The Montessori Mafia

“… the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia: Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper Sean ‘P.Diddy’ Combs.”
    — Wall Street Journal, April 2011

In April 2011 the Wall Street Journal’s Peter Sims published a provocative article in which he asked “Is there something about the Montessori approach that nur- tures creativity and inventiveness that we can all learn from?”

Here are a few of the answers he discovered:

Google Founder Larry Page:

“When Barbara Walters, who interviewed Google founders Messrs. Page and Brin in 2004, asked if having parents who were college professors was a major factor behind their success, they instead credited their early Montessori education. “We both went to Montessori school,” Mr. Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently.”

Will Wright, inventor of bestselling
“The Sims” videogame series

“Montessori taught me the joy of discovery,” Mr. Wright said, “It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori…”

Jeff Bezos, CEO and Founder of Amazon

According to Jeff Bezos’s mother, young Jeff would get so engrossed in his activities as a Montessori preschooler that
his teachers would literally have to pick him up out of his chair to go to the next task. “I’ve always felt that there’s a
certain kind of important pioneering that goes on from an inventor like Thomas Edison,” Mr. Bezos has said.

Read the full article: The Montessori Mafia

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