Being a Lot
Education, Repression, and the Human Need to Be Fully Seen
I have been interested lately in this idea of being a lot. What it means to be a lot in the world. I have a way of being that is incredibly enthusiastic. I speak quickly. I move quickly through ideas. I am often unfiltered in the sense that I am not especially attached to what other people think of me, and I am not usually looking for external validation before I speak. I tend to simply share what is there.
It brought me back to watching Jason Silva present at the American Montessori Society conference. He was the same. Completely unfiltered. Fully expressed. He was simply sharing what interested him, what lit him up, what brought him alive. He was experimenting publicly with ideas as social thought experiments and allowing people to ride the wave of his thinking in real time.
There were mixed reactions, of course. Surprise. Concern. Discomfort. Excitement. Curiosity. Some people clearly loved being inside that energy of exploration. Others visibly did not. But what struck me was not whether people agreed with him. It was that he was allowing himself to appear in public without forcing himself into some carefully restrained version of acceptability.
And of all the pedagogies in the world, Montessori may be one of the few places where that quality of human existence can genuinely be nurtured.
Not performatively encouraged. Not superficially celebrated. Actually held.
Because what does being fully human look like in a classroom? It looks like children who are too loud, too quiet, too physical, too emotional, too fast, too slow, too close to your body space, too withdrawn from it. It looks like experimentation. It looks like social collision. It looks like children trying out ways of being in community and discovering through reality what happens when they do.
That is what a classroom actually is.
A social experiment.
A family is a social experiment. A school is a social experiment. Society itself is a social experiment. We are constantly bumping against one another trying to discover where we begin and where another person ends. We try things. We get responses. We encounter pushback. We discover connection. We feel shame. We feel belonging. We notice when something works relationally and when it does not.
Montessori education, at its best, understands this deeply. We are trained, at least in principle, to observe without immediate judgment. To avoid projecting ourselves directly onto the child. To help children come to common ground rather than simply imposing behavioral compliance from above.
So if a child is too physically close to another child, or speaking loudly, or expressing strong emotion, there are tools for that. There are conversations for that. Peace meetings. Reflection. Observation. Relationship. The assumption underneath the pedagogy is not that the child is bad. The assumption is that the child is learning how to exist among other human beings.
That is a profoundly different orientation from suppression.
What fascinates me is how quickly modern culture labels people as “too much” while simultaneously creating almost no safe places to explore what human experience actually is.
Since the 1960s, entire generations have emerged from cultures that were attempting to push against Victorian restraint, wartime repression, silence around sexuality, silence around emotion, silence around embodiment. There was this enormous movement toward experimentation, self-expression, exploration, altered states, expanded consciousness, rock and roll, psychedelics, communal living, sexual liberation. A whole generation trying to turn over every stone simply to know what was there.
And underneath much of that was not evil.
It was inquiry.
Sometimes people reached a stone, turned it over, explored it, and realized it was not for them. Sometimes they found healing. Sometimes they found destruction. Sometimes they found insight. Sometimes they found addiction. But the movement itself was exploratory.
Now we are living inside the aftereffects of both the experimentation and the repression of that experimentation.
Because what happens culturally when entire subject areas become unspeakable? What happens when there are whole dimensions of human existence that cannot be discussed openly, calmly, developmentally, relationally?
They do not disappear.
They go underground.
And once they go underground they often emerge distorted, secretive, compulsive, performative, addictive, shame-filled, or commercialized.
We can see this everywhere.
We are watching governments and research institutions now seriously investigate psychedelics, MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, and trauma healing for veterans with PTSD, for people carrying devastating psychological injuries, for those unable to move through overwhelming grief or trauma. Research groups at places like Johns Hopkins University have been studying psychedelic-assisted therapies for years now, carefully and scientifically, exploring questions of healing, consciousness, depression, trauma, and well-being.
At the same time, culturally, many people still behave as though the mere mention of these subjects contaminates the conversation.
There is a strange inauthenticity there.
The technologies we admire, the devices we use daily, the innovation cultures we celebrate publicly, have often emerged from environments where experimentation with altered states was quietly normalized. Books like Stealing Fire discuss this openly in relation to innovation culture, Silicon Valley, elite performance communities, and altered states of consciousness. Yet the public presentation of technological culture remains carefully sterilized, as though human beings arrive at extraordinary ideas through immaculate rationality alone.
We maintain the performance of purity while living inside systems built by deeply imperfect human beings.
The same contradiction exists around sexuality.
Pornography addiction is widespread across ages and demographics. That is not even controversial anymore. But rather than asking what conditions produce that level of disconnection from embodied intimacy, we often simply bury the conversation beneath shame and secrecy. We rarely ask what it means that so many people seek emotional, relational, or sensory fulfillment through screens rather than through human closeness itself.
What is absent from ordinary life that virtual life has become so compelling?
What conversations did we never learn how to have?
What relationships to our own bodies were interrupted so early that desire itself became fused with secrecy?
And then I return again to schools, because I always return to schools.
I think educators profoundly underestimate how formative these early moments are. A three-year-old touching their body in a classroom. A child asking a direct question about anatomy or intimacy or physical sensation. A child moving too closely into another person’s space.
What happens next matters.
The adult’s face matters.
The tone matters.
The nervous system reaction matters.
The silence matters.
The child is learning something in that moment about themselves, about safety, about shame, about visibility, about whether their experience can exist in the world without rejection.
And often the educator believes they are neutral when they are not neutral at all.
A facial expression is not neutral.
A withdrawal of warmth is not neutral.
A sharpness in tone is not neutral.
The child absorbs all of it.
Montessori environments theoretically understand this. At least they are meant to. The prepared adult is supposed to observe themselves alongside the child. To recognize their own projections, discomforts, judgments, histories, reactions. But we carry our cultures into the classroom whether we acknowledge it or not.
We carry our fear of bodies.
We carry our discomfort around sexuality.
We carry our inherited shame.
We carry religion, repression, family history, silence, embarrassment, secrecy.
And then those things quietly shape the atmosphere around the child.
I often think we should have much clearer collective agreements as educators about how we respond developmentally and calmly to ordinary human behavior. Not reactive morality. Not panic. Not humiliation.
If a child is touching themselves, perhaps the response is simply calm and practical. I can see you are enjoying your body. Would you like some privacy in the restroom?
If a child is touching another child constantly, perhaps we sit beside them and ask gently, What were you hoping for when you did that? Would you like to know how the other child felt?
We already have tools for these conversations.
The deeper issue is that adults themselves are frequently dysregulated around the subject matter. And because we do not normalize these conversations early, they emerge later under conditions of secrecy, alcohol, shame, peer pressure, performance, suppression, or violence.
Then we act surprised.
We act surprised by spring break culture, by sexual violence on university campuses, by compulsive online behavior, by relational confusion, by emotional dissociation, by young people who do not understand their own bodies or boundaries or desires.
But many children have spent their entire developmental lives receiving the message that these parts of themselves are dangerous to discuss openly. Then suddenly, at adolescence, we hand them a brief sex education class wrapped in awkwardness, embarrassment, giggling, and discomfort, as though a single institutional conversation can compensate for years of silence.
What would happen instead if conversations about bodies, boundaries, emotion, consent, attraction, discomfort, hormones, physicality, and human experience were simply normal? Not sensationalized. Not eroticized. Not dramatized. Simply integrated into ordinary developmental life in age appropriate ways from the beginning. Not because we are encouraging children toward sexuality, but because we are refusing to make embodiment itself unspeakable.
There is a difference.
And I think Montessori environments, along with other genuinely human-centered pedagogies, have the potential to do this differently because they already understand that children learn through lived experience, relationship, observation, dialogue, and reality itself.
The irony is that we already allow children to live inside intensely embodied systems all the time. Dance. Music. Advertising. Fashion. Social media. Entertainment. Consumer culture. We saturate childhood with image and stimulation while refusing grounded conversation about the human realities underneath those images.
Then we wonder why so much emerges later in distorted form.
I listened recently to a conversation about the rise of smoking among Gen Z. One of the commentators suggested that part of what we are witnessing is a generation emerging from prolonged social isolation during Covid, a generation cut off from ordinary relational development during formative years. And what struck me was not even the smoking itself, but the longing underneath it.
A longing for ritual. A longing for belonging. A longing to gather physically. A longing to perform identity publicly with other people. Education has become so performative that even rebellion has become performative. But beneath all of it is still the same ancient human need. To be seen. To belong. To exist without fragmentation. To feel that one’s inner life can safely meet the outer world.
And perhaps that is part of what I mean by being a lot.
Not excess for its own sake. Not boundarylessness. Not indulgence. But the refusal to amputate essential parts of human existence simply because culture feels uncomfortable looking at them directly. Children deserve environments where reality can be approached calmly. Where difficult conversations are not deferred until crisis. Where embodiment is not automatically fused with shame. Where observation replaces panic. Where adults are capable of regulating themselves before regulating children. Where being fully human is not treated as pathology.
Because if we cannot create spaces where human beings are allowed to exist honestly, then secrecy will continue educating children in our place.
If you wish to follow the research and thinking that inform this work, the books Mapping Montessori Materials for AI Competency Development and Montessori & AI -Volume I are available through my website, katebroughton.com.
Image Prompt: I am too much.
