Culture Studies

I spent more hours studying Spanish in school than I spent on English, but testing myself right now, I can’t count beyond treinta y nueve, 39. Spanish wasn’t valued in my peer culture in rural Sweden the same way as English — the language of Hollywood, video games, and internet forums. Compared with all that, 520 classroom hours won’t get you far.

If the culture in a school is at odds with its pedagogical goals, energy will be wasted trying to deal with the friction between these value systems: You get disruptive students and motivation issues. An educator might have an easier time if they found a way to align the peer culture with the pedagogy. But crafting aligned cultures is not how mainstream education works. Rather, culture is treated largely as a constant — natural, if sometimes frustrating, and beyond the scope of educators. Schools do not shape culture; they find strategies to work with the cultures they stumble into. When chaos descended on my Spanish classes, my teachers responded by locking the most disruptive boys in a room in the back, trying new pedagogical tactics — group assignments, role play, watching Spanish films — and increasing the amount of time we studied. But the culture remained.

Focusing on curriculum and pedagogical tactics makes sense from an administrator’s perspective. You can describe instructional techniques in a textbook. You can share a lesson plan with a colleague. But the nebulous thing that shapes the values, norms, and status hierarchies which, in turn, shape the motivation and behavior of the students? Culture is more subtle and complex. If a certain group of kids in — say — a suburb of Nairobi has a culture that makes them learn twice as fast as their peers, how can we help it spread? If a homeschooling community in Austin, Texas has a culture that makes the children uncommonly agentic, how do we isolate what in the web of social relationships gave rise to those norms and values? 

Culture is a catalyst. It multiplies the effectiveness of all other interventions and tools. A kid that grows up in an academically oriented family might use the internet to accelerate their rate of learning. The same kid in a different context might use the same tool to distract herself. Knowing how to scale up cultures that support us would be immensely useful, but it is a difficult problem.

Most educational movements have not focused seriously on solving it. But there are some exceptions, movements that have gone beyond curriculum and pedagogy and designed their schools explicitly to promote the formation of certain cultures. Two examples that stand out to me are Jesuit and Montessori schools. Both have (or had) distinct cultures that differ markedly from the norm and actively work to maintain and scale them up. The particular cultures they promote are in many ways opposites — traditional Jesuit schools were conservative and gave teachers great authority, while Montessori schools are progressive and child-centered — and I’m not sure the specifics of either are ideal for most children. But I think we might learn something by looking at how they grew.

On August 15, 1534, Ignatius of Loyola and six other students at the University of Paris met in a crypt beneath the church of Saint Denis to pronounce vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to God. They called themselves the Compañía de Jesús, and (although Ignatius himself never used the word) the members of the order became known as Jesuits. The Jesuits sought to counter the waning influence of Catholicism through missionary work — and by starting schools. These included seminaries for training priests, as well as lower schools (called “colleges”) for younger students, typically aged 12 to 17. They were unusual in the breadth of students they served, providing free education to anyone who passed an entrance exam. Educating the broader population at that scale had never been attempted in Europe before.

Jesuit colleges expanded rapidly. The first opened in the city of Messina in Sicily in 1548. By the time of Ignatius’ death in 1556, he had personally approved the opening of 35 ¹ colleges or universities. When the order was abolished by the pope in 1773, Jesuits operated more than 800 schools across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. ²

The early colleges were boarding houses where students lived for 11 months each year, attending classes four days a week. Typically, students moved to the boarding houses around age 12. But students were sorted into grades by ability, not age, and many students dropped out for years at a time due to financial hardships, so the classes were highly age-mixed. Both in classrooms and in the boarding houses, Latin was the only language allowed (with some exceptions for the youngest students).

The colleges were strictly hierarchical, in a rank order codified by Loyola: God at the top, below him the priests, then the seminary students, and finally, the lay students. Inside of each category, there were finer hierarchical gradations. The standard Jesuit response to large class sizes was to divide students into groups of 10 called decuries, which would be led by a top student called a decurion who would assist the instructor with grading, supervising, and even discipline. ³

Loyola, a soldier who fought in many battles before undergoing a spiritual conversion at 30 after a grave injury at the Battle of Pamplona, modeled the colleges partly on the military. Students were expected to submit to their superiors. In the classrooms, pupils sat in rows arranged not by age but by how far along they were in their studies. Rows would take turns reciting Latin, conjugating, paraphrasing, and so on. The students seated closest to the teacher would be given the most difficult assignments. As they improved, they would progress row by row, getting closer to the teacher until they were promoted to the next class. Working through Aristotle — in Latin — was considered an appropriate task at 15, after just three years at the college. In 1615, Pierre Corneille (who is considered, with Molière and Racine, to be one of the three great 17th-century French dramatists) entered the Jesuit college at Rouen at the age of nine and completed its curriculum in philosophy at 17 — a fairly typical pace for those who were allowed to graduate.

Ability in learning was held in great esteem, and the teachers strongly encouraged competition. All exercises were graded with positive or negative points, tracked by student “censors.” The highest-performing pupils would receive titles — “prince” or “emperor.” In contrast, weak students would be thrown out if they failed to progress rapidly enough between classes, and it was not uncommon to see poorly performing students punished in humiliating ways — having their compositions posted publicly for ridicule, getting a picture of an ass attached to their neck, or receiving a beating with leather straps.

You might think that the serious scholarship Jesuit boys engaged in from a young age reflects the values of a society that elevated learning more than ours, but this was not the case. The culture that Jesuit pupils brought with them to the schools was rather set against learning. As the influential French medievalist Philippe Ariès argued in his Centuries of Childhood, children in the 16th and 17th centuries lived with little separation from the adult world, which by modern standards was rough and anti-intellectual. It was common for young boys to duel, drink, and torture animals as a sport. The essayist Michel de Montaigne, who came of age just before the Jesuit colleges were established, jokes in one of his essays that brothels were frequented more than classrooms: “A hundred scholars have caught the pox before getting to their Aristotle lesson” — that is, by their mid-teens.

The Jesuits did not inherit a culture suitable for learning: they made one. Or rather, they took a small scholarly culture, seeded by themselves (a set of seminary students at the University of Paris), and then figured out how to scale it up. They managed to build institutions where the values and norms promoted self-discipline, scholarly work, submission, and service to the community. I will return to how they brought more people into this culture without changing it. But first, a few words about Montessori.

Maria Montessori’s vision of childhood was greatly at odds with the Jesuit ideal of strict hierarchy and discipline. She believed that children should have great freedom to choose what to work on and limited structure for how to approach it. Montessori opened her first classroom, Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House), in a tenement building in Rome in 1907. Within a few years, it gained international attention. By 1910, Montessori schools could be found across Western Europe, and in 1911 they spread to the United States. Today, there are more than 15,000 around the world. 

The pedagogy Montessori developed had many layers — it included, for instance, a specific model of the developmental stages of children — but key in the context of this essay is the idea of a prepared environment. Montessori attempted to arrange the school in such a way that children would be guided to activities designed to support their growth through their own free exploration. The rooms at a Montessori school are not arranged around desks in rows but instead have plenty of open space and separate workstations.

This layout of the room, often furnished with a limited color palette, a lot of unpainted wood, and so-called Montessori materials, ⁴ is the most obvious aspect of the prepared environment. But another key component is the culture. Montessori classrooms require a certain stillness, since the children work independently for long blocks of time on self-chosen projects. This focus, and this capacity to move between tasks without disturbing others, is a cultural norm that children have to pick up. Kids who have attended other schools often need time (and struggle) to adapt, a process Montessori educators call “normalization.” A normalized student is one who has internalized the culture, something Montessori herself described as “the most important single result of our whole work.” Here is how normalization is described by Montessori Academy, an Australian umbrella organization for Montessori schools:

Other characteristics ascribed to a normalized child are a “love of work,” “pursuit of self-mastery,” and “sociability.” On its face, these sound like values most schools endorse. Yet it is not uncommon that visitors from other schools find the focus and silence at Montessori schools “unnatural.”

In both Montessori schools and Jesuit colleges, instructors deliberately manipulate their students’ social hierarchy, regulating how much influence various members have over the group. If the students who command respect embody the values the institution is trying to instill, those values will be amplified through social imitation. If, on the other hand, people who command respect are those trying to subvert the values of the institution, the culture will work against the skills, norms, and behaviors the institution is trying to instill. 

The Jesuit colleges were, as we saw, highly structured, with an explicit and detailed hierarchy of values. The classes were numbered in descending order, and students climbed up toward the first class according to ability — not age. High performers were assigned honorific titles and given authority over their peers.

There was also a status difference between students who were on track to become priests, scholars, and teachers and those who were aiming for careers in the secular world. Students on the priestly track were more central to the cultural flywheel and the work assigned to the Jesuits by the pope, so they ranked higher. Whenever a new school was opened, Loyola seeded it with a set of teachers and exemplary students, usually future priests. New students arrived to join a group that was already established — a culture and a status hierarchy they had to adapt to.

The curriculum also emphasized cultural role models, with a significant part of the studies dedicated to reading the lives of exemplars who embodied the values the Jesuits wanted to promote: Demosthenes, Cicero, Caesar, the saints, and, at the summit, Christ.

At first sight, Montessori is the antithesis of this kind of hierarchical world. But this is not the case. Their way of manipulating the hierarchy is just more subtle. According to Michael Strong, an American school founder who has intersected with the Montessori movement since the 1980s, the easiest way to start a new school is with a cohort of young children who have not attended a school before. They have no established classroom culture. By working very closely with them, a Montessori teacher can establish a culture of student-initiated learning; quiet, polite behavior; and extended cognitive focus, all of which are critical for making a Montessori classroom work.

And the key is this: Once you have established this norm, you can add a new cohort of younger children. They will imitate their older, enculturated peers, since Montessori classrooms are age-mixed.

“While the expression ‘mixed-age’ has become commonplace, what is crucial about such an arrangement is that the older students in a classroom come to serve as models for the behavior of the younger students,” Strong said. “Children are biologically programmed to imitate the behavior of our older peers. There are no actions that an adult can take to rival the effectiveness of older children modeling desired behaviors for younger children.”

Strong is referring here to the well-documented fact that there are systematic patterns people will imitate and learn from. Humans preferentially learn from people whom we perceive as competent, successful, or prestigious. Children, perhaps because they are less skilled at telling who is competent, also rely substantially on imitating those who are (slighly) older. By elevating these cultural role models, you can affect the norms of the wider group.

In this way, Montessori relies on the natural hierarchy that arises among students of different ages to scale their culture. (The Jesuits also relied on this dynamic when they demanded that older students speak only Latin with the young.)

Because of the outsized influence of older students in an age-mixed context, Montessori schools are sensitive to the introduction of students who transfer from normal schools. If more than 10% to 20% of the older students have transferred from other schools, the culture will be perturbed and important norms will be lost. A common example of this is how non-Montessori school children tend to view self-directed time as a chance to socialize, which leads them to speak during the extended periods of self-directed work — a norm that tends to spread, since conversations attract more participants.

This points to a severe limitation in attempting to scale up educational cultures. They can absorb only a small percentage of newcomers each year and so must exclude others. To the extent that these cultures exist today, they are something students and their families chose, and since there is limited demand, those who are interested can probably find a way in. 

Jesuits and Montessori schools both do teacher training in the schools in the form of apprenticeships. Jesuits grew their ranks by employing seminary students who stayed on in the colleges to become scholars. Montessori training consists of a year as an assistant to a mature Montessori teacher, complemented with two summer classes. Normal teacher education also has a component of on-the-job learning, but Montessori and Jesuit training goes further in several ways. First, it is the main part of teacher education, rather than a complement to university classes. Second, there is a stronger emphasis on the master-apprenticeship relationship.

It is common for Montessori teachers to define themselves by reference to the person who introduced them to teaching. Some trace their “lineage” with pride back through several generations to Maria Montessori herself. Montessori died in 1952, so there are only a few of her students left alive, but they are often spoken of as if some of her “magic” rubbed off on them. And those who were trained by Montessori’s students, according to Strong, often identify with their particular lineage. Strong himself traces his Montessori family tree to Cato “Nan” Hanrath, who trained under Montessori before becoming the chief Montessori teacher trainer in Mexico City. Today, most of the Montessori world has centralized around two commoditized lineages. The first, Association Montessori Internationale in Holland, was founded by Montessori and is considered more orthodox. The other, American Montessori Society, was started by Nancy Rambusch, who broke from the older group in her desire to adapt Montessori to American society. ⁵ Both AMI and AMS have attempted to standardize the movement and provide formal teacher training and certifications, though there is still considerable diversity: the Montessori brand is not trademarked, and new initiatives often spring up under the name.

This identification with a lineage speaks to a third way that Montessori and Jesuit teacher training differ from more typical models: It is not just about learning the craft; it is about becoming what both call “a true believer.” This religious impulse is clear among the Jesuits, where teachers would be members of the order, having taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. But it is also present in Montessori, especially the more orthodox lineage that Montessori herself set up, AMI. Montessori writes in The Discovery of the Child that the teacher “must acquire a moral alertness which has not hitherto been demanded by any other system, and this is revealed in her tranquility, patience, charity, and humility. Not words, but virtues, are her main qualifications.”

Montessori was, like Loyola, a devout Catholic, and there is a certain religious fervor to her mission (creating world peace through a revolution in education!) and her emphasis on virtues and commitment on the part of teachers. Later lineages of Montessori emphasize this less, but there is still a clear sense that becoming a Montessori teacher requires a moral commitment that normal teaching does not. This focus on stepping into a tradition and accepting it fully, making a moral commitment, likely helps to keep the culture in the schools more stable. ⁶

It is not only teachers who are expected to be morally committed to the vision. When the Jesuits set out to establish their colleges, Loyola instructed that when a school was advertised, those who applied should accept a number of conditions. In a letter dating December 1, 1551, ⁷ he suggested a code of conduct for future Jesuit pupils:

If you tried to impose the same type of consistent culture in government schools, there would be intense pushback. And for good reason: Public schools accommodate a much wider set of stakeholders, none of whom can impose their vision on the others. Public schools are legally committed to basic liberal ethics, including not infringing on students’ personal beliefs. This is a powerful ideal. But it can leave them with a muddle of a culture, which makes it harder to achieve the kind of focus and alignment required in an effective learning institution.

When families deliberately choose educational alternatives, on the other hand, there is room for a more radical and far-reaching alignment between the participants. Montessori organizations put out pamphlets detailing a vision of education and encourage parents to compare self-proclaimed Montessori schools with their standards. This puts pressure on schools that use the name but diverge culturally. In this way, the shared vision pushes the instructors and families to align (or break off to form new lineages). By making the values clear and having people opt in, there is less friction to overcome, less work necessary in making sure that the participants share in the culture.

The Jesuit colleges and Montessori schools see themselves as more than just schools. They see themselves as instruments that work to bring about a new world — starting with children. They have very specific and divergent ideas about how that world should look, what kinds of virtues will help create it, and how children are to be raised to achieve those aims. But they share the insistence on a large value system. And they have converged on a set of practices — age-mixing, status manipulation, lineage traditions, and opt-in membership — in an attempt to deal with the problem of how to scale up their cultures without losing what makes them unique.

When I talked to Sebastian Garren, the founder of a Catholic preparatory school who has a longrunning interest in Jesuit education, he pointed out that maintaining a culture like this requires a “strong, intense, nearly fanatical level of devotion from those offering the alternative system.” Jesuits were devoted to their educational culture, which meant that, even though they engaged with the top scientists and philosophers of the day (sometimes joining their ranks), they did not let the insights gained through those engagements reshape the education.

“The inflexibility of the culture made it work as a culture for a particular type of education,” said Garren. It meant they failed to adapt as the world changed. “However, if it were more adaptable, it would have likely been ineffective.” There is a tension between openness and the structure required to maintain highly distinct cultures at scale.

It might be the case that the only way to grow cultures deliberately is by trending toward dogmatism. But I do think there it is possible — with new technology, perhaps increasingly so — to navigate this tension productively. It is possible to instill invaluable ideals. We may struggle to accomplish this equitably, at least in the short term. But if we fail to do so, I suspect that the gap between those who have access to highly functional cultures and those who do not will only grow more pronounced.