In my experience, the big expense in Montessori isn’t the activities nearly so much as the student-teacher ratio and the real estate costs.
These schools tend to be located in rich neighborhoods where owning enough land to operate a school is spectacularly expensive. And the care they provide ultimately boils down to the number of eyeballs necessary to prevent serious liability should you let your toddler out of their crib. It’s much cheaper to just keep kids caged up for eight hours a day than to let them roam under supervision.
On top of that, pre-K schools are disease hot-houses. It is, similarly, much easier to keep your space hygienic if you limit the kids’ activities. I tried to send my son to daycare last month. He got four illnesses in six days, including COVID. Then he spread it to the rest of us, so we were out on our asses for a week each. Absolute nightmare. Had to pull him out again, despite shelling out a month’s mortgage payment for enrollment.
We could have public institutions that are well-regulated and fully staffed, on public property that’s professionally cleaned on a daily basis. And could require vaccinations for enrollment, include a properly researched educational plan, incorporate the buildings into big workplace settings so parents don’t need to add 30 minutes or more to a commute to drop off/pick up… all sorts of good stuff. But that would require civil planning, which is basically communism, so…
In my experience, the big expense in Montessori isn’t the activities nearly so much as the student-teacher ratio and the real estate costs.
These schools tend to be located in rich neighborhoods where owning enough land to operate a school is spectacularly expensive. And the care they provide ultimately boils down to the number of eyeballs necessary to prevent serious liability should you let your toddler out of their crib. It’s much cheaper to just keep kids caged up for eight hours a day than to let them roam under supervision.
On top of that, pre-K schools are disease hot-houses. It is, similarly, much easier to keep your space hygienic if you limit the kids’ activities. I tried to send my son to daycare last month. He got four illnesses in six days, including COVID. Then he spread it to the rest of us, so we were out on our asses for a week each. Absolute nightmare. Had to pull him out again, despite shelling out a month’s mortgage payment for enrollment.
We could have public institutions that are well-regulated and fully staffed, on public property that’s professionally cleaned on a daily basis. And could require vaccinations for enrollment, include a properly researched educational plan, incorporate the buildings into big workplace settings so parents don’t need to add 30 minutes or more to a commute to drop off/pick up… all sorts of good stuff. But that would require civil planning, which is basically communism, so…