Why Do Good Schools Produce Bad People?
Introduction to Provocations V4: The Revolutionary Adolescent
In 1971, Gil Scott-Heron wrote the song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” contains the following lyric: The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because
The revolution will not be televised, brother.
In February 2026, Laurie Ewert-Krocker gave a speech at the end of the AMI Montessori Experience Adolescent Refresher Course where she recognized that along the way of creating Montessori adolescent programs over the past 40 years, compromises were made, and that we must no longer compromise when it comes to the development of our adolescents.
What does this song from the 70’s about Black Liberation and Laurie’s speech from 2026 have in common?
They recognize a fundamental principle: Revolutionary change will not be celebrated, comfortable, easy, or popular. Compromises were made because to not make them would have made our programs come under negative scrutiny. It won’t make us look “five pounds thinner” to shed the tyranny of Common Core, for example; if anything, it will make people deeply uncomfortable. It will not be “televised” because it will necessarily disrupt the status quo that is barreling our society and world toward collapse.
Montessori envisioned a world of equitable interdependence, where systems of extraction and hierarchy, of destruction and war were dismantled. The moneyed and powerful interests across the globe, who would not benefit from this change, are fighting every day to stop this from happening- painting every step toward the needed revolution as horrendous. The tools they use to maintain the status quo are so common as to go unnoticed: Grade level standards, standardized examinations, grades, and the decades-long pursuit of credentials are a key part of this arsenal. These provide a sense of certainty, of stability, of “I went through it and I turned out fine.”
I think most of us can look out at the world, at our daily lives, and realize that things are not fine.
The revolution in global society that Montessori described is precisely what we need in this moment. It is what this edition of Provocations is inviting you to lean into.
When I began my work as an adolescent guide, I was lucky enough to be mentored by Pat Ludick, a Montessori adolescent pioneer and trainer. Among many lessons I learned from Pat, perhaps the most important was to embody humility. To be humble and honest with my students about when things didn’t go as I had planned, or when I hadn’t acted in a way that I wish I had.
One day, she sent me the following poem that has remained with me ever since:
Humility:
It is not the act of intentionally making ourselves small.
Humility is the task of becoming ‘right-sized’…
To be humble is to be as God made us.
It is to acknowledge all our talents and shortcomings, strengths, and weaknesses
and to turn them fully toward the good!
My ability to be humble with my adolescents is the key personality trait that has made me a successful adolescent guide, because out of my greatest failures emerged opportunities for me to work with adolescents to co-design something better. I don’t want to paint the picture that I am a master at humility; in fact, it’s still quite difficult for me. Yet it is something I remind myself of daily as I act and interact with the young people in my care.
It is in this spirit of humility that I have been asking myself, much like Laurie did in her speech: What compromises have I made in creating adolescent environments, and why did I make them?
I’ve spent much of my career debunking compromises: The five paragraph essay is one that I have railed against for years, not only because it’s a poor tool of writing pedagogy, but because it imports an authoritarian approach to language expression that was explicitly designed to make grading easier.
The more I’ve done this work, and the more honest I become with myself, it’s become clear to me that as practitioners broadly, we have made compromises that we must, lovingly, interrogate and change.
The choice to give grades or standardized tests because “that’s what they’ll have later.”
The choice to teach math via direct instruction because “that can’t relate to our practical work.”
The choice to give a rigid schedule to a 15 year old that would be considered insulting to a 5 year old (remember those 3 hour work cycles?).
The truth is that these choices were likely not made out of malice, or a desire to water down Montessori pedagogy (though I do know some people who have explicitly wanted to do that). The reality is that schools, leaders, and guides are under pressure in an uncertain world to provide certainty. To answer the ultimate question:
“Is my adolescent going to be OK?”
It’s a question that leads us in one of two directions.
The easiest direction is to lean on the metrics that guided our own education and provided certainty, or at least the illusion of it. To say that “your adolescent is in the 90% percentile” or “look at how many skills are checked off on this math list” or “they have all A’s!”
And while this may appease parents, it means that we water down what we offer when we let these aspects of conventional education into our Montessori environments.
We limit true student exploration.
We put Production and Exchange into one 45 minute block per week.
We garden, sometimes, when there isn’t homework due.
This is not to shame guides who have, knowingly or unknowingly, walked ourselves into these situations (been there, done that). This is an opportunity to reflect on the aspects of our program that have walked away from the vision laid out for us in the Appendices of From Childhood to Adolescence and recommit ourselves to that vision.
The reality is that our world needs Montessori now more than ever.
Here’s just a snapshot of the reality of the world we live in:
By 2030, global freshwater demand will outstrip supply by 40%
The richest 1% emit as much carbon as the poorest 60%
The richest 1% own almost half of the world’s wealth
And the kicker: The architects of the collapse of our society and environment went to “great” schools: Yale. Harvard. Princeton. Penn. Stanford. Insert top college or private high school here.
What did that education do for them? It gave them knowledge and “certainty” without inner development or a moral compass. It empowered them to destroy our world.
In Appendix A of From Childhood to Adolescence, Montessori wrote “Schools as they are today, are adapted neither to the needs of adolescence nor to the times in which we live. Society has not only developed into a state of utmost complication and extreme contrasts, but it has now come to a crisis in which the peace of the world and civilization itself are threatened. The crisis is certainly connected with the immense progress that has been made in science and its practical applications, but it has not been caused by them. More than to anything else it is due to the fact that the development of humans has not kept pace with that of our external environment” (Montessori 2007, 56).
Jeff Bezos went to a Montessori school. That fact should disgust us as a community- not be lauded as a success of the method.
The truth is, if we continue down this path, there won’t be a world for our adolescents to inhabit. What good will their “preparation to get grades in the future” be if they don’t have any water to drink?
Doing things differently will be uncomfortable. It will not make you look five pounds thinner. It will make your administrators, families, and colleagues furrow their brow and wonder if you’re in your right state of mind.
You’ll get the same looks that Dr. Montessori got during her time.
She had the courage to resist fascism and was exiled in India for seven years as a result of it. I think you can handle an upset parent.
Which brings me back to the design of our adolescent programs. In “Principles and Practices in Education,” Montessori wrote that “the idea that we are conferring ‘freedom’ upon the adolescent when we allow them to work… at mathematics instead of history at a certain hour of the day- this idea is in practice quite absurd… such ideas are an actual caricature of what is really of use to the child at an earlier age… At puberty another kind of intercourse arises, a new kind of social instinct: society is conceived of as work. New real work, work of absorbing interest, work that is worth the effort it costs us is … it requires the collaboration of others, and this cooperation implies association and discipline” (Montessori 2011, 59)
Montessori called on us to do more.
Our world demands that we do more.
How will you be a part of the revolution?
This piece is from our Provocations Magazine, V4: The Revolutionary Adolescent. This introduction is just the tip of the iceberg- check out the full magazine below!