According to the Wall Street Journal, a “Montessori Mafia” showed up in an extensive study about creative business executives.  This Montessori Mafia includes 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.

Is there something going on here?  Is there something about the Montessori approach that nurtures creativity and inventiveness?

By the end of kindergarten, among 5-year-olds, “Montessori students proved to be significantly better prepared for elementary school in reading and math skills than the non-Montessori children,” according to research published in Science.  “They also tested better on “executive function,” the ability to adapt to changing and more complex problems, an indicator of future school and life success.”

Montessori methods go against the grain.This quote from  Harvard Business Review captures the difference: “When I got too old for my Montessori school, and went to traditional school, I felt like I’d been sent to the Gulag:  I have to sit in this desk?  All day? We’re going to divide the day into hour-long chunks?  Am I on Candid Camera? Am I Job?”

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2018 at 11:31 am and is filed under Montessori Moments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.