Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos credit Montessori education as a major factor in their success | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos credit Montessori education as a major factor in their success

michaelolaf.net

23 pointsbrlewis22 comments

Montessori schools seem ideal. But this looks like a bogus site. There's practically no content here. He even has Larry & Sergey mixed up.

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)

Could this site be the result of a poorly paid PR firm for Montessori?

Also, the photos are currently mislabeled. (Brin and Page are reversed.) I expect the author will fix this at his own pace.

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

Yeah, I kind of agree. Site looks totally bizarre. Steven Levitt(freakonomics) has also mentioned somewhere that schooling and (obesseive)parenting are somewhat irrelevant in one's success (to some degree, at least).

I saw something in print about them last night and just googled "sergey larry montessori" today to find this page. There are other pages farther down the search results that seem better researched, but the basic idea is still that Montessori gave them freedom to explore interests.

One additional thing in another article is that Montessori let Sergey learn at his own pace, important when he was first learing English:

http://www.momentmag.com/Exclusive/2007/2007-02/200702-BrinF...

There's a 20-minute video here, with a synopsis that credits Montessori with inspiring the 20% time idea:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/118

Many pages repeat the "friends since childhood" line for whatever reason.

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.

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

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.

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

Yes, and then there's always the possibility of a third variable that causes both X and Y, and hence makes it appear as if X causes Y when in reality they are simply correlated. Oh my, statistics is a tricky affair :-)

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.

Teachers have a more active and leading role in Montessori education than in other non-traditional methods such as Summerhill. Montessori was described to me as a triangle with the student, the teacher, and the environment at the vertices.

See more here:

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2006-01

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

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.

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

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.

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. :-(

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...), 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.

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

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

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