2005 Symposium: Partnership Education and Montessori Education

Facilitated by Riane Eisler, Jonathan Wolf, and Tim Seldin

Sponsored by The Montessori Foundation and The Center for Partnership Studies

Attended by:

Andrew Kutt
D. J. White
Karen Walker
Anita Albers
Jan Mike
Sheila Hamilton
Anne S. Perrah
Carol Brands
Jay Van Dinther
Leah Van Dinther
Marliese Colantuno Roth

The Institute followed the inaugural conference launching the Montessori Center for Partnership Education. Our goal was to take some small first steps exploring how best to expand, update, and generally enrich our schools through a melding of Montessori and Partnership Education.

Tim Seldin, President of the Montessori Foundation, spoke on how Riane Eisler’s work in partnership theory, and its application to education, provides Montessori education with a thoroughly documented and intellectually rigorous framework for explaining the underpinning foundation of Montessori philosophy and practice. It provides a lens for analyzing all areas of life and society, as well as a rich array of specific materials and information.

Dr. Eisler’s work begun in her book Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century offers tremendous resources that we can use to update and enhance Montessori’s Cosmic Curriculum (integrated studies in cosmology, biological evolution, human cultures incorporating history, geography, economics, anthropology, science, literature, philosophy, psychology, political science, the arts, and other disciplines).

The overarching framework for the study of human cultures of the partnership/domination continuum developed by Eisler is a powerful tool that our children can use throughout their lives. Once understood by teachers, the partnership model and the dominator model can serve to empower children with a new analytical lens that offers greater clarity and a richer sense of human possibilities (their own and that of us all).

Eisler work is not only parallel but completely in tune with Maria Montessori’s view of education and the child. It too spans evolution as a gateway to a better understanding of ourselves, from prehistory to our present and potential future. Its vision of education is as a mean of ensuring the realization of our highest human potentials and empowering us to be active co-creators of our future..

Our goal for the Montessori Center for Partnership Education is that it will offer:

1. A way of updating and enhancing our Montessori Curriculum, especially at the elementary and secondary level.
2. A way of strengthening the partnership structure of Montessori schools as well as the relations among children, guides, parents, staff and others in the school as well as community by using the lens of the domination and partnership models to evaluate and where necessary change.
3. A tool that can be used in Montessori teacher education in the spiritual preparation of the adults.
4. A way of explaining Montessori philosophy that is rigorously documented and convincing.

Even beyond this, Montessori schools, which already incorporate so many aspects of Partnership Education, are the most logical partners to take Dr. Eisler’ elegant intellectual framework and refine it into a form that can be readily shared with nonMontessori trained educators and incorporate in whole or in part in nonMontessori schools that are seriously interested in real educational reform.

By becoming proficient in Partnership Education, we can explain everything that is the foundation of our Montessori educational ideas better to ourselves and to the world, and take these ideas further using both a larger conceptual social framework and sound knowledge that has accumulated in the century since Montessori’s brilliant contribution was first operationalized.

We considered an over-arching framework that considers three main areas of inquiry:

• Content (curriculum; what we teach and why)
• Process (instruction, methodology; how we teach and why)
• Structure (school, community, environment; also, who is it that teaches; the personhood of the adult—given that, in Montessori, the adult is not only the preparer of the environment, but also part of the environment, as well as the facilitator of what occurs in the environment) . . . and also takes into consideration outcomes in each area
• We discussed enriching our teacher education programs drawing from Eisler’s The Power of Partnership.

Notes of the Proceeds from the Symposium are being edited at this time.

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