This week, the school district holds its kindergarten registration for the fall. Coincidentally, the lottery for the public Montessori charter school is held tomorrow so, when the rest of the country finds out who its likely Republican and Democratic nominees will be, I will definitely know, one way or another, where Aitch will be matriculating in the upcoming school year.

Going in, I was 100% certain I would want Aitch to attend the charter school; after all, the only thing better than a Montessori school is a FREE Montessori school, right? Then I began to harbor some doubts. Nine years seems like a long stretch for All Montessori, All the Time. I had attended an enrichment program in elementary school that was Montessori-like (no lectures, no grades, child-directed learning, etc.) I got a lot out of it, but while directing my own learning I had managed to sidestep all the math and science content that was presented over three years. So I attended a school tour and a few information sessions.

My fears about the educational process were mostly allayed. It seemed like a wonderful environment for the kids. The Montessori method seemed sound enough; like any pedagogical method, it depends largely on the ability of the teacher. But I was a little put off by the tone of the information sessions. The teachers, parents, even the students were annoyingly self-congratulatory, giving the impression of having drunk deeply of the school Kool-Aid. I could understand if it they were just doing it to sell the school, but the wait list is TWICE as big as the enrollment limit. To those of us out there in the peanut gallery, it sounded like, “Aren’t we great? Wouldn’t it be so great if you joined us? Oops…that’s right…you don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. Enjoy the public school!”

And that was my second problem with the presentations. Almost everyone who praised the Montessori method did it by contrasting it, unfavorably, with the way they allegedly do it in public school. “It’s not like public school, where the kids are sitting at desks all day long…where the teachers are talking at the kids all day…where the kids are rewarded for competing, instead of working cooperatively…where there are no multi-age classrooms…where they just drill the kids all day without applying anything.” As a former public-school teacher, I found this galling. I taught sixth grade, and I never chained up the kids and forced them to diagram sentences for hours on end. We did plenty of interdisciplinary units, cooperative learning, and independent study. Hell, we did plenty of that when I was a public school student back in the dark ages. Again, it seemed kind of mean-spirited on the part of the school representatives, and I wondered if I could hack that environment for the next decade.

Of course, in the end it’s what is best for the boys, not for me. I think that if Aitch’s name is drawn for one of the twenty-odd kindergarten slots tomorrow, I will send him there, but either way, I am going to suggest to the public school supernintendo that he conduct information sessions to present some up-to-date information about the methodologies that the elementary teachers use. After all, they are competing with the charter and private schools now.