mbateman's comments

It's mainly an intellectual issue. That is: it's a dispute about what is true in development and education.

In the early 20th c., when American progressives and intellectuals were very interested in education, this dispute was explicit. The (nascent) educational establishment reviewed Montessori's works, attended her trainings and published criticisms, and held whole conferences on the problems with the method. She was very popular for about five years or so, but the popularity was grassroots. The intellectuals always thought she was wrong. Just as one example: the intellectual current in the US was to delay it until later for largely Rousseauvian reasons (reading is an adult imposition that children aren't naturally interested in). Montessori became famous in large part because she taught children how to read earlier. (This is mentioned in the review above.)

There were dozens of issues like this. Montessori thought there should be "an education of the senses"—but progressives critiqued this idea as incoherent. Montessori thought there should be specific, synthetically designed learning materials. Progressives thought there should be more natural experiences and fewer, if any, truly curricular "learning materials". Some thought her approach was too rigid, others too anarchic. Despite widespread public popularity, Dewey, his students, the NEA, and many many many others were vocally critical of her method. By 1916 it had all but vanished from the country, and wouldn't come back for over 40 years.

(There are modern versions of every single one of these critiques, but the overall educational scene is also just much less intellectual than it was a hundred years ago, so it's not as visible.)

But the first half of the 20th century is also precisely when the US school system took shape! It became bureaucratized, and US progressive educators themselves flip-flopped between different pedagogical approaches—from "project based" approaches to "efficiency" approaches that were more vocationally directed. By the time Montessorians clawed back some influence in the US, the basic shape of the system was already in place, and the only outlet it could take was as a grassroots movement. Which meant: lots of entrepreneurial women starting small schools in scattershot ways. Which means independent schools. Which means tuition.

The school system in the US is so badly broken that it also affects the nature and costs of independent schools. And Montessori schools are largely independent schools. So they are more expensive and less accessible. There's a very explicit narrative at play in the review above, one that concludes with completely unmerited swipes at Amazon/Day One. A frank look at current and historical school policy dynamics would conclude that the barrier to getting more Montessori education in the US is the public school system, and that philanthropic and entrepreneurial efforts to push Montessori forward are the only things that have kept it going at all.

The idea that Montessori schools are expensive, rare, and inaccessible because Montessori pushed them to be this way is really ridiculous. It's belied not just by the above narrative, which is a better explanation, but by decades of work that she did that was strongly characterized by humanitarian and activist efforts for the very poorest students, by many attempted (and mostly failed) partnerships that she attempted to engage in with any national government would listen, by her work in India during WWII (which has tremendous and ongoing influence), and more.

I wrote a Twitter thread (was a bit irritated when I banged this out, unfortunately) that makes some similar points here with a couple of specific citations, newspaper clippings, etc. https://twitter.com/mbateman/status/1499590385638821889

I’m part of a now-large-ish Montessori startup and am a sort of Montessori scholar. The biography reviewed here is very good and worth checking out. Overall it’s the best of the biographies available, and is a significant improvement over Kramer’s from a few decades ago.

Just an aside: the extended tangents in the review about Montessori’s entrepreneurialism turning her method into a classist privilege are, uh, really strange. The idea in the review seems to be that the rarity and expense of Montessori in the US is because she charged for trainings and tried to parent some materials. Purely as a matter of historical fact, this is a narrative in search of evidence that isn’t there, and a narrative that isn’t really face plausible. Montessori education is rare because the progressive intellectuals that built the US school system adamantly and vociferously rejected Montessori for pedagogical reasons. There are just way better explanations available for why her work didn’t take hold more widely.

Glad to see Montessori and Stefano’s biography in particular getting coverage though. I’ve enjoyed reading the many comments here about people’s experiences with Montessori!

There are general issues with transportation efficacy in NYC right now (subway reliability etc.) but none of them are LIC specific.

In principle the same should go for hiring, but in practice I think it's game theoretically more complicated. I've hired swaths of cohered tech teams before, but it was one by one, to allow for more individualized assessment and negotiation.

Some traits are shaped by sexual selection because of their deleterious effects. It's an honest signal: if you can survive despite having that crappy trait, you must be really robust!

You can't conceptualize that as a fitness hit, because of what fitness means in the context of evolutionary biology. But you had better be able to conceptualize it somehow, because it's interesting and important if true.

"The anti-Rockefeller focus of these otherwise incompatible political positions owes much to Populism. 'Populists' believe in conspiracies and one of the most enduring is that a secret group of international bankers and capitalists, and their minions, control the world's economy. ... Populists and isolationists ignore the tangible benefits that have resulted in our active international role during the past half-century."

It's missing two things that I would need to actually use it:

1. An overview, where you can see the status and progress of all the projects at a glance. Right now, as far as I can tell, the only info the overview page gives about the projects is the project name and participants. I'd love to be able to see which columns were completed in the overview page.

2. Project templates. I want to have a few different project types, each type of which loads a default set of columns, colors, and tasks.

One final observation is that I'm not sure what the "state" field of the columns does. Changing the state doesn't seem to have any visible effect. For my purposes I'd like each of the columns to represent project stages and for it to be very meaningful when we've moved from one project state to the next.

Looking forward to seeing future iterations of this project! I've been amazed at how hard it is to find a software solution for my needs, and am very glad to see new promising new development in this area.

I'm not sure why textbooks haven't been updated, but I doubt the hypotheses mentioned in the article (ignorance, that the authors believe the study, and pressure to keep textbooks short).

> "Clarity, but also include jargon."

Well, that pretty much summarizes my writing strategy.

I think the article makes a case for the first, but we shouldn't immediately conclude that means that on-average-very-high-interest microloans are somehow intrinsically the subject of moral disapprobation (as I've seen suggested in at least some comments).

I think there is a (third) real question as to how to brand high-risk services like this.

EDIT: I think this top level comment (currently) below by jfasi is highly on point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7547117

This looks like a very small effect but one with a very distinct form so I'd be curious to see the details.

For anyone that thinks there is actually a problem here, what could the motivation or mechanism behind this "blackout" possibly be? Significant parts of the US media have been reporting pretty well on Snowden for a long time now.