When it comes to Nutrition, Content remains King
It is considered forward-thinking in education to emphasize curiosity and interest over content mastery. What matters, we are told, is not what a child learns, but only how he learns it. If a child always wants to bake cakes instead of learn math facts, it is avant-garde to defer to that interest-based exploration.
When it comes to learning about nutrition, however, no one advocates for this approach. If a child always wants to eat cakes rather than veggies, even the avant-garde agree that adults should not just passively let it happen, but should thoughtfully, proactively direct and guide children towards knowledge of a healthy diet.
When the goal is to help children form good eating habits, it is obvious to us that “content” cannot flow purely from interest. There is a lot about diet that we do not know, and a lot of evidence diets need to be individualized, yet we still expect parents and educators to scaffold around that complexity and impart knowledge and good habits. Here we see it as negligent if an adult assumes that any diet a child pursues is as good as any other.
What is true of knowledge of nutrition should be seen as true of knowledge as such. We should help children form all learning habits in the same way we help them form eating habits. We should see that it is neither correct to have children unthinkingly memorize or obediently comply to our adult views, nor correct to just assume that whatever they happen to choose is automatically good for them. In helping children learn and grow, our work is precisely to figure out how to uncompromisingly support agency and self-regulation, and to allow for maximum choice, in a way that also optimizes for the consumption of life-enhancing, scientifically validated nourishment.
Education reform, to avoid simplistically adopting one side of a false alternative, requires a theory of self-directed learning that respects rather than sidesteps the inherent architecture of knowledge and skills. We need an agency-centric pedagogy that helps us grapple with and address, rather than merely trade off against, our central and inescapable adult responsibility to help children acquire the skills and layers of factual knowledge necessary for their adult flourishing.
This content-respecting approach to agency is one of the ways in which the Montessori method, in its core principles, is fundamentally distinct from progressive education. Montessori education is not merely another pedagogy of self-directed learning. It is unique, and uniquely important, precisely because it strives to combine self-directed learning with a respect for the centrality of knowledge in human life.