POSITIVE EXAMPLES OF THE MONTESSORI APPROACH

1. Google founders, Larry Page & Sergey Brin

Google ran one of its famous doodles in honor of Maria Montessori. No surprise, really. Both of the company's founders went to Montessori schools. 

In 2004, ABC's Barbara Walters asked Larry Page and Sergey Brin about the secret to their success. Both Mr. Page and Mr. Brin had college professors for parents. She wondered if that familiar connection to learning played into their success. They said no. Their parents helped, but really their Montessori education was the key. Brin and Page specifically pointed to the curriculum of self-directed learning – where students follow their interests and decide for themselves what they want to learn. 

"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 and doing things a little bit differently", says Page, who's now CEO of Google.

2. Jimmy Wales

If you want to learn more about Montessori – the woman or the teaching philosophy – you can always turn to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia run by Montessori graduate Jimmy Wales. 

"As a child, Wales was a keen reader with an acute intellectual curiosity and, in what he credits to the influence of the Montessori method on the school’s philosophy of education, 'spent lots of hours pouring [sic] over the Britannicas and World Book Encyclopedias,' " says Mr. Wales' own Wikipedia entry. "There were only four other children in Wales’ grade, so the school grouped together the first through fourth grade students and the fifth through eighth grade students."

3. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez credits many of his successes to his very own Montessori education, noting that before Montessori school, he struggled to read, and found the phonetic way of learning the sounds of letters extremely helpful. In a broader sense, Marquez believed that Montessori education was responsible for “making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.” We couldn’t agree more!