
Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos credit Montessori education as a major factor in their success - brlewis
http://www.michaelolaf.net/google.html
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farmer
Montessori schools seem ideal. But this looks like a bogus site. There's
practically no content here. He even has Larry & Sergey mixed up.

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vegashacker
Yeah, site looks totally bogus. Jeff Bezos is mentioned in the headline, but
not in the "article". The sentence structure is horrible. I think that the
part, "Having been friends since childhood ..." is supposed to mean that Larry
and Sergey were friends from childhood. If so, that's wrong, at least
according to Google: "Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of
each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in
computer science in 1995." (<http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html>)

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paul
Maybe the author considers grad school to be part of childhood :)

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zach
I've been reading Maria Montessori's "The Montessori Method" anthology and
it's been interesting to see how her "children's houses" were like startup
schools, err... schools that are like startups. The theory side is a little
hard for me to fully grok, but her insights into the mental world of children
are outstanding and the way she applies them quite interesting.

For the record, I went to a Montessori school for kindergarten and first
grade.

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fauigerzigerk
I had a very similar type of education. WHERE ARE MY $$$BILLIONS???

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mhartl
Ah yes, selection bias. In surveys of centenarians (people 100 years or
older), a surprising number of them credit their longevity to eating onions.
Now, onions are good for you, to be sure, but will they make you live to 100?
Yes---if you have good genes, do a bunch of other things right, and are
really, really lucky. And so it is with all these "multi-bazillionaires
attribute their success to X". Are they smart and savvy, with possibly unusual
backgrounds that give them an edge? Sure. But a bunch of other things have to
go right as well---and even then I hear that the _most_ successful people also
eat lots of onions.

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brlewis
As far as research that shows a causal relationship between X and success, all
we have that I know of is YC.

For research on the results of Montessori education, look here:

<http://www.montessori-ami.org/research/research.htm>

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Alex3917
I don't think you can really call Montessori school 'education.' The word
education comes from the latin e+ducere, meaning to be lead. The entire
concept of Montessori schools is that they're supposed to be an environment
for autodidacts.

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pg
The etymology of a word and its meaning are not identical.

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Alex3917
Although arguably the meaning of a word and its definition are also not
identical. (That is, words are defined as used, whereas the meaning is,
according to some, the impression the word creates in your mind.)

Personally I just hate the idea of being forcibly lead.

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ivankirigin
So does Will Wright <http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/146>

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greendestiny
Ok I'm really interested in Monterssori for my unborn child. So perhaps the
graduates here can help me out a bit. Why is it a frozen curriculum? I
appreciate Montessori made great improvements in teaching retarded children
but surely any methodology advances?

I guess you could say if it works why change it, but I'm suspicious of what
seems like dogma.

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jey
I don't understand why self-directed education stops so early. Why aren't
there high schools and colleges employing Maria Montessori's profound
insights?

I wish I had been lucky enough to attend a Montessori school as a kid. :-(

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nostrademons
There are, it's just that they're fairly rare and you need to know where to
look.

I went to a high school with very similar methods
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Charter_Essential_School...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Charter_Essential_School#Philosophy)),
though to my knowledge they were developed independently. And I do think that
whatever limited success I've achieved so far has been largely because of it.

On the college level, there's Hampshire.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College>.

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Jd
The evolution of my own methods has largely been due to my own self directed
education: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling>

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mattculbreth
Cool, we just signed up our son for Montessori. I can see the success already.

