Each year the cosmos begins again. What the children’s questions revealed this time, and why “I don’t know” is sometimes the most educational answer available.
The First Great Lesson is told with a black balloon, a candle, a bowl of water, and a quantity of theater that new guides find embarrassing until the first time they watch children receive it. It is the story of how the universe came to be. It is told to six-year-olds. It is deliberately, structurally incomplete.
We tell it in the first week of Elementary, but our older Primary children come in to hear it too, and this year classroom three came back with better questions than the Elementary did.
The questions
- “If everything was hot and then it got cold, where did the hot go?”
- “Was there a sound?”
- “Who was watching?”
- “Is it still happening or did it finish?”
The fourth one stopped me. It is, more or less, the open question in cosmology, asked by a five-year-old who has been at this school for two years and has no idea that she has said anything remarkable.
What I said
I said I did not know, and that people whose whole job is this question also do not entirely know, and that some of them are alive right now and still working on it.
The look on a child’s face when they learn that a question is still open is not disappointment. It is recruitment.
This is the part of the Great Lessons that is easiest to get wrong. The instinct — a good instinct, a caring instinct — is to close the loop, give the child a satisfying answer, and move on. But the lesson is not a delivery of content. It is an invitation to a very large room, and the door has to be left open.
By the following week two children in classroom three had asked for the sandpaper globe, one had started a drawing of “the hot part” that took nine days, and the girl who asked whether it had finished had moved on entirely to a question about worms. That is also fine. The room is large and she will come back.
Sarah Lindqvist
Primary Lead Guide, Montessori Makers School
Writing from the classrooms is published four times a term and collected in the termly letter. Questions are welcome at hello@montessorimakersschool.org.