MODERN MONTESSORI
We offer a modern montessori program for children aged 2.5 yrs to 5 years. In their senior kindergarten year, the students reduce their reliance on montessori materials in favour of a more traiditional approach in time for their entry into Grade 1. From Grade 1 onward, our curriculum is academically intense and one that focuses on the basics of writing, reading, communication, and numeracy. Students learn traditional subjects such as English, Math, Science, Social Studies, French, Art, Music, and Physical Education.
MODERN MONTESSORI
While there are many ways to think about the roots of social and economic inequality in our world today, here, I argue that the concept of evolutionary mismatch2 goes a long way toward explaining this problem that permeates so much of the modern human experience.
Evolutionary mismatch exists when some feature of the modern environment of some organism is critically out of line with the environmental conditions that existed under the ancestral conditions that surrounded the evolutionary history of that organism. When it comes to humans, we can think of evolutionary mismatch as corresponding to the fact that, in so many ways, our modern world is mismatched from the nomadic conditions that characterized the human experience for the lion's share of our existence. Under ancestral conditions, for instance, humans lived in small groups surrounded by kin and long-standing friends. Whereas now, so many of us live far from kin and deal largely with strangers each and every day.
The modern food-production industry does not tend to take this evolutionary mismatch into account. This industry, like nearly all industries in the modern US, focuses on the bottom line of what sells. And because our ancestors evolved to prefer foods that were fattening, so many modern food companies produce fattening food in unprecedented volumes. Such processed food is now relatively inexpensive and is highly prevalent.
It turns out that standard public education practices are, in many respects, mismatched from ancestral kinds of learning environments that surrounded our evolutionary history.4 If ancestral educational conditions were anything like educational conditions found in nomadic groups around the world today, then our best guess is that they had very little resemblance to modern public school. Education in nomadic groups does not include a single educated adult providing technical information to a group of 22 seated young people for eight hours a day for five days a week. Let alone standardized tests... And attentional issues were certainly not treated with pharmaceutical solutions under ancestral conditions.
Social inequality is a large problem in our modern world. And various forms of data seem to point to an inconvenient fact surrounding social inequality: It is on the rise. And it has been for quite a while.1
Want to work toward reducing social inequality and leveling the playing field for the greater good? Keep evolutionary mismatch in mind. The adverse effects of evolutionary mismatch on the modern human experience are nothing short of profound. 041b061a72