Jess Lin
Influential people who’ve had a Montessori education
We’ve long known kids going from preschool to elementary have a big edge coming out of Montessori schools. They’re better prepared for elementary school in reading and math skills than the non-Montessori children, and they were able to adapt and deal with changing, complex problems a study suggest ;
Children in Montessori preschools show improved academic performance and social understanding, while enjoying their school work more, shows a study in Frontiers in Psychology. Strikingly, children from low-income families, who typically don’t perform as well at school, were not disadvantaged in Montessori preschools, and showed similar academic performance compared with children from high-income families.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5670361/
Good preschool education is crucially important. During the first six years of life, our brains develop significantly, and many of these changes can be permanent, so ensuring that children get a good head start could help them for the rest of their lives
Below are some of the influential people who attended Montessori school as children:
Founders of Google - Larry Page & Sergey Brin, said, “ 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,” Page told the Christian Science Monitor.
They commented that their Montessori experience encouraged them to think
the freedom to develop their own interest. They said they learned how to be self-directed and self-starters at Montessori (ABC News, 2005).
The founder of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
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.”
Prince William and Prince Harry,English royal family - Both Prince William and Prince Harry earlier attended Montessori nurseries,
thanks to their mother, Princess Diana (who had worked as an assistant at a Montessori nursery before marrying the Prince of Wales).
Here are quite a number of famous and successful people who, in some form or another, have a Montessori connection. Check some interesting names below...
Katherine Graham, owner/editor of the Washington Post
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, editor, former first lady (John F. Kennedy)
Julia Child, famous chef, star of many TV cooking shows and author of numerous cookbook
Anne Frank, famous diarist from world war II
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winner for Literature
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Austrian painter and architect
George Clooney, Academy Award-winning actor
Joshua Bell, American violinist, owner of Stradivarius violin
Below are some of the famous people who chose Montessori schools for their own children:
John Bradshaw, psychologist and author
Dick Ebersol and Susan St. James, television executive and actress
Stephen J. Cannell, TV writer-producer-director (The Rockford Files and many others)
Willie Nelson, musician, has a Montessori school on his ranch
Cher Bono, singer-actress
Michael Douglas, actor
And below are others with some kind of Montessori Connection:
Alexander Graham Bell, noted inventor, provided financial support directly to Dr. Montessori. Helped establish the first Montessori class in Canada and one of the first in the United States
Thomas Edison, noted scientist and inventor, helped to found a Montessori school
Erik Erikson, anthropologist/author, had a Montessori teaching certificate
Jean Piaget, noted Swiss psychologist, made his first observations of children in a Montessori school.
Alice Waters, restaurateur and writer, is a former Montessori teacher
President Wilson’s daughter trained as a Montessori teacher. There was a Montessori classroom in the basement of the White House during Wilson’s presidency