We are remarkably patient when children get maths wrong. We are often far less patient when they get people wrong.
A child can miscount, reverse a number, misunderstand a mathematical concept or arrive confidently at completely the wrong answer, and we understand what we are looking at: learning.
We don’t expect mastery before experience. We expect mistakes, repetition, practice, guidance and gradual understanding.
But when the thing a child is learning is how to live alongside other human beings, our expectations can become strangely different.
So, how do our children learn mathematical skills?
That seems like an obvious question. They are first exposed to concepts, then they practise them, alone, alongside others and with the support of adults, and gradually they absorb the ideas and begin to apply them more generally.
Counting is a good example. At first, “one, two, three” means these three things in front of me. Later, number becomes an abstract idea that can be applied to almost anything. Eventually, mathematical thinking becomes one of the many strategies a child has for making sense of the world.
We understand that this takes time.
We understand that children will make mistakes. We understand that some will grasp a concept almost immediately while another child might need to encounter it dozens of times, in dozens of different ways. We don’t conclude that the child who gets a sum wrong is somehow unsuited to mathematics. We guide. We model. We practise. We adjust. We try again.
So why do we sometimes struggle to acknowledge that exactly the same is true of learning to socialise?
We somehow expect young children to spend whole days together, managing their emotions, bodies, impulses, friendships, disappointments, disagreements, boundaries and desires without insult or harm to anyone. Yet they have barely set foot on the planet, never mind had the lifetime of practice that we, as adults, have been privileged to accumulate.
Once again, we find ourselves asking: what is the purpose of school?
Parents quite rightly expect that when their child comes to school, they will learn numeracy, literacy and all sorts of other tools for navigating the world.
Well, what about learning how to live with other people?
Just as putting children in a room with numbers will not help them understand mathematics, putting children together and hoping for the best does not facilitate social development.
Social development has to be nurtured, supported, observed and practised.
I would argue that the development of the social being is one of the most important aspects of our work as educators. When children are increasingly able to interact successfully, listen and respond to one another, negotiate disagreement and feel safe enough to play and explore, so much other learning becomes possible.
We are a social species. The ability to form relationships, negotiate differences, repair ruptures and find our place within a community is not an optional extra to education.
And these abilities do not simply appear.
So what does nurturing social development actually look like?
Sometimes it is very explicit. We give children language for situations they do not yet know how to navigate: Can I join you? I don’t like that. Please give me some space. Can I have a turn when you’re finished? Can we start again? We help them notice other people’s responses, understand that “stop” means stop, recognise boundaries and find ways to communicate their own.
At other times our work is less visible. We observe. We choose groups carefully. We change the environment, reduce pressure, offer movement or create quieter spaces. We stay close to a child who needs more help reading a situation and step back as their confidence and competence grow.
We also help children understand what is happening inside themselves. A hot face, a tight chest or an overwhelming urge to shout, push or run can gradually become information they can recognise and respond to.
Because anger isn’t bad. Neither are frustration, jealousy, disappointment, embarrassment or irritation. They are part of being human.
In our Montessori setting, we have an entire approach dedicated to supporting children’s growing social abilities. It sits at the foundation of our pedagogy and is part of the reason Montessori education is described as education for peace.
That does not mean creating an artificial quiet in which nobody argues.
It is work towards a far loftier ideal: that human beings can learn to live peacefully together while experiencing the whole range of healthy human emotions.
Anger can be harnessed and channelled into action. Frustration, when reflected upon, can tell us a great deal about our boundaries, expectations and tolerance. Conflict can show us something about another person’s experience that we had not previously understood.
Peace is not the absence of difficult feelings.
It is developing the capacity to experience those feelings without allowing them to govern everything we do next.
When a child gets a mathematical problem wrong, we foster an attitude that mistakes are part of learning. We pause, reconsider and try again. This is resilience.
Social learning requires exactly the same generosity.
Children will sometimes get it wrong. They may misunderstand a situation, become overwhelmed, misjudge somebody’s boundaries or want a friendship without yet knowing how to create one successfully.
Our job is neither to pretend these behaviours don’t matter nor to define the child by them.
Our job is to guide, nurture and support their development.
Of course, supporting social development does not mean that other children must tolerate being repeatedly hurt, frightened or overwhelmed. Part of building a peaceful community is protecting boundaries. We intervene when necessary, provide closer supervision, change arrangements and give children space.
Safety and inclusion are not opposing ideas. Keeping one child safe and helping another child learn how to be safe with others are both parts of the same work.
And some children need much more help with this than others.
Just as some children understand mathematical concepts remarkably quickly, some seem socially fluent from an early age. Others need time, repetition, careful guidance, modelling, supervision and many opportunities to try again. Things that appear instinctive to one child can represent enormously sophisticated social learning for another.
This is where pedagogical skill matters.
We use Grace and Courtesy lessons, stories, modelling, observation and restorative conversations. We revisit interactions when children are calm enough to reflect. We help them consider another person’s experience and understand that repair is something much richer than extracting a compulsory “sorry”.
We protect space for children who need it too. Sometimes the most socially responsible thing a child can learn is to recognise, I’ve had enough people for now. A quiet corner, time outside, purposeful physical work or a little distance from a group can be exactly what is needed when a child’s social battery is drained. Regulation is not exclusion from the community; often it is what enables successful return to it.
And then there is one of the most important things we can help a child discover: what it feels like to be liked.
To know that other people enjoy having you around. To begin to recognise which of your actions draw people towards you and which push them away. To discover that you can contribute something to a friendship or a community and, crucially, that you can get something wrong, repair it, change what you do next and still belong.
That is powerful learning.
Children live wonderfully in the present, and this can help enormously. Yesterday’s disastrous interaction does not have to become today’s identity. A child who struggled yesterday gets another opportunity today.
We resist fixing children into roles: the difficult one, the aggressive one, the shy one, the bossy one, the sensitive one, the child nobody wants to play with.
Children are developing. Their social selves are under construction.
If education is preparation for life, I believe this is education in its most fundamental form.
I want our children to read, to calculate and to understand science, history, art and the extraordinary world around them. But I also want them to be able to live alongside people who are different from them; to manage disagreement, respect boundaries, recognise when they have caused hurt and repair relationships when things go wrong.
I want them to learn how to make room for somebody who finds all of this harder than they do, and to trust that when they are the person finding it hard, their community will make room for them too.
None of this is separate from education at all.
It is the foundation, the starting block and the journey.