It may seem like a laughable “only in New York” story that Manhattan
mother, Nicole Imprescia, is suing her 4-year-old daughter’s
untraditional private preschool for failing to prepare her for a private
school admissions exam.
But her daughter’s future and ours might be much brighter with a
little less conditioning to perform well on tests and more encouragement
to discover as they teach in Montessori schools. Ironically, the
Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the
creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni
that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia: Google’s founders Larry Page
and Sergei Brin, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, videogame pioneer Will Wright, and
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, not to mention Julia Child and rapper
Sean “P.Diddy” Combs.
Is there something going on here? Is there something about the
Montessori approach that nurtures creativity and inventiveness that we
can all learn from?
After all, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were famous life-long
tinkerers, who discovered new ways of doing things by constantly
improvising, experimenting, failing, and retesting. Above all they were
voraciously inquisitive learners.
The Montessori learning method, founded by Maria Montessori,
emphasizes a collaborative environment without grades or tests,
multi-aged classrooms, as well as self-directed learning and discovery
for long blocks of time, primarily for young children ages 2 1/2 to 7.
The Montessori Mafia showed up in an extensive, six-year study about
the way creative business executives think. Professors Jeffrey Dyer of
Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of globe-spanning business
school INSEAD surveyed over 3,000 executives and interviewed 500 people
who had either started innovative companies or invented new products.
“A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori
schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity,” Mr. Gregersen
said. “To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only
learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk
different).”
When Barbara Walters, who interviewed Google founders Messrs. Page
and Brin in 2004, asked if having parents who were college professors
was a major factor behind their success, they instead credited their
early Montessori education. “We both went to Montessori school,” Mr. Page said,
“and 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, doing things a little bit differently.”
Will Wright, inventor of bestselling “The Sims” videogame series,
heaps similar praise. “Montessori taught me the joy of discovery,” Mr. Wright said,
“It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher
explaining stuff to you. SimCity comes right out of Montessori…”
Meanwhile, 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. “I’ve always felt that there’s a certain kind of
important pioneering that goes on from an inventor like Thomas Edison,”
Mr. Bezos has said, and that discovery mentality is precisely the environment that Montessori seeks to create.
Neuroscience author Jonah Lehrer cites a 2006 study
published in Science that compared the educational achievement
performance of low-income Milwaukee children who attended Montessori
schools versus children who attended a variety of other preschools, as
determined by a lottery.
By the end of kindergarten, among 5-year-olds, “Montessori students
proved to be significantly better prepared for elementary school in
reading and math skills than the non-Montessori children,” according to
the researchers. “They also tested better on “executive function,” the
ability to adapt to changing and more complex problems, an indicator of
future school and life success.”
Of course, Montessori methods go against the grain of traditional
educational methods. We are given very little opportunity, for
instance, to perform our own, original experiments, and there is also
little or no margin for failure or mistakes. We are judged primarily on
getting answers right. There is much less emphasis on developing our
creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run
imaginatively and to discover things on our own.
But most highly creative achievers don’t begin with brilliant ideas, they discover them.
Google, for instance, didn’t begin as a brilliant vision, but as a project to improve library searches,
followed by a series of small discoveries that unlocked a revolutionary
business model. Larry Page and Sergei Brin didn’t begin with an
ingenious idea. But they certainly discovered one.
Similarly, Amazon’s culture breathes experimentation and discovery.
Mr. Bezos often compares Amazon’s strategy of developing ideas in new
markets to “planting seeds” or “going down blind alleys.” Amazon’s
executives learn and uncover opportunities as they go. Many efforts
turn out to be dead ends, Mr. Bezos has said, “But every once in a
while, you go down an alley and it opens up into this huge, broad
avenue.”
Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Montessori alumni lead two of
the world’s most innovative companies. Or perhaps the Montessori Mafia
of can provide lessons for us all even though it’s too late for most of
us to attend Montessori.
We can change the way we’ve been trained to think. That begins in
small, achievable ways, with increased experimentation and
inquisitiveness. Those who work with Mr. Bezos, for example, find his
ability to ask “why not?” or “what if?” as much as “why?” to be one of
his most advantageous qualities. Questions are the new answers.
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