Montessori Goes to College: A Vision for Self-Reliance

The Montessori method has been associated with primary education but Reliance College, inspired by its principles, is due to open in 2024

Students participate in an architecture tour during one of Marsha Enright’s summer seminars, The Great Connections. From these seminars, the idea of a college was born. Courtesy of Marsha Enright

We hear a lot of negative news these days about the state of our colleges and universities: low-bar requirements for admission, the abandonment of such survey courses as literature and U.S. history, grade inflation, professors with a leftist agenda, censorship, and of course, ever-rising tuition and fees.

Less noted is the dramatic decline in liberal arts majors. Fewer than one in 10 students now pursue a degree in the humanities. Lump together philosophy, history, English literature, and foreign languages, and in 2020, less than 4 percent earned their bachelor’s in one of these fields.