Please share your perspective on the need to approach Montessori philosophy through the

lens of critical theories. Why is this important? Why do you think there is pushback?

Contradictory stories

When we trace the roots of the Montessori approach and locate it within its historical context,
contradictory stories begin to emerge. On one hand, we can see how it was primarily formed
as a response to various social injustices, and emerged as a justice-oriented project. On the
other hand, one can simultaneously see the marks and traces of colonial capitalism
throughout Montessori’s work. Addressing the latter is where the challenge lies for the
Montessori community. A critical engagement with Montessori entails that we find ways to
hold these contradictory narratives together, and consider how we can make Montessori work
for contemporary childhoods.

Feminist activism and child advocacy

Situating Montessori as a justice-oriented project is vital for ongoing practices of justice and
care. Her feminist activism without doubt is a starting point for us. She was actively involved
in various women’s congresses, and spoke vehemently about matters related to women’s
emancipation. Besides addressing the dominant themes such as women’s right to vote and
own properties, she also addressed the issue of women teacher’s low status and pay, and their
adverse working conditions. Matters that continue to be an issue today. Moreover, prompted
by the protests from socialist women, she took on board and touched on the challenges poor
working-class women were experiencing, and insisted that their cause whilst an ‘entirely
different women’s question’1 was united with the plight of women who owned properties. We
see traces of intersectional thinking quite evidently in these early speeches. Further,
Montessori considered the lives of women and children to be intertwined both in their
interdependence as well as in their marginalization. In fact, like many of her forerunners and
contemporaries she believed early childhood education was a key site for feminist activism.
Disrupting the division between public and private space was core to this. Women found
ways into the public space through what is often referred to as civic motherhood. The teacher
training for women that Montessori put in place was in fact instituted, in her words, to bring
‘the critical gaze of women’ into the sciences. For instance, she refuted the dominant
scientific belief at the time that young girls and women were inferior both in intelligence and
stature to boys and men2. She further considered what was referred to as the ‘school of
scientific education’ as mechanistic and abusive, instead proposed scientific practices that
prioritized an ethic of care. When you situate the Montessori pedagogy within these feminist
histories, you begin to see how her feminist sensibilities shaped a lot of her thinking and
practice. This can be an important segue into contemporary justice-oriented work and
feminist practice.

Locating Montessori in its colonial capitalist context

As I said earlier, we need to simultaneously locate Montessori in the colonial capitalist

contexts that it arose from. I use the term ‘colonial capitalism’ to highlight how capitalism
was the incentive behind land grabbing, exploitation, extraction and imperial expansion. The
logic of which shaped scientific practices during the time, including developmental theories
such as the Montessori approach. The term further has relevance because those very same

1
Montessori, Maria. 1896. Speech at Der Internationale Kongres, Wages of Labouring Women. 202- 203.
2
Montessori, Maria. 1913. Pedagogical Anthropology. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company.
logics, whilst taking a slightly different form, continue to shape Montessori education in
contemporary societies. I’ll come back to this later when I talk about developmental theories.
But my point is that we must locate Montessori, to effectively do justice-related work in
present times. There’s a major reorientation that is necessary in how we think and relate to
Montessori. For starters, we must abandon the idea that Montessori is a perfect and complete
system of education. I know it is difficult to accept, but we really need to give up on this idea
that Montessori already always has all the answers for social justice and transformation. It
doesn’t. This is where critical theories come to our aid. But before I delve any further, I want
to briefly speak to the notion of ‘critical’. When people hear the word ‘critical’ they think it is
about utterly trashing Montessori. This is not the case. On the contrary, critically engaging
with Montessori is about considering how Montessori works, and how it does not work; as
well as thinking about for whom it works and for whom it doesn’t?. Foolishly we have been
far too invested as a community in uncritically validating Montessori. And at the heart of that
is the mistake of ‘misplaced concreteness’. We have turned the relational action of the word
into a noun. We spend an enormous amount of energy on protecting and upkeeping what the
word Montessori is, and thereby miss out on what it does. I get it, it’s difficult to critique
something that you dearly love, but that’s the exact same reason why we should be critiquing
it. I critique Montessori because I believe it deserves a future. Critique in this manner is about
getting unstuck, it is about liveliness and a commitment to an ongoingness.

What critical theories do is they draw our attention to power relations that are otherwise made
invisible by them being positioned as ‘common sense’ narratives. We cannot lose sight of
power relations. A dismissal of social and worldly justice always happens through deliberate
disregard for power differences. I have researched and worked with a range of critical
theories over the years including decolonial theories, postcolonial studies, critical disability
studies, indigenous philosophies, queer theory, feminist poststructuralisms, feminist
posthumanisms, amongst others. These theories and philosophies are like lenses. They
uncover different aspects that traditional western knowledge practices obscure. They interrupt
established and taken-for-granted ways of thinking, knowing, feeling and doing, to make
other ways of seeing the world available to us. When we analyze Montessori through them,
they enable us to expose power relations that circulate and shape the everyday experiences of
children and adults in the classroom.

On being included: the sustenance of whiteness

What is of concern today is how institutions take up terms like inclusion, diversity, equity for
the sake of sustaining their corporate image, and as a way of promoting themselves. What it
really does is result only in a change of perception of whiteness, while whiteness continues to
be reproduced in imperceptible ways. To be clear, I use whiteness to refer to the structural
relations that privilege western colonial configurations of the world. As I said, my concern is
with how whiteness as a structure absorbs equity interventions into its strategies but only for
its own sustenance. For instance, the word ‘decolonise’ has become a buzz word in
institutional spaces these days. Sadly, if you inspect closely to see how the word is enacted,
you find that it is often put to work in ways that keep whiteness in place. As indigenous
scholar Eve Tuck3 teaches us, decolonization is not a metaphor. Representational politics
where diversity and inclusion has simply constituted adding people who look different into
institutional spaces is seriously failing us. Adding some color to institutionally white spaces
does little to challenge whiteness as a structure and system. Having a person of color, for

3
Tuck, Eve. & K. Wayne Yang. 2012. ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity,
Education & Society, 1:1, 1-40.
instance, in leadership does not automatically mean whiteness is being dismantled. Many
organizations are pleased to talk about race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, disability etc
and add them into their DEI statements, as long as the structures of whiteness remain intact.
In order to be able to dismantle whiteness one must be able to recognise it. However, the
biggest challenge here is that we are so embedded in whiteness, and whiteness has taken on
such a ‘common sense’ status, that it easily eludes our capture. Of course, we need to ask
questions such as, Who is present in the room? Who is not in the room? Who is making the
decisions? Who is affected by these decisions? But let’s not stop there. We also need to ask,
Whose stories are being told? Whose stories are not being told? What knowledges and whose
knowledges are deemed valid? What worldviews and worlds are being promoted?

Intersectionality as means for deep coalition

What people do not realize is that whiteness as a structure adversely affects white people too.
For instance, when we consider gender and sexuality through critical theories such as
decolonial and postcolonial feminisms, we realize that the gender binary system is an
outcome of the imposition of western gender differentials on pre-colonial societies. The work
of decolonial scholar Maria Lugones4 and postcolonial scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí5, for
instance, bring our attention to how indigenous communities and pre-colonial societies have
had different relationships to gender – from gender not being a core classifying category, to
an indifference to gendered differences, to gender variability viewed as sacred. Colonialism
meant that these differences were criminalized and attempts were made to violently erase
them. I believe it is important to view contemporary trans, nonbinary and intersex politics
through this lens, i.e. as a decolonial project. While the marks of whiteness left on a white
trans woman may be very different from that left on a Black trans woman, viewing the effects
of coloniality on different bodies allows us to see our oppressions and liberations as
interconnected. Not everyone is affected the same way. This opens up possibilities for deep
coalition and solidarity. Similarly we need to bring other facets such as class, disability,
neurodivergence, caste etc into our justice projects.

Class related injustice is particularly relevant in Montessori. Whilst the first Montessori
schools were instituted amongst working-class families, it is not without issue. We can view
the Casa as an extension of her feminist project. Afterall, nurseries and infant schools were a
key site for women’s emancipation, particularly in disrupting public vs private gender
divides. And whilst this is great, one must also address the civilizing mission that is
embedded in these projects, which proceed out of deficit imaginaries of working-class
children and families as feral and uncivilized. In contemporary contexts, Montessori has
gained a reputation as an elitist phenomenon. I know Montessorians tend to protest against
such framings by citing the number of public Montessori initiatives. And while making
Montessori public will definitely open up access, it is simply not enough. Since I am in the
UK, I cannot speak specifically to how class materializes in the US Montessori context. But
what I do know is that most Montessori schools in the UK receive government funding, and
one would think this would automatically make Montessori more accessible. But this is not
the case. If we engage with working-class scholars who specialize in class-based work in
education such as Diane Reay, Valerie Walkerdine, Beverely Skeggs, Carol Vincent, Stephen
Ball, Jayne Osgood amongst others, we get a glimpse of how class works, and how class
divides are maintained through location, aesthetics, values, materialities, resources etc. Jayne
Osgood and I have briefly touched on this in some of our publications, but we definitely need
4
Lugones, Maria. 2007. ‘Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System’. Hypatia 22(1), 186-209.
5
Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. 1997. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender
Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
more research in this area. And of course, class cannot be analyzed by itself. For example, the
experiences of Bangladeshi working-class girls would be very different from Black working-
class boys. This is where intersectionality helps complicate such conversations.

When Kimberlé Crenshaw6 coined the term ‘intersectionality’ within the legal context, she
was not focused on ‘personal identities’ people possessed, rather she was referring to how
existing legal frameworks failed to identify the effect of power relations on intersecting
subjectivities. Crenshaw herself is shocked by the way the term has been taken up and
employed in everyday activist spaces, especially where it is used to create a form of hierarchy
of oppressions. The term was employed as a way to draw our attention to the insufficiency of
a purely anti-racist approach or a purely anti-sexist approach. In other words, she was
speaking to how single issues were being monopolized to the detriment of all others. I am
reminded of recent efforts of a white autistic woman, a Montessori practitioner, who
approached an anti-racist steering team at a major Montessori organisation about including
disability and neurodivergence in their anti-racist framework. She made her case by sharing
her own challenges as a neurodivergent student in Montessori training. The steering team
dismissed her concerns saying that ableism did not fall within the remit of the organisations
anti-racist endeavours. This is exactly what Crenshaw was speaking against. As Audre Lorde7
reminds us: ‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-
issue lives’

Decolonising knowledge: troubling developmentalism

Coming back to colonialism, I want to say more about how modernist science, European
Christianity, and enlightenment humanism together spawned and spurred the conditions for
colonialism. You see the influence of all of this in Montessori’s own writing. The most
obvious and blatant one is linked to ‘scientific’ racial categorisations and hierarchies evident
in her earlier works especially her book Pedagogical Anthropology, where she speaks of
superior and inferior races. She embraces the belief that Europeans had larger cranial
volumes, and therefore being more intelligent than African and Australian Indigenous people.
There are also mentions of Europeans possessing superior facial contours and features than
non-Europeans. These of course are easily identifiable in her writings. What often escapes
our field of vision however is how western colonial logic is woven into Montessori’s
pedagogical approach. Of course, this is not wholly unique to Montessori. Most
developmental theories that emerged at the time, including Freud psychosexual development
theory, Piaget’s cognitive development theory and Erikson’s psychosocial development
theory, are also implicated. These theories of child development championed particular views
of ‘human’ and human development that were inextricably entangled to the West’s civilizing
project, a project that was used as a core justification for colonial expansion. In exchange for
militarized stealing of land, extraction, and violence towards indigenous peoples,
‘development’ was deemed a fair exchange. In other words, ‘savage’ indigenous people and
‘undeveloped’ land were subjected to western conceptions of progress and development. This
logic is very much embedded in Montessori’s idea of education being concerned with the
formation of the Universal Man or ‘New Man’. Children much like the indigenous ‘savage’
are to be subjected to civilizing processes that will make the feral disappear 8. Jamaican

6
Crenshaw, Kimberle. 1989. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of
Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,’ University of Chicago Legal Forum: 1:8
7
Lorde, Audre. 2007. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley: Crossing Press.
8
Rollo, Toby. 2018. ‘Feral children: settler colonialism, progress, and the figure of the child’, Settler Colonial
Studies, 8:1, 60-79, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1199826
scholar and poet Sylvia Wynter9 refers to this version of ‘Man’ as the western bourgeois
representation, that overrepresents itself as though it was ‘human’. Often referred to as homo
oeconomicus or the ‘rational economic Man’. It is critical that we identify how this version of
‘Man’ is embedded in Montessori theory and how it takes shape in contemporary Montessori
practice. The goal of formation of the ‘rational economic Man’ can be seen in Montessori’s
work with adolescents, i.e. the emphasis of economic independence as a key developmental
milestone in her stages of development. In contemporary societies, this goal aligns with
neoliberal drives that frame children as ‘market supply factors’, and as contenders in the
‘global economic race’(See Chapter 3 in Dahlberg et al., 200310 for further exploration)

The developmentalist logic has been further critiqued by feminist scholars for regarding
matters such as gender, sexuality and race as irrelevant to childhood, even as the formation of
the ‘rational economic Man’ is orchestrated by wider political and economic systems. By
attending to language and discourse, for instance, feminist poststructuralists show us how
dominant narratives about gender shape and circulate everyday childhoods, and how children
are actively making sense of and negotiating their gender and their peers’ gender
performances. Queer theorists take this further to demonstrate how notions of masculinity
and femininity are indissociable from sexuality, i.e. they are regulated based on
heteronormative understandings of gender. Feminist and queer scholars such as Bronwyn
Davies, Glenda MacNaughton, Mindy Blaise, Kerri Robinson, EJ Renold, Veronica Pacini-
Ketchbaw amongst others have shown us how through romanticised notions of childhood
innocence, the status quo is sustained. For example, adults in children’s lives are completely
okay with the portrayal of heterosexuality in children’s books, tv shows, play objects and
themes, but the moment queer relations are brought into the conversation, it is deemed as
‘sexualising’ childhoods. The conceptualisation of childhood innocence, leaves no room for
children’s complex lived experiences. As a four-year-old child, I vividly remember desiring
boys in my kindergarten, I did not have the language to explain it, nor did I exactly know
what I was experiencing. But with time, it was very clear that whatever I was, was not
acceptable in society. Young children have complex knowings that they may not necessarily
have the language to express. We must ask ourselves how we can hold space for such
knowings. Queer and trans children exist and we must stop making them disappear into the
closet. They deserve to have affirmative and celebratory views of themselves… The
developmentalist logic does not allow us to grapple with these things as the child is figured as
an innocent, neutral and universal being. Simultaneously, we must speak about how Black
and brown children are not granted the privilege of innocence (See Goff et al., 2014). In the
US, think of the cases of young Black boys Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis who
were murdered by the police, or young Black girls such as Child Q, and Olivia (autistic) who
were strip searched by police in the UK. The ‘adultification’ of Black childhoods is well-
documented and researched, it is not a new thing. But what I’m trying to get at is that
different critical theories highlight different aspects of the complex lived realities of children
and adults.

Although Montessori’s cosmic education is valuable in highlighting interdependencies, a

closer reading illuminates how this too is inflected by European Christianity, modernity, and
colonialism. Her philosophy not only promotes a western conception of what it means to be
‘human’, but it further promotes a European Christian view that positions ‘Man’ as the

9
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After
Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument’. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), p. 257-337,
doi:10.1353/ncr.2004.0015
10
Dahlberg, Gunilla, Peter Moss, & Alan Pence. 2003. Beyond Quality in Early Childhood Education and Care:
Postmodern Perspectives. London: Falmer Press
‘crowing creation’, at the apex of civilisation, uniquely capable of transforming ‘nature’. This
is seen in her concept ‘supranature’, in which humans are seen as extracting from the
nonhuman world to fulfill particular visions of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The logic of
colonial capitalist extractivism is deeply embedded in this thinking and practice, where
nonhuman worlds (materials, objects, space, plants, animals, water, land etc) are merely
viewed as resources for children’s development. However, when we engage with indigenous
philosophies from diverse locations, we see radically different ways of relating to the
nonhuman world. We see relations of reciprocity with land, water, trees and other nonhuman
entities. The nonhuman world is further viewed as agentic, animate and sacred. To give an
example, Black feminist scholar and educator Fikile Nxumalo and indigenous scholar
Marleen Villanueva recently published a paper on Decolonial Water Stories11. They bring our
attention to how water in early childhood contexts is often used as a ‘resource’ for children’s
cognitive, social, emotional and physical development. They identify anthropocentric and
colonialist logic that is embedded in such practices, and in turn ask us to view water
differently as ‘life force’. Within the context of the current ecological crisis and earth
violence, there is an urgent need to move away from human-centered accounts and
approaches to childhoods and worlds. Methodological individualism and human
exceptionalism, the old saws of western philosophy and political economy, have resulted in
major ecological simplifications that reduce the possibilities of living well and in right
relations with earth and earth beings. Taking the example of water, we may ask ourselves,
where does the water that children pour back and forth from jugs come from? What are the
diverse political, economic, industrial and social processes that shape water relations in these
sources? What are the relations that have been displaced for such extractivist practices? How
can we foster different water relations and connections with children that is marked by
reciprocity? As anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose12 asks: “If water is living, can it also die?
Is water caught up in precarity, is it vulnerable? Is water, like life, variable and diverse; in
this time of ecological loss, is it threatened?”

But of course, this is not limited to water relations. And this is also not to revert to
romanticized views of indigeneity or hold onto an idealized vision of the world, but to find
ways to grapple with the messy and contaminated relations that we are all enmeshed in.
Every mundane encounter in the Montessori classroom, everything we touch is contaminated
with sinister, non-innocent stories and relations. In previous research I have considered every
day Montessori objects like the Pink Tower, animal figurines, chairs, tea etc to make visible
the complex networks of stories, relations and worlds that produce them. Such excavations
present with endless dilemmas, from stories of mass deforestation, to the pollution and
poisoning of waters, to the exploitation of labour. Rather than utterly giving up due to the
enormity of the task at hand, I believe we need to think of transformation in terms of modest
possibilities of recuperations. That is, to be in the continuous task of changing the field of
relations for purposes of justice and care. The answer isn’t to offer static solutions and draft
rigid policies on diversity and inclusion, but to take a responsive approach that is committed
to an ongoingness, to listening to subaltern communities and making a difference. As Isabelle
Strengers teaches us we just cannot abandon this imperfect world for an ideal one, we must
stay with the disorder of the times by engaging with ongoing practices of justice and care.

Towards transformation

11 Nxumalo, Fikile. and Villanueva, Marleen. 2019. ‘Decolonial Water Stories: Affective Pedagogies with
Young Children’. International Journal of Early Childhood Environmental Education, 7(1), 40-56
12
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2016. Lively water. Retrieved from http://deborahbirdrose.com/?s=living+water
This is far from an exhaustive take on critical theories, but I hope it has offered a glimpse into
the work that is ahead of us. When we consider research that is popularly enacted in
Montessori circles, we understand that they are mostly concerned with promoting Montessori
or preserving a particular version of Montessori. They also come from research paradigms
and approaches that are not designed to detect and analyse power relations. We must then ask
ourselves, why have we as a community not engaged with critical theories, when non-
Montessori early childhood scholars and practitioners have been delving into these
perspectives for decades?

In a 1992 article titled An American Montessori Diffusion Philosophy Montessori's Flawed

Diffusion Model13, AMS founder Dr. Nancy McCormick Rambusch astutely identifies the
role Montessori herself played along with a cenacle of her disciples, in stifling critical
engagement with her pedagogical approach. The article refers to Montessori’s flawed
diffusion model, in which orthodoxy was ensured by Montessori diffusing ‘her educational
work in a proprietary manner’. Any critical engagement with her philosophy was viewed as
being disloyal to Montessori. While we would not dare see children as blank slates, the
diffusion model essentially views adults who go through Montessori training and preparation
as blank slates ready to be inscribed on. We need to seriously consider, how training
organisations can move away from this model of transmission to a model where critical
theories are interlaced in the preparation of the adult.

Former AMS President Dr. Marlene Barron in a 2002 Montessori Life magazine contribution
on Maria Montessori and the Postmodern World14, invites us to re-think Montessori training
and preparation in contemporary contexts. She encourages us to abandon the top-down
diffusion model to one of co-constructing knowledge by thinking-with multiple
perspectives15. I have seen this model put to work in the former Montessori Centre
International, London (under the leadership of Barbara Isaacs and Penny Johns) where
matters relating to race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, faith etc were embedded in their
teacher training and in their top-up programmes. It is indeed where my own engagement with
critical theories was initiated…which in some ways stopped me from being a ‘true believer’
of the Montessori approach. I mean that in the most affirmative sense. Not so much to
undermine serious claims to the world, but quite the opposite. So as to allow those claims to
knowledge and the world, by leaving open investigation. We must ask ourselves, How do we
engage in deep critical thinking, from what you love towards something that deserves a
future?

Before Marlene passed this year, I had the privilege of engaging in conversations with her
until a week before her passing. We shared our frustrations with the kind of research practices
that were being produced within Montessori circles. And she expressed her concern that
Montessori research was failing the Montessori community by denying possibilities to
question our practice or engage with scholarly perspectives outside what we normally
gravitate towards. I think Marlene is spot on in her analysis. As I mentioned earlier, it is not
about trashing Montessori altogether. Instead, engaging with critical theories will enable us
shift the focus from being invested in preserving a name, to transforming practice.

13
McCormick Rambusch, Nancy. 1992. An American Montessori Diffusion Philosophy Montessori's Flawed
Diffusion Model, NJ: Princeton Center for Teacher Education.
14
Barron, Marlene. 2002. ‘Maria Montessori and the Postmodern World’, Montessori LIFE, pp.25-29.
15
See Jackson, Alecia. Y., Lisa A. Mazzei. 2022, forthcoming. Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research.
Oxon: Routledge for an exploration of what it means to ‘think-with’