​[By] the introduction into the school of various forms of active occupation … the entire spirit of the school is renewed. 
​
It has a chance to affiliate itself with life, to become the child’s habitat, where he learns through directed learning, instead of being only a place to learn lessons having an abstract and remote reference to some possible living to be done in the future. It gets a chance to be a miniature community, and embryonic society. To do this means to make each one of our schools an embryonic community life, active with the types of occupation that reflect the life of larger society (Kalantzis, and Cope, n.d.-a).
​

The role of a Montessori teacher is that of an observer whose ultimate goal is to intervene less and less as the child develops. The teacher’s first objective is to prepare and organize the learning environment to meet the needs and interests of the children as well as promote independence. The focus is on the children, not on teachers teaching. Through careful observation and planning, Montessori teachers remain constantly alert to the direction each child is heading and actively works to help them succeed (North Star Montessori Elementary School, n.d.)
​

this institution should be a perpetual creation by the cooperative enthusi-asm of teachers and students growing with the growth of their soul; a world in itself, self-sustaining, independent, rich with ever-renewing life, radiating life across space and time, attracting and maintaining round it a planetary system of dependent bodies.
​

Career Foundations course empowered students to take control of the course itself and thus, their own goals, first by setting their own standards in the four key areas of attendance, punctuality, focused teamwork, and homework completion, and sharing how they would help each other meet their goals when they ran into problems.
​

In sum, there are many methodological challenges to carrying out good quality educational research, including good quality research on the Montessori method. Arguably the most obvious challenge to emerge from the literature reviewed here is the practical difficulty of randomly allocating pupils to Montessori and non-Montessori schools in order to compare outcomes. The majority of studies have relied instead on trying to match pupils and teachers in Montessori and non-Montessori schools on a number of different variables, with the concomitant danger that unidentified factors have contributed to any difference in outcomes. Even if randomisation is achievable, studies need to be conducted on a large enough scale to not only allow generalisations to be made beyond the particular schools studied, but to also allow investigation of which children the Montessori method suits best. On a more optimistic note, recent experimental studies—whereby features of existing Montessori classrooms are manipulated in some way, or features of the Montessori method are added to non-Montessori classrooms—hold promise for investigating the effectiveness of particular elements of the Montessori method.

​Some critics believed and still believe that under Dewey’s educational system students would fail to acquire basic academic skills and knowledge. Others were fearful that classroom order and the teacher’s authority would disappear. They probably constituted a minority at the time, but recent events seem to demonstrate that their concerns cannot be ignored. If society rejects or ignores the existence of an objective moral order and throws into the dustbin of history the concept of natural law, relativism takes its place and becomes the ethical norm of conduct in accordance with man’s own personal experience and/or observations. If to these two factors we add the lack of respect and contempt for authority, we have created the formula for chaos and eventually a totalitarianism of the worst kind. Society cannot survive without order and respect for legitimate authority both at the government level and primarily at the family level where children are expected to be taught the difference between right and wrong.

J. Lave & E. Wenger (1991) argued that learning occurs when individuals are members of the communities, in which they are acculturated and at the same time participate actively in the diffusion, reproduction, and transformation of in-practice knowledge about agents, activities, and artefacts. They also argued that to know is to be capable of participating with the requisite competence in the complex web of relationships among people and activities.

Intuitions are dynamically constructed impressions distilled from countless occurrences of action and interaction with the world and from the myriad dialogues that we engage in as we go about life in the various communities of which we are members. (Kiraly, 2000).