Every mother and father has felt that concern: Will my child be learning at the right pace? What if he is left behind? What can I do to help you without overwhelming you? Education, as we know it, still involves models designed to produce workers rather than to accompany people.

That is what he explains to us in this interview Pedro Valenzuela, expert educator in the Montessori method, author of teach me to read (RBA), a book in which it presents us with a clear route to accompany our children and students in the literacy process. Valenzuela is a teacher of RBA’s Montessori Moberi courses.

Compared to the rigid approach of the traditional system, the Montessori method stands as an alternative that is respectful of the child’s rhythms, focused on enhancing their autonomy and natural development. And that’s what this interview is about, finding alternatives, new (and old) ways of understanding the child’s brain.to accompany you calmly in the reading-writing process and the development of your potential. You can learn more about this method through RBA’s Montessori Moberi literacy and mathematics courses. And if you want to get to know Pedro Valenzuela up close in the classroom, you can do so through this video. In addition, you can download the free ebook «Why Montessori?».

-To locate our readers, let’s start with the basics. What does the Montessori method consist of, broadly speaking?

The Montessori method is an educational proposal developed by Dr. María Montessori at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, which breaks with everything that until then was understood by education. Until that moment, education has a very Prussian basis, of Enlightenment despotism, with its famous phrase of “everything for the people, but without the people.”

It was an education in which the citizen is not taken into account at all, he is treated as an ignorant person, they are intended to be controlled. Then, a little time later, with the Industrial Revolution, with the famous assembly lines, the industry needs labor, and that becomes the objective of education. So, we go to school, not to be educated to live, but to be educated to have a job.

That model still prevails today, unfortunately. Obviously, the classrooms have changed, but the structure is the same.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with what is known as the New School, not only María Montessori, but also other well-known pedagogues, such as Pestalozzi, Freinet, etc., came to tell the world something like that the child is a living being, and like any living being, it has biological development needs. María Montessori has observed them, I have observed it, and what any educational process has to do is address those biological developmental needs that the child has.

That information, a century later, is highly corroborated. Developmental Psychology or Neuroscience begins to talk about how the child’s brain learns. And all this, 100 years ago, María Montessori, in my point of view a true visionary, was able to leave it recorded throughout her entire bibliography so that the world could know it. And it was there that the foundations of what is still known today as the Montessori Method were established.

-You mention it a little in the book, but to bring it closer to our readers, how does the Montessori Method come into your life as a teacher?

Well, look, for eight years of my life I have worked with the group of people with intellectual disabilities, who are socially in the background, precisely because they do not produce for the system, they are not part of that assembly line. So, I come to this job with what they had explained to me at the university, my session very well established… And I start to make this proposal and I see that nothing of what I propose comes out. Absolutely nothing happens there. A few weeks go by and when I’ve been there for a month or so, I decide that either I’ll leave or I’ll change the way I do things.

That’s when I start offering activities. I begin to leave them material and let them be the ones to give me information about their tastes, preferences and so on. And from there everything begins to change, many things begin to happen.

Added to this is something that for me personally is very important in my life, it is something transformative. And, in this context in which they are socially seen as in the background, people with disabilities have something very important to offer society and it has not yet been heard: it is love, affection and common sense.

By circumstance, this work ended, I resumed my university studies, and suddenly at the university, the first year, I read a quote from a certain María Montessori, who says something like that it is possible to educate respecting the development of the child from love. And I say, “wow! This sounds familiar to me, it sounds very familiar to me because I have just lived it for many years of my life.” I go to the library, I look for information, I find a book, I read it and I say, I want to train in this.

From there, this path began approximately 15 years ago, to sow seeds in this sense. Because I am truly convinced that the current educational system does not work. And well, my role, having been in many gardens and having gone through many bad days, is to continue spreading the word and believing that the educational system has to be available to the child and not to the industry.

-In your book you also mention that the Montessori method believes that there is immense potential, which is exclusive to childhood. What does this potential consist of?

The child itself, human beings, has an innate potential. That is, not developed by any educational context. The first years of a child’s life are very beautiful. They are left to do it, and we see that the child is already beginning to do things on their own that go unnoticed socially.

For example, suddenly he doesn’t move and starts to crawl, suddenly he crawls and starts to stand up, he starts to walk… Nobody has taught him that, he only does it through contact with the environment in which he lives. Suddenly he doesn’t speak at all and starts babbling, suddenly after babbling he starts saying small syllables, then his first words… No one has taught him that either. That is, it does so in full contact with the environment.

But there comes a time, when childhood education ends, at five or six years old, in the social context it is already very stressful. So I no longer leave it to the child to develop his abilities, his potential alone, based on his rhythms that he needs, but it is society that imposes a model. So you already have to learn such a thing, now I’m going to take you to catechism because I want you to make communion…

The child begins to be covered with that social mass and there comes a time when we have no idea who we are. We don’t know each other. We don’t know what we like, what preferences we have and that is not normal. It makes no sense that we spend 16, 18 or 20 years in an educational system, and that we leave there without knowing what we like.

No, education has to be there to develop that potential, so that the child sees it, so that the child feels it and so that he can live in confidence who he truly is.

-In the book you focus particularly on reading and writing, and you warn us that there is no exact age at which a child should learn to read, but that we must wait until the brain is developed. How do we know it’s time?

With good information. Neuroscience already tells us that, from the seventh month of gestation, the baby who is still in the womb already hears things. I mean, I can start talking to him now, that’s where it all starts, okay? From there, we human beings achieve oral language, we build it in interaction with the environment in which we live. The richer that environment is, the better we talk. If we lock a child in a place where he has no communication, he will not speak.

But read and written language is not like that. That is, this already depends on a process of brain maturation. What does that mean? That we need to start training. And for this training, the brain has to develop.

-What would this training be like, then?

My daughter is born, and I’m already starting to talk to her, I’m communicating with her: she can see my mouth, she can see my lips, I’m starting to talk to her, I’m also starting to buy her first stories on thick cardboard so that it doesn’t break, so she can start playing. That is, that training begins there.

When he starts to say his first words, well, we will start playing with sounds. What sound does this word begin with? By what sound does it end? Then I will give him the opportunity to touch it, to touch the letters with the sandpaper letters… That is, it is a training that begins from the moment the baby is born and should approximately last until the baby is eight years old.

So, from that age group there is a very well established route, which is what I try to explain in the book in a clear and simple way, and that tells us what steps my daughter or my student has to go through, within that process.

At any given time, if they get stuck on a step, well, maybe there could be some kind of difficulty, and I could detect it too. But I have to do that training, I can’t wait until the child is six years old to start talking about sounds, about phonetic training. No, I have to start when I have to do it.

-If a mother or father who reads to us is worried because their child is not reading at the same pace as their peers, what would you tell them?

Read the book first [risas]. And then you have to have a minimum of information. First you have to know what the reading pathway of your child’s brain is. And then you have to look at what procedures you’re doing at school and what they’re doing at home as well, so that all of these pieces fit together.

In the end, the process is very simple, but everything is magnified when there is no good information, because we immediately start making comparisons, and we get nervous. Based on what? Based on a very competitive social context, where teachers and schools egoically compete to see who teaches first. And then families also feel very proud that their child has learned to read before another.

That is absurd, it is very banal information when you have a minimum of information that tells you what the development process is like. At my school, where we do this type of accompaniment from this place, first we reassure the families, which is very important.

We offer you very valid information, and when you decide to take the path, the most important thing for me is that you enjoy it. And the day they see reading flourish in their children, they feel very proud and what they do is validate the information that you have given them.

-In the long term, what consequences can forcing this learning process of…