In the years following the pandemic, a venture-backed preschool chain called Guidepost Montessori raised $440 million on the promise that a century-old pedagogy could be scaled into a national institution — and then collapsed under the weight of that very ambition. The failure, which left families without schools and investors without returns, is less a story of wrongdoing than of a fundamental mismatch between the logic of rapid growth and the quiet, stubborn demands of caring for young children. It asks us, once again, to consider what we mean when we say something is too important to be lef