That being said, I see correlation here, not causation.
To be a little bit tongue and cheek, I could write the headline:
"99% of successful people do not attend Montessori schools"
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5795/1893.full?ijkey=3...
Although they reference the study in a really odd way: "Neuroscience author Jonah Lehrer cites a 2006 study published in Science that ..."
What does Jonah Lehrer have to do with the study? AFAICT absolutely nothing. He appears to be a contributor to the WSJ, but he didn't write the study. And none of the links they present are even to the article where he apparently cites this study. I have no idea why he's mentioned here.
Tangent aside, I think that's the real meat.
"The creative elite" -> "so overrepresented" -> list of five names in tech, one rapper, one 20th Century culinary master
I stopped taking the article seriously at this point.
a)Taking your kid out of public school and
b)Encourage your kid to do things he finds interesting with you at home and take him to museums and crap
True, it requires a mostly unemployed parent, but Montessori has just discovered how kids learn naturally at a young age. Just like a kid learns a language without having to be formally taught, he learns other things without formal education as well. The older years it's a different story, but there's really no need to pay a ton of money for a Montessori pre-school. Any parent can do it.
While parents can certainly homeschool, you can't claim it's an equal substitute for Montessori education.
Even if we can agree standard education is bad, that doesn't make everything else good by default. Including just "let your kid do things he finds interesting and take him to museums and crap".
But to try to extend that to say that almost anything BUT standard school is good puts a huge burden of proof on the original poster.
If a>b, it doesn't automatically make c-z better than b too.
Montessori's method is centered on structured, self-directed individual activities with materials prepared to focus children's attention on one or another particular skill considered important. Traditionally, it does not involve "doing things with you", "museums and crap", or just "doing things [one] finds interesting".
Yeah, but it's easier to shift the responsibility to other, more "professional-looking" people, especially if you have the money to do that.
Which doesn't mean that I don't agree with you. One of my first childhood memories is of my father teaching me the letters of the alphabet, when I was 4 or so. He was on a lunch-break, I remember that, he worked on a construction site. After that it was easy to learn to read by myself at about 5, one day I just opened a kids' book and, as I had already knew what those letters meant, it was easy to start reading. He also taught me the first words and expressions in French ("ceci est une pipe" and all that), when I was 8 or 9. Nothing too fancy, he just taught me how to pronounce the words in French and we read a couple of simple phrases out-loud. That gave me a huge advantage over my school-colleagues a couple of years later, when we started to learn French in school.
It also mattered a lot for me that my parents' house was full of books, and the fact that I saw my father reading each and every day.
I have two friends who have experience with Montessori, and like you, I'll put together funds to get my future kids in there some day.
One of my friends is an Aikidoka. He had started hanging out with some folks who turned out to operate a Montessori school. They liked him enough that they invited him to teach there -- more to expose the kids to different ideas. My friend tells me that there is a selection process involved for the kids, and not all kids can get in. They'd put them in the environment and see how they acted. My friend and those operators are pitching Aikido to the national board as a form of conflict resolution. Which, if you know anything about Aikido, is remarkable.
The other friend is the only old man I know who says things like, "I can't wait to see what will happen", and "Using predictive modeling is like driving by looking at the rear view mirror." Most old people I know are quietly staring at death looming in the future. This guy put his son through Montessori. His grandson is now in Montessori, though the daughter-in-law objected at first.
From the comments from these two, from the smattering of articles I've read about them, the key behavioral patterning related to startup is the development of gumption. That is, instead of using external reward-punishment and coloring-inside-the-approved-lines, these kids go out and do what they want, using their own internal sense of right and wrong. It's something I've been hacking my own mind with much of my adult life -- through things like playing Go. Does this guarantee these a Montessori grad to be wildly successful at building out a startup? No. But it will save a lot of misery from twisting yourself, cringing from Authority or staying trapped in a losing situation (a la Gervais Principle).
That is way better than recruiting Tiger Moms and Dragon Ladies.