, and other pursuits. Specialization promotes community based on common interests and a shared purpose.

Besides community there are choices between consistent

Maria’s House Montessori

Montessori is not a method. It isn’t a style, an approach or a set of materials. It… rather she… was a person, a physician and researcher, a 19th century girl with a dream who grew up to be an indomitable woman, a voice of reason in a dehumanizing industrial age, a reformer who challenged institutions and governments to look carefully at the young souls around them, to see their faces hope and their innocence, and to offer them the dignity and compassion that we all deserve.

Maria Montessori. In 1896, she was the first woman to earn her Medicinae Doctoris (with distinction) from the University of Rome. Industrial Europe’s appetite for coal was exceeded only by its appetite for working-class males whose 12 hour days six days a week kept factories running. Boys were expected to follow their fathers into the workhouses. Prussian-model factory schools prepared them for that work, separating them from their families at 6 years old, dividing them by age, and confining them with an instructor whose primary job was to produce compliant young men. After nearly a hundred years of this type of compulsory servitude, boys (being boys) had become unwilling to cooperate. In response, city officials began arresting dissenting youths, deeming them “incorrigible”, and sentencing them to… (wait for it)… factory work.

In 1897, Maria chose to spend her residency years working in the relatively new field of psychiatry. “My colleagues,” she wrote, “are far too ready to apply medical treatments to children whose only illness seems to be that they are too healthy to be treated as slaves. We have raised children instinctively for tens of thousands of years. Surely that process is not broken.”

And so began the mission that would consume the remaining 55 years of her life. From her first days as a public health physician at Rome’s San Lorenzo tenement in 1907, Dottoressa Maria Montessori was drawn to the work of restoring, protecting and enhancing the natural processes that drive human development. An insightful systems thinker with a singular aptitude for research, Maria produced hundreds of intricate, elegantly designed works and lessons for children ages 2 through 12, offering her world (and ours) an organic, holistic view of the wonders of early childhood. It’s our privilege, our pleasure and our passion to study and practice Montessori at Maria’s House Doylestown. The children around us are remarkable, always curious, constantly becoming. They truly are our heroes.