We do not push children here Deborah Jackson puts forward a new motto for all Montessori schools.

Some while ago I took a friend to visit her first Montessori school. It was operating in cramped conditions while waiting for planning permission to be granted for more spacious premises. But the atmosphere inside those two temporary rooms was exemplary Montessori.

There was little elbow room for either children or staff, who shared their space with computer equipment and a rabbit. Despite the confinement, all the usual Montessori areas were neatly arranged. Every inch of the floor was used with children working on mats as well as tables.

I felt immediately at home in this familiar, creative classroom. But my friend was perturbed. As we left, she confessed she found the children's concentrated activity unnerving. "It doesn't seem natural for them all to be so quiet" she said. "And where do they run around?"

Of course, the luxury of running around outdoors would come with the move to a new site. But in the meanwhile, the children had adopted to the demands of a difficult working environment and were getting on with it.

I agreed with my friend that it would be unnatural for children to work so diligently, so intently, so quietly, if their manner of working were forced upon them. But, I explained, the apparent seriousness of the Montessori classroom is not achieved by a dictatorial regime imposed from above. It emanates from the children themselves.

Indeed, working in something like crisis conditions, this was the only way the school could survive. Imagine trying to impose artificial rules of silence and obedience on twenty small children in an overcrowded room, without a hint of rebellion.

As a parent, the best analogy of imposed control I can offer is what I call the party-effect: cram ten or more youngsters into a living room and organise them into having unmitigated fun for two hours or more. Sooner or later someone is in tears, and more often than not, it's me.

This is one of the ironies of modern parenting and education - we often practice them in small spaces, and yet expect to maintain a high level of control. I don't believe it's possible to organise and control children for very long without suppressing their natural energies. But given the right environment and a measure of independence, children are able to organise themselves.

The atmosphere of seriousness which my friend detected is typical of Montessori classrooms, although the intensity of the work does not mean there is an absence of joy or fun. And while my friend was bewildered by what she saw most parents do not find a class of quietly concentrating children offputting at all.

Consider what many parents are looking for when they select a nursery or pre-school for their children. Playgroups are commonly perceived as a place where children will be 'minded' rather than 'educated'. Some parents choose them for their freeplay and socialising opportunities.

Montessori schools offer much more than a minding service. But while they present the child with a new kind of freedom few parents select Montessori for the way that it frees or empowers the child. What the parent notices are shelves that are neat and tidy, children who are polite, an atmosphere of concentrated work, and the possibility of learning to read, write and count before the age of five.

Some parents will have heard of the 'work' which a Montessori classroom encourages from the start, and many prefer the word 'work' to the word 'play'. Parents talk amongst themselves of astounding 'results' and of the superiority of Montessori children over their peers when they start state or prep school. Occasionally the Montessori approach is referred to as 'scientific', which fathers find particularly appealing.

For the very reasons that my friend was suspicious of the Montessori classroom, Most parents are attracted to it. And what I have found, in talking to parents and staff of Montessori schools around the country, is that many parents have completely the wrong idea.

The true spirit of a Montessori school has nothing to do with pre-set goals like learning to read by a certain age. The organisation of a Montessori classroom may appear to be for the convenience of the adults in controlling the space, but as we know, it is arranged entirely for the convenience of the child. Even the air of seriousness is not an imposed effect, but the consequence of children's inner peace and tranquillity.

Parents sometimes choose Montessori education for its "product". The want to be able to hold up their children and say "look what I made". They are unimpressed by the fact that children are all the time busy making themselves. They rarely value the often invisible process of discovery which they cannot quantify or show to the neighbours.

What occurs next is a conflict of misunderstanding between parent and school. It must be hard for a school principal to respond to prospective parents who only wish to hear about reading targets and codes of discipline. It must be difficult to describe the Montessori ideal of observation rather than coercion; the importance of the child developing at his own pace; the way that the child is his own teacher.

But if the spirit of Montessori is not promoted from the first it becomes increasingly tough to break it to parents that in sending their child to a Montessori school, they have not necessarily purchased a passport to academic excellence. That is why I am sometimes asked, as an outsider, to come and talk to parents about my view of Montessori.

I tell them, of course, that their academic expectations for their children may indeed be met in a Montessori classroom. Montessori-trained children often do go on to write and, later, read well ahead of their peers. But this is not the point.

Parents sometimes shuffle in their seats when they hear the virtues of the three Rs set aside in favour of something called "the work", which sounds suspiciously spontaneous and enjoyable. They wonder what Montessori could possible have meant when she talked about the teacher "without a desk, without authority, almost without teaching" and they express anxiety about an environment so conducive to a child's enthusiasm for learning, that the real world is bound to fail by comparison.

I have met parents whose children must sit pre-prep exams at the ages of three and four. They have chosen a Montessori school not in order to get away from the invasive, disruptive nature of testing, but to prepare them for it. Often the school principal will tell me of a nervous three-year-old who sits at his desk like a beleaguered old man in a dead-end job. Already he has learned the tedium and tension which attends some parents in their daily work.

Even the mere act of arriving at school can be fraught when we grown-ups sometimes set our sights on a range of acceptable behaviours for the child, and then imagine we can enforce these by scalding or nagging. Children are often threatened until they enter the classroom in fear rather than a state of open enquiry.

At going-home time, the child's self-motivated day may quickly come to an end. Parents may fail to greet their children before badgering them about what they did, how far they got, whom they sat with and was it all great fun? They they refuse to let the child out of the door until he has performed the appropriate rites of gratitude and farewell.

In short, the modern parent finds it difficult to leave the child alone. Many staff complain that this is the single greatest obstacle to employing the lessons they learnt during their Montessori training. The pushiness of some parents, they say, interferes with the child's natural love of learning.

Because of the stereotyped image of Montessori education, the directress may feel herself under more pressure than the average nursery nurse or play worker. So what does she do? The temptation is to turn her school into the kind of hothouse many parents dream of. It should not be difficult: the equipment is there, the parents will support her - all she needs is the co-operation of the child.

She, too, starts to visualise the ideal classroom as a place where the children work in a controlled way, and silence is achieved by constant reminders. She begins to mistrust the child's ability to work quietly by himself, and so increases group activities, such as art, cookery and taking the children to the toilet. What a nuisance that the children seem to resent the erosion of their independence. They seem increasingly hard to handle.

She starts to set targets for certain children to achieve, in number work, reading and writing. She feels herself to be elevated to the position of teacher and guardian of the Montessori reputation. Reputation, note - not the Montessori spirit but the false notion of what Montessori means to the most demanding of her parents.

So the hierarchy is swiftly changed. Instead of looking first at the child, and allowing his needs to dictate the route of leaning, we all look to the parent, the one who pays the bills, to determine how children must be educated.

When we carry in our heads a notion of what a classroom ought to be, and allow our expectations to become our goal then we begin to exert pressure on the child. No longer is the Montessori classroom a haven for hassled children.

Children, on the whole, will tolerate an authoritarian environment, but that is not what Montessori had in mind. The modern child has enough authority to cope with with at home where he may be nagged, judged and pushed all day, to the extra-curricular round of activities which starts as soon as he can toddle. Many children attending a Montessori nursery are also ferried to some kind of gym class, swimming and maybe a fledgling music lesson or two. After school hours, they may be seen running in a park or making bread with mummy, but these two events are becoming less likely. Instead, the child sits in front of the television, another authority of a kind, with all the passivity this entails.

So, every time a Montessori school tries to meet the needs of pushy parents, instead of their children, it panders to the modern malaise. Parents pressure their children because they feel pressured themselves. It is all too easy for schools to get caught up in the anxiety, with the child as the unfortunate focus of our neurotic efforts. I believe it is the responsibility of the Montessori school to disentangle itself from the spiral of intrusion into the inner life of the child.

Peter Dixon, a senior lecturer in teacher training at King Alfred's College in Winchester has inspirational ideas about the role of the adult who works with under-fives. He points out how ridiculous it is for playworkers and teachers to make paper Father Christmases on behalf of three-year-olds so that parents can take them home and pin them up, and pretend their children made them. The only parson who isn't fooled is the child himself.

"People who work with children," says Dixon, "have to be able to stand up and speak for the three and four-year-olds. They are not entertainers, they are educators. They have to say: 'This is who children are and this is what they need to be doing. We do not push children here.' That might serve as a useful motto for many a Montessori school.

Deborah Jackson is author of Do Not Disturb - The Benefits of Relaxed Parenting published by Bloomsbury