The Children Are Not the Problem

What We See When We Actually Observe Them

On the way to the gym today was cold. I had a polo neck and a jacket on and now an hour after exercising, I am back in a T shirt because it is sunny and definitely warming up. It is just funny how quickly things change when the sun comes out. It made me think again about change and about children and about the world we are walking into.

I love a good thought experiment, and the one I am playing with now is thinking about what the world looks like with children who have grown up inside the apps and systems created by Gen X, now completely ubiquitous. The children who grew up using the inventions of Gen X are demonstrating a range of behaviors, some people call them symptoms. People tend to stick to the symptoms. Scrolling, suicide, depression, being checked out, being disinterested, addicted to games, addicted to devices. We are very clear that a lot of what we would call damage has been done.

But what if we start from a different place. What if we say the children are designed for the future they are living into. They arrive designed for this moment. We do not have children arriving now asking where their penny farthing is. We do not have Victorian children arriving in a digital world confused about why there are no horse drawn carriages. The children who are arriving now are arriving into this world, and they are designed for this world.

And what I notice is that alongside the children who are deeply embedded in devices, we also have millions of children who want to go back to the soil, back to the earth, back to growing food, back to connection, music, dance, animals, building, making, crafting. We have children who are deeply committed to the restoration of humanity. So there are pros and cons. There always are.

But then we have to ask the harder question. What if children are addicted to devices and not communicating and not connecting with people and not having relationships, or having relationships with AI bots because they are easier to manage and always agreeable and always make them feel good. What is that future. What does that actually look like. We have seen films where the robot is the last one on Earth and the human beings are in some sort of floating space device organizing everything on their console and not moving and not working out and not really living in their bodies. We already have cultural images of that future.

This is where Montessori comes in, because Montessori begins not with ideology, not with policy, not with technology, but with observation. Observation of children. Observation of what they actually do, what they are actually motivated by, what they actually choose.

If a child has asked a parent nine times to go outside and play, or to read a book, or to do something together, and that has been denied nine times, that has to be part of our science, part of our research, part of our observation. Because the child did reach out. The child did want connection. Connection was not available, and the child made a second choice. And that second choice becomes the behaviour we later complain about.

If we observe long enough and document what we are observing, we would be able to say this child’s instinct was to connect, but connection was not available. That is very different from saying this child prefers devices.

You might also observe a child deep in a computer game ignoring their physical needs. They need the restroom but they keep playing. They are hungry but they keep playing. They go past the body signals that tell them what they need. Then when they finally go to get food they grab whatever is fastest and highest energy because they are beyond discernment at that point. They are not asking what would be good food right now. They are just trying to satisfy hunger as fast as possible. Again, these are generalizations, and I am not talking about every child in the world. There are billions of children and every single one is unique. But the point is not to generalize. The point is to observe.

This is actually the work in Montessori. The educator as observer. Not the educator as performer, not the educator as worksheet designer, not the educator as entertainer, but the educator as observer. Our materials are already on the shelves. We do not need to make worksheets. We do not need to create endless new documents and personalized AI generated worksheets with the child’s name on them. That might feel good and might give a dopamine hit, but it is not foundationally necessary.

If you do not use worksheets and you use materials and research and children creating their own work plans, a lot is taken off the plate of the educator. That does not mean educators are not documenting. They are writing quick notes in journals about children so they can write really solid reports from detailed observations. There are also apps where you tap a child’s card and record that they have been introduced to a material, that they are practicing it, that they have mastered it. So assessment is ongoing, natural, organic. It does not take the educator away from the work because it is integrated into the work.

When you observe children over time, you become very acute at noticing changes in behaviour. If something is happening at home, you often know before the parents tell you. Parents sometimes come to meetings and say we are getting divorced, did you know something was wrong, and the answer is often yes, because your child told us months ago that you were not happy. Children tell us everything if we are trusted observers and trusted listeners.

This is one of the great gifts of Montessori environments. We have time to pay attention to children. Time that is not spent delivering a curriculum minute by minute, adding bells and whistles to make it interesting, writing endless lesson plans and worksheets. Children are doing the same curriculum, often getting excellent results on standardized tests, but without drill and fill. They are following interest.

The whole class might be presented the timeline of writing or the timeline of technology, but then each child chooses a part of the timeline to research more deeply and later presents their findings to the group. It is organic, and in that organic structure there is almost no wasted time. There is no child sitting at a desk waiting for others to finish a worksheet. Even now with laptops and AI and personalized learning systems, children can work at their own level, but what is missing is movement and embodiment.

In early childhood Montessori, if a child chooses the Pink Tower, they do not carry the whole tower in one go. They carry one cube at a time from the base to the mat. That walking, that carrying, that weight, that texture, that spatial movement embeds knowledge into the body. Learning is embodied. If everything is on a laptop, even down to kindergarten, we are missing that kinesthetic experience. We are neutralizing reality. We are eliminating reality and forcing children to live only in their heads.

So then we have to ask another thought experiment. What would a disembodied society look like. What would it look like if children grew into adults who were not connected to physical reality. Would they care about parks. Would they care about growing food. Would they care about trees, clear skies, soil, animals, water. If their learning had never been embodied, why would they care about the physical world.

We often say children do not want to learn or children are disengaged or children are absent from school, but have we done the deep thinking about why. Why would anyone want to go to school if they knew they were going to sit in a desk, follow someone else’s schedule, not follow their own interests, and not be able to think in their own way. Why would anyone want to go to school like that.

So the question becomes how do we make schools a destination where people would love to go. The first answer I always give is go and visit a Montessori school. Do not visit one, visit six. Visit private ones, public ones, ones that go through high school, ones that are small, ones that are large. See how the environment functions when you follow the child, when the curriculum is already on the shelves around the room, when children move, choose, research, collaborate, present, and manage their own time.

If we wanted to move public schools quickly, one of the simplest structural changes would be to have home rooms where children stay, and then they move as a group for labs, arts, physical education, library. The big sessions are scheduled, but most learning happens in the home room environment where children manage their work. Educators move between rooms on a schedule so children know when help will be available. There are not constant whole group lessons. There is freedom of movement, but freedom comes with trust, and trust takes time.

Montessori already uses multi age groupings. Zero to three, three to six, six to nine, nine to twelve, twelve to fifteen, fifteen to eighteen. In a three year cycle, children settle in the first year, master work in the second year, and develop leadership in the third year. In traditional schooling where children move every year, some children spend the whole year just settling in and then move again and start over. Multi age environments allow nervous systems to settle and leadership to emerge naturally.

Montessori educators do not have big desks at the front of the room because the classroom is not about the adult, it is about the children. The adult moves around the room observing, supporting, guiding. In many traditional classrooms the fixed desk at the front represents authority and control. The environment itself communicates the philosophy.

When you step back and look at all of this, you begin to see something very important. The issue may not be that children are broken or distracted or addicted or disinterested. The issue may be that we have built environments that do not match human development, do not match human embodiment, and do not match human curiosity.

From the Montessori lens, the child is always moving toward independence, competence, connection, meaning, and contribution. From the child’s lens, the world we are building must look very strange. Adults are handing over thinking to machines, handing over memory to devices, handing over navigation to GPS, handing over writing to artificial intelligence, and then asking children to sit in rows and memorize information and follow instructions all day. From the child’s perspective, that must look very confusing.

So perhaps the question is not what is wrong with the children. Perhaps the question is what environments are we building, what behaviors are we modeling, what realities are we creating, and what future are we walking toward without really observing what is happening in front of us.

Montessori always begins in the same place. Observe the child. Not the system. Not the technology. Not the policy. The child.

Because the child will tell us everything we need to know about the future if we are willing to look carefully enough.

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.