Welcome from the Director of Training

“You work with adolescents? Bless you!” 

That has been the all-too-frequent response to my work over the years (and yours, I would guess).

But anyone who works closely with adolescents knows they are a powerhouse of potential for our culture, our times, our future—and we have sorely neglected that potential by allowing the cultural message about adolescents to focus on turmoil, confusion, and dysfunction. Adolescents frequently risk alienation, unnecessary restrictions in school situations, stifling test performance expectations, and now, virtual social isolation and assault on their “remote” identities. 

Not in Montessori. 

Montessori education offers an inspiring vision of adolescence

Montessori education offers an inspiring vision of adolescence as a time of creativity, contribution, motivation for purposeful work, practice in civility, application of knowledge to real, concrete outcomes, and imagining and impacting communities to create a better future for everyone.

A radical reformer in her time—and in ours—Maria Montessori suggested that adolescents would thrive in communities in which they themselves are responsible for meeting their fundamental needs—growing, preserving, and cooking food, designing and building structures, managing natural resources, using tools and human ingenuity to solve problems, crafting items for sale, managing businesses—all while pursuing knowledge that is relevant to their lives and serving others.

Supporting adolescents in this stage of life, which lays the foundation for responsible, mature adulthood, is crucial work in a time when real, practical, and humane interactions as citizens and moral members of society are diminishing rapidly.

We need you. Adolescents need us. The world needs adolescents who have had a chance to discover and strengthen their human potential.

And the real surprise? Working with adolescents in a Montessori environment will inspire YOU. In the right environment, adolescents can’t help but cultivate OUR faith in humanity.

Join us. 

~Laurie

“For success in life depends in every case on self-confidence and the knowledge of one’s own capacity and many-sided powers of adaptation.”

- Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence