Montessori and Charlotte Mason

This came up on another message board, so I read a couple of articles about the Montessori method and tried my hand at comparing MM and CM.

I've taken quotes from two Montessori articles (the quotes are highlighted in green) and commented on them. I hope those who have a firmer grasp of Montessori will correct me.
http://www.eaglespeak.org/curric/approach/mont
http://www.jmjpublishing.com/montessori_basics.htm

First of all, it looks like the goals of both MM and CM are the same:

"education, rather than being the rote transfer information, must seek to serve the whole child, and to nurture the human potential of each individual."

"The long-term aim of a Montessori education is to develop productive, culturally literate, life long learners who display a sense of responsibility for self and the global community. Through working in cooperation with the child's nature, it is believed that a sense of wonder and desire to learn can be maintained throughout an individual's lifetime."

CM agreed that the whole child - body, mind and spirit - needed to be included in his education. If education was handled correctly, a child should grow and develop to his full potential and enjoy continuing his education for his entire life.

"Her educational foundations have been tested and have survived because her ultimate goal was to preserve the dignity of the child. How can a child not thrive and learn in a prepared environment that emphasizes respect and integrity? A respect and integrity not only of the materials, but more importantly of the child, and of those with whom he interacts."

CM also placed respect for the child very high. She felt that education, twaddly books and insipid lectures, under-estimated the ability of children.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

"The basic philosophy of Montessori is to 'follow the child.' "

This is similar, yet very, very different. Both present learning opportunities and allow the child to take from it what appeals at the time. But my impression is that MM leans a little towards unschooling, or at least towards child-led schooling - you lay out the materials and the child chooses which of the materials he feels like learning from that day. You provide the opportunity, but the child doesn't have to take it unless he wants to. Or the child may take some and leave the rest. CM is similar, you provide lots of material (in books) and the child assimilates what he needs and discards the rest, he won't latch on to it in his mind, so it won't be in his narrations. The difference is, with CM, each child will be learning from the same materials, they won't be by-passing some books altogether in favor of another book. But each will get something different, a different twist, on the book, his own individual slant. I'm seeing some similarity to unschooling in MM, but I don't know if I'm getting that correct or not.

"In the Montessori environment the materials are designed to be self-correcting. ... it allows the child to learn in an atmosphere of success and positive reinforcement. The child corrects his own errors and works towards the mastery of concepts through repeated manipulations of the materials. His motivation is not for external reward, but for internal fulfillment."

CM also wanted learning to be its own reward. But the self-correcting aspect doesn't sound like anything CM mentioned. Her goal was for children to to educate themselves by learning to extract information from books themselves. So there's an element of independence in both MM and CM. But there, the similarity ends.

MM seems to rely heavily on environment:

"The basics of the Montessori principles can be illustrated with a triangle, where you have the child; you have the directress, or the teacher; and you have the environment which includes the materials. The teacher takes the role of directress, it's one who directs the child to learning. She is responsible for the preparation of the environment. The prepared environment is one that invites the child to grow. It's an attractive environment that will lead the child to a spontaneous exploration and discovery, or self-learning."

It seems like Montessori creates an artificial environment, even to using child-sized props, and Charlotte Mason thought it was better for the child to learn things in his own real environment with real things in the real world. Charlotte Mason didn't go out of her way to specially prepare an optimum environment for children to learn.

"The interrelated, hands-on, sequential Montessori materials provide concrete learning on which the child can build abstract understanding. They are designed to be self-correcting and teach one skill/concept at a time which encourages development of the individual's self-confidence and problem-solving abilities."

CM differs in that it doesn't really set apart specific skills for special focus so the child can develop mastery. CM is more of an all-over-at-the-same-time experience, the child would master skills as they came up in his daily routine - he'd learn to tie shoes because his shoes need to get tied every morning, but there's no special time or anything set aside during school to specifically encourage that. With MM, I get the sense that the child is encouraged to focus on a task to master it. CM also relies heavily on focusing attention, but the focus is more in the mind, attending to assimilation of information, especially from words. MM sounds much more hands-on. The articles talk about color-coding with phonics cards and household tasks, and, in geography, putting together map cut-outs. CM is more about reading about different places and getting a sense of what the people are like in that country, and then the child would be interested enough to go find the country on a map in a book.

What I'm seeing is that MM is more sensory, learning by doing. CM has that element, especially in handicrafts, but learning is primarily the assimilation of ideas (thoughts and concepts), which are processed in the child's mind from books, art, music and his natural environment. The senses seem to have a larger role in a Montessori education than in a CM education.