Four Students, a Shopping List, and a Balinese Recipe
The entry in the newsletter is two sentences long.
We are continuing the Bali project, and everyone is going well. Four students are preparing a ‘Going Out’ to Coles to buy the ingredients for a traditional Balinese dish.
That is the whole thing. It is also the best short explanation of Montessori primary education we have.
An excursion the children run
Most schools do excursions. A teacher picks a destination, books a bus, sends home a permission note, and forty children are transported somewhere educational and then transported back.
A going-out is not that.
A going-out is organised by the students. It arises from work they are already doing — a project, a question they cannot answer from the classroom, something they need that the classroom does not contain. They identify the need, work out where to go, plan how to get there, and make it happen. An adult accompanies them, because they are children and the school has a duty of care. The adult does not run it.
These trips are usually small. A handful of students, not a whole class. Sometimes it is the local library. Sometimes it is a whole-school trip to the national park. Sometimes it is four children going to the supermarket for coconut milk.
The teacher’s role, as one of our staff described it, is setting up the correct avenues for the students to take on such a task.
Two years later, a three-course meal
The same pattern shows up again in a later newsletter, with a different group and a different country:
A couple of the students went on a ‘going out’ excursion to Coles where they went shopping to create a three course meal they will cook for Stage 3 as a follow up of their passion project on China.
A passion project on China ended in a three-course meal cooked for the entire class. The students chose the topic, chose the response, planned the shopping and did the cooking.
By the following year, new Year 4 students moving up into the upper primary classroom already knew what was coming. The newsletter records them arriving excited to do a going-out, and starting to plan their projects in the first weeks of term so they would have something to go out for.
Why the supermarket is the interesting bit
There is a temptation to write about the finished dish, because the finished dish photographs well.
The learning is in the supermarket.
A child in a shop with a list, a budget and a deadline is solving a genuine problem with real constraints. The coconut milk is not where they expected. There are three sizes and they need to work out which is better value. The total is over budget and something has to give. None of these are exercises, and none of them have a printed answer.
Maria Montessori’s term for the goal of this stage was intellectual independence — the shift from a child who accepts facts as facts to one who wants to reason things out and make their own decisions. Her instruction for the six-to-twelve years was that children need to be exposed to a vastness of culture, wide social contacts and the open environment.
In practice, sometimes that means the Balgowlah Coles.
The measure of it
Ask a child what they did at school today and you will usually get “nothing”.
Ask a child who has just organised a going-out, and you will get the bus route, the budget, an opinion about the price of lemongrass, and a strong view on how the cooking went.