There existed a “secret of childhood” that all the teachers I had in my school days never ever knew. It was this: I, Paul Czaja from the Bronx, was born to be a natural learner. You did not have to “teach” me anything. Just as I, when I was inside my mother for nine months, had grown from the inside out, I was capable of learning everything from the inside out.
I had the natural potential to be a learner as surely as I had the natural ability to walk and talk. I actually had learned to understand my homeland language way before I ever went to school. I had mastered knowing and speaking the complex language of English purely by the power of my absorbent mind.
No bribing or shaming with marks was necessary to motivate me. No punishment was required either. Just as the carrot seed knows by itself how to take in dirt, water, air, and sunshine in its wondrous process of becoming a carrot naturally, so too was I able in natural ways as a child to absorb and change all the raw experiences of human life into all the human skills that come with being a person – language, so I might speak, understand, write, and read, mathematics, so I could count and multiply and divide, even subtract; history, so I could gain the wisdom of the ages; science, so I could know how everything works and how to invent the new.
What I needed from my school life was not merely to be taught academic skills but to experience and learn these same skills as “helps to my life.” If my teachers of that so long ago time had looked upon me not as a pupil “in a class to be marked, graded, classified, and labeled” but really as being a living person, they might have respected me as the leading edge of Nature who was developing in a manner that was following a deep wisdom that began at the moment of my conception.
I really was never meant to be a “pupil” (which entomologically means to be a “puppet”) for I was not made out of a wooden stick like Pinocchio but born to be a real boy from the start. All my potentialities were present when I was one, tiny new cell, and they were still present when I was born a beautiful baby made up of hundreds of trillions of cells. And these very same powerful potentialities were still there driving me forward when I was one of the 50 kids sitting in rows of desks as “first graders” in my first school. If I was to develop fully, what I needed from the kind lady behind the desk and in front of the big blackboard was not to teach me but rather to provide me indirectly with lots of learning opportunities that fit my developmental stages. I needed her to treat me with respect – challenging me with learning tasks that matched my personal skill level and that led me up the academic curriculum spiral with enough practice time to go from mastery to mastery.
I did not know it then, but what I and my brother and friends needed was the unique privilege of learning within a school that was designed to respect our individuality and provide us with experiential learning opportunities. There were no such schools in the Bronx at that time. But you can be sure when I grew up and had children of my own that I had them grow up strong and independent and truly learned by placing them in such alternative schools throughout all of their developmental years. They are now all grown up and have never stopped thanking me.
Dr. Paul Czaja has been involved in the Montessori movement of alternative education for more than 45 years. Dr. Czaja was on the founding faculty and, eventually, headmaster at the famous Whitby School the American Montessori Center, in Greenwich, Connecticut, from 1960 until 1979. He has been involved in Montessori teacher training for many years, and has worked with Montessori public charter schools as well as independent schools.