Few of us know adults who attended Montessori schools and often wonder what the long term benefits might be.
In his article for the Harvard Business Review, Andrew McAfee, co-director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy in the MIT Sloan School of Management, asserts that Montessori builds innovators:
There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate.
So shouldn’t we be paying a great deal of attention to the educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there’s a “Montessori Mafia” among the creative elite. So maybe there’s something to the method Italian physician Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century.
Read more here.