Kritérion is proud to share a couple of articles that appeared in a leading San Antonio newspaper about the founders of this Montessori school.

Education Pioneers
The Lavens teach kids to absorb their surroundings.
by Keri Guten, Staff writer

Joh Laven retired his wooden shoes long ago, but he hasn't forgotten them. Even as he climbs the creaky steps of his mansion-turned-Montessori-school across from San Pedro Park, those wooden shoes are a reminder of the legacy of his Dutch upbringing.
"I came through World War II with one wooden shoe and a coverall," Laven says, recalling his 30-mile trek from his hideout in the woods back to Amsterdam after Canadian soldiers liberated Holland. "When that one shoe split, I thought,'Now what can happen?'"
Not even Laven could have predicted the role he'd play in bringing theMontessori method of education to this country. He and his wife Hanna started the second Montessori school in the country in Los Angeles in 1959 and the first school in Texas in San Antonio in 1962.
Laven, the oldest of 11 children, was born in 1919 in a watermill in Limburg, Holland, and raised in a farmhouse built by the Romans. In this near-medieval setting, he picked up the Montessori method by osmosis.
"I grew up seeing the blacksmith, the butcher, the baker, the miller all doing their things," he says in his strong Dutch accent. "An interest in people and what they were doing was natural. I am always studying things I run into. That's how I live; that's the Montessori approach."
By 1907, Montessori education was the rage in Europe. Maria Montessori's theory that children teach themselves by absorbing knowledge from their surroundings had spread from her native Italy to take firm hold in Holland, where Montessori's international headquarters is located.
Hanna embraced the Montessori philosophy before Laven. She was already a classroom teacher who discovered teaching the same lesson to 40 different children with 40 different minds did not make sense.
"My professors in college thought Montessori was nonsense," she says. "But I was frustrated because I couldn't do anything for the bright ones or for the not-so-bright ones. I was so elated with Montessori and its individual approach to learning that I went back to college for two more years of study. It helped me deal with all the things that turned me off in classical education."
Hanna was trained in Amsterdam by Elizabeth Kok, who had been trained by Maria Montessori herself. Kok became a beloved mentor and friend to both Lavens. Her likeness watches over nearly every classroom at the couple's Kritérion Montessori School in San Antonio.
Laven came to Montessori later in life, after the war interrupted his plans to become an architect.
The war was difficult for the Dutch in general and for the Lavens in particlar. They were introduced a few years before the war by Laven's sister, but the war years stretched their engagement to seven years. It also forced them to pursue their studies and interests on the sly- especially Laven, who was at the prime age for forced duty in the German army.
As the war worsened, Laven took part in the resistance movement, destroying records and smuggling downed Allied pilots out of the country.
Following the war, Laven was able to practice the knowledge he learned with both his head and his hands. As an architect, he helped restore two gutted luxury hotels; but he also worked in a furniture factory.
During this post-war period, Laven began his Montessori training with Kok. Before completing his certificate, his visa to the United States came through and he left for Los Angeles, where he found work as a carpenter and then a delivery man.
Hanna soon joined her husband in America with four children and the dream of starting a Montessori school in her own home. Two more "American" children were born before that dream came true.
The school became a reality when the Lavens met actor Tom Laughlin ("Billy Jack"), who had read about this country's first Montessori school in Whitby, Conn., and wanted his children to have this type of education in California. He secured sufficient financial backing and the Sophia School opened in Santa Monica in 1959 with imported Montessori equipment and two groups of children.
A media blitz spread the good word about Montessori, but trouble was around the corner. Laughlin began interjecting his notion of what Montessori was about and wanted things changed, but the Lavens stood firm.
"How can you improve on the method - we couldn't do that," Hanna says.
On a trip back from Amsterdam, Hanna stopped in San Antonio to speak to the local Montessori society. They had sent a representative to California to investigate the possibility of duplicating the Sphia School in San Antonio.
The Lavens were charmed by San Antonio and agreed to move there to set up the San Antonio Montessori School, the first in Texas. Working with architect Duane Landry, Laven designed a school that would become a standard for official Montessori schools around the world. That structure is now the original building at St. Mary's Hall school on Starcrest.
The Lavens were lured back to California briefly, but returned here more than 30 years ago to open the Kritérion Montessori School, now occupying two restored mansions on Ashby and serving several hundred children ages 2 to 14.
"It is harder in modern life. Everything is more pressured. Parents are aware of the necessity of education and they put pressure on their children, who become defensive toward school. We have to get them to feel good about what they are doing. The key is in finding what makes an individual child click, what gives him that insatiable thirst for knowledge," Laven said.

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Montessori stresses thirst for knowledge
by Keri Guten, Staff writer

The biggest difference between a traditional classroom and a Montessori classroom is freedom.
"When I talk about freedom, it is the freedom to learn, not to have a wild party," says Joh Laven, administrator, trainer and founder of the Kritérion Montessori School in San Antonio.
In classical classrooms, one teacher offers the same lesson to 35 different students with 35 different minds and interests. Homework is assigned; facts are memorized; tests are taken; and students are ranked according to test scores.
In a Montessori open classroom, students of different ages are viewed as individuals and encouraged to explore whatever subject triggers their thirst for knowledge. There are no tests; teachers gauge whether a child grasps a subject and is ready to move on.
Instead of standard textbooks, specially designed equipment - beads, colorful tokens, sandpaper letters on wooden slates - helps children see and feel abstract concepts such as math and allows understanding to come step by step at a pace comfortable to each individual.
"Children teach themslves." This was Maria Montessori's discovery as she worked with underprivileged children in the slums of Rome at the turn of the century.
Montessori, the first woman to earn a medical degree from an Italian university, was assigned to assess the physical needs of these "defective children." She designed materials and techniques that allowed the children to work in areas previously considered beyond their capacity.
Her greatest triumph came when her "defectives" passed the state examinations taken by normal children. Through her work she discovered that children teach themselves by absorbing knowledge from their surroundings.
Montessori died in 1952, but her work lives on in more than 3,000 schools established in this country since 1957. There are six Montessori-type schools in San Antonio. Although each school adheres to the basic Montessori tenets, they vary in the ways in which they apply them.
Global education is taught in these schools, Laven says. Students learn there are no loose subjects, that everything is tied to the total picture.
"A pencil is not just a pencil," Laven says. "You can trace that pencil back to the factory, then back to the forest. Then you can discuss why forests are in certain places and not in others. Every subject is related.
"A regular teacher has to unlearn everything. She uses her words as teaching methods. A Montessori teacher must know where to find answers and must present material so every child can use learning as an apparatus to build on the knowledge they already have."
Discipline, Laven says, is not a problem at a Montessori school.
"Once you get a child to concentrate on work they choose themselves, once they feel good about that work - why be rebellious? You don't rebel against your own choice."

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