Do Montessori Students Grow Up to Be Happier Adults?

Believe it or not, there is some research suggesting that they do!

In 2021, a team led by well-known Montessori education researcher Angeline Lillard published a paper in the journal Frontiers of Psychology in which they presented survey-based findings that people educated at Montessori schools experience higher levels of well-being as adults. The researchers even found a positive correlation between levels of certain aspects of well-being and length of time spent in a Montessori school–just how happy (in certain respects) the participants in their study felt tallied with how long they had been in a Montessori program.

A significant fact about the Lillard team’s study is that it reported these associations while accounting for factors such as age, race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and even attendance at private schools. In other words, the increased levels of well-being of the study participants don’t appear to be attributable to facts about them such as their race, the income of their families when they were children, or whether they were educated at private schools.

Lillard and her research team hypothesize that the connection between attending a Montessori school–private or public–as a child and experiencing heightened well-being in adulthood may be due to several features of Montessori education. One of these is the self-determination enjoyed by Montessori children, who are able to choose their own work, increasing their sense of autonomy. Another is the meaningfulness of the activities in which they participate–the reasons for the activities are always spelled out for the students, so they look upon their work as purposeful. Last, the formative experiences of Montessori students may involve a greater sense of social cohesion and stability because of the mixed-age classrooms in which the students learn.

Commenting about this research, Caedmon Head of School Matthew Stuart remarks,

If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. If a child is invited to pursue their own passions in the classroom, if the main motivator in a classroom is a child’s own growth instead of the teacher’s praise, then from day one you’re building an intrinsic self-confidence and your sense of being able to make mistakes. The whole of Montessori is self-discovery and increasing your own sense of wonder. So if that’s how you approach life, with a sense of wonder, you’re going to be happier!

If you’d like to know more, a longer, more detailed summary of this research can be found in the article “Montessori Children Often Turn into Happy Adults”, published in the online Psychology Today.