David Blaine was a four-year-old Montessori student when he fell in love with magic.
Katherine Graham is a Pulitzer prize-winning author and former owner & editor of the Washington Post.
When a crisis forced Ms Graham to assume control of the Washington Post, her confidence faltered, but remembering that what matters is how people learn, not what they know—Graham said, “The Montessori method, learning by doing, once again became my stock in trade.” Her reign at the highly-regarded paper lasted more than two decades.
“Montessori taught me the joy of discovery,” Will Wright, creator of The Sims, told The Wall Street Journal. “It showed you can become interested in pretty complex theories, like Pythagorean theory, say, by playing with blocks. It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori.”
Julia Child credits her Montessori education for her manual dexterity (a key feature of her ability as a chef), and for the love and joy she found in her craft.
Taylor Swift, country music’s youngest-ever Entertainer of the Year, attended Alvernia Montessori School in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
Erik Erikson, developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst, was a certified Montessori teacher.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser attended a Montessori school in Vienna, which influenced both his affinity for vibrant colors and respect of nature. He collected pebbles and pressed flowers as a child, demonstrating an interest in items that are precious and small at an early age, which later manifested itself in his collections of Venetian glass and Japanese fabrics.
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi stated: “If we are to achieve real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with children”; however, what might not be well known is that he spoke these words at a Montessori Teacher Training Center in 1931 as a reference to a statement made by Maria Montessori.
Ghandi was a great admirer of Dr Montessori’s ‘peace education’ which is seamlessly integrated into the overall Montessori Method.
Willie Nelson has a Montessori
school on his ranch.
President Woodrow Wilson had a Montessori
classroom installed in the basement of the White House
during his presidency. His daughter Margaret trained as a Montessori teacher.
Jeff Bezos attended a Montessori school in Albuquerque, New Mexico when he was young. Later, he founded the online retail behemoth Amazon.
According to his mother Jacklyn, Jeff got so immersed in the details of the activities at his Montessori school that teachers had to pick him up in his chair to transfer him to other new tasks.
John Bradshaw served on the National Board of Directors of The International Montessori Society from 1990 to 2016.
Dr T. Berry Brazelton, paediatrician, child psychiatrist, author and Harvard medical school professor emeritus . His positive, child-oriented philosophy of parenting has influenced countless families to raise children who are “confident, caring, and hungry to learn”.
Dr Brazelton attended a Montessori school as a child and is a supporter of the Montessori philosophy through his lectures and publications.
Alexander Graham Bell and his wife, Mabel Gardiner Hubbard Bell, invited Dr Montessori to America to help them establish Montessori Education in America. The Bells started one of the first Montessori schools in the parlour of their home. Mabel Bell, who was deaf, was one of the teachers.
Maria Montessori said that if, deaf and blind, Helen Keller became “a woman and writer of exceptional culture, who better than she proves the potency of the Montessori method?” In her tribute to Montessori, Helen’s teacher Anne Sullivan observed, “Only through freedom can people develop self control, self dependence, willpower and initiative. This is the lesson Helen’s education has for the world.”
Dakota Fanning attended a Montessori school in Georgia. Her family then moved to California so that she could pursue an acting career.
Her few years in a Montessori environment gave Ms. Fanning an impressive point of pride: “I learned to read at two,” she told About.com. “I was in a Montessori school and they teach you to read really, really young.”
Thomas Edison helped found a Montessori school.
“I like the Montessori method. It teaches through play. It makes learning a pleasure. It follows the natural instincts of the human being. The present system casts the brain into a mold. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning.”
Tana Ramsay, wife of chef Gordon Ramsay is a Montessori teacher.
Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist noted for his work on child development, made his first observations of children in a Montessori school. He was head of the Swiss Montessori Society for many years.
As a child, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis attended Miss Chapin’s School for Girls in Manhattan. Miss Chapin was a pioneer in education for girls; she attended Dr Montessori’s New York lectures in the 1930s and enthusiastically included Montessori methods in her classrooms.
In Houston, at St. Mary of the Purification Montessori, Beyoncé’s talents first emerged.
Sergey Brin stated in an interview that his Montessori education was the key to his success. Brin specifically pointed to the curriculum of self-directed learning – where students follow their interests and decide for themselves what they want to learn.
Henry Ford was an advocate of the Montessori education system.
Gabriel García Márquez said his Montessori school gave him “the desire to kiss literature” and states, “I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.”
Chelsea Clinton, writer, health advocate and daughter of former President William “Bill” Clinton and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, attended a Montessori School.
Sigmund Freud was a contemporary of Dr Montessori and promoted her work.
Bill Gates attended a Montessori school in his early years.
Peter Drucker wrote: “For thousands of years people have been talking about improving teaching — to no avail. It was not until the early years of this century, however, that an educator asked, “What is the end product?” Then the answer was obvious: It is not teaching. It is, of course, learning. And then the same educator, the great Italian doctor and teacher Maria Montessori (1870-1952), began to apply systematic analysis of the work and systematic integration of the parts into a process.
Alice Waters, chef, restaurateur, and writer, is a former Montessori teacher.
Stephen Curry credits Montessori with instilling in him the skills to learn at his own pace as well as to harness his strengths, work on his weaknesses, and develop a sense that he could achieve anything. “Montessori gave me a lot of confidence at a young age,” says Curry. “I used to love it when I’d come to school because there was something new I was going to learn every single day.”
Anthony Doerr, American author, was once a Montessori student. In an interview with his former school, Post Oak in Houston he said “Of all the skills, nine years of Montessori education gave me critical thinking skills, social skills, and kickball skills. The most lasting has been a sense of my place in deep geologic time. We were making twenty-foot-long timelines as early as first grade. I could spell Paleozoic before I could spell Coca-Cola.”
Anne Frank, the World War II diarist went to a Montessori school while living in Amsterdam.
Her diary is a natural extension of her school experience. She, like all Montessori students, learned to cultivate observation skills and record her thoughts in a journal.
Diary of a Young Girl has been translated into 67 languages and is one of the best-loved books in the world.
According to her friend Hanneli Goslar, Anne showed aptitude for reading and writing at an early age. a talent that was nurtured in her Montessori school. She frequently wrote at school, and was outspoken, energetic, and extroverted, telling all, from a young age, that one day she wanted to be a published author.
In 2002, Devi Sridhar became the youngest Rhodes Scholar in the program’s 100-year history. Interested in health as a young person, she now directs CEG’s global health governance project. Devi is a former Montessorian.
Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, has stated he feels fortunate to have attended a Montessori school early on, recalling that, “I feel like I was nurtured into wanting to be somebody special.”
Larry Page, Co-Founder and CEO of Google, remarked on his Montessori schooling experience “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.”
