Montessori In Mountain View - How Italy's Famed Educator Shaped Silicon Valley
Exactly 100 years ago, the renowned Italian educator first landed in America with a method that pushes independent thinking. Today, the results are everywhere -- notably at Google HQ.
The
life stories of great people who have changed America can often be
traced back to a common starting point: a boat from Europe sailing into
the New York harbor with a salute toward the Statue of Liberty and an
obligatory passage with the immigration officials at Ellis Island.
But for an elegant Italian signora who arrived on the
Cincinnati yacht exactly 100 years ago, the landing told a different
story, with journalists and photographers awaiting her arrival on a
Manhattan pier.
In 1913, renowned Italian educator Maria Montessori received a
queen’s welcome, setting the groundwork for the future diffusion of her
pedagogical method throughout the United States. In no other country
have Montessori schools spread so widely or been so successful as they
have in the USA.
A century after that initial landing, entire generations of
“Montessori kids” have made a name for themselves in American society,
permeating it with the ideas of the teacher from the central Italian
town of Chiaravella. Among these well-known names, a large number of
Internet prodigies stand out: Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; Jimmy
Wales, creator of Wikipedia; and above all, Larry Page and Sergey Brin
who, from Mountain View in California, lead the digital incarnation of
the Montessori method: Google.
The road that leads from early 1900s New York to Silicon Valley
today has been shaped by the teachings of the studious Italian.
Montessori’s reputation preceded her, and over 100 schools inspired by
her methods had already sprung up across the country in the few years
before her first visit.
In an era when teaching was dominated by a rigid authoritarianism
emanating from the teacher’s desk, many Americans would wind up being
won over by Montessori’s ‘play’ pedagogy which provided space for
children’s innate creativity to emerge, acknowledging differences in
each child’s personality and rate of learning.
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, was one of the
first people to speak out in favor of the Montessori method: an
endorsement that appears to confirm that, a century before Amazon and
Google, it was a method that struck a chord with the imagination of
creators and inventors even then.
Upon her arrival in Manhattan, Maria Montessori found entire pages of
the New York Times dedicated to debates about her, with columnists and
readers divided between extravagant praise and severe criticism. The New
York Tribune defined her as “the most interesting woman in Europe,”
while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle presented her to their readers as the
woman who had "revolutionized the education system" across the world.
Montessori returned to the United States many times during the next two
years, and travelled extensively around the country, holding conferences
and training courses for those who wanted to apply her teaching
methods.
And yet, soon after, the enthusiasm died down and the Italian’s
critics, many of whom were followers of the influential John Dewey,
successfully attacked the foundations of her methodology.
By the time Montessori died in 1952, she had been almost completely
forgotten in the United States. Then, a decade later, school reform was
placed firmly back on the agenda and America launched itself into the
rediscovery of the Montessori method, and the number of schools
dedicated to her approach exploded.
When Montessori kids meet at Stanford
Today, of the 20,000 Montessori schools all over the world, more than
5,000 are in the United States. They are almost always private schools,
often rather expensive, and they conquer American parents’ hearts with
the originality of their approach: mixed-age classes, an emphasis on
experimentation and play, little time for marking and testing, and
strong encouragement to challenge the teachers and question everything.
And this is the fertile sandbox that gave life to Google.
Larry Page went to Montessori Radmoor in Okemos, Michigan; Sergey Brin
to Paint Branch Montessori in Adelphi, Maryland. When they met for the
first time at Stanford, they recognized each other straight away.
Marissa Mayer – one of Google’s first employees and now CEO of Yahoo!
– still tells, with a mixture of horror and admiration, how Larry and
Sergey seemed to compete at public events to see who could challenge
protocol the most. During a dinner at St James’s Palace in London, they
scandalized Prince Phillip by drinking the fruit coulis which was to be
served as a topping for the soufflé. When Mayer tried to explain how to
eat it correctly, the two founders replied, as they have done in many
other similar circumstances, with the proverbial Says who? "We're Montessori kids," Mayer recalled. "We've been trained and programmed to question authority."
Page and Brin told their favorite biographer, Steven Levy, how the
Montessori method influenced their choices when creating a company
different from any other. And also when it came to decorating. There can
be no doubt that the Mountain View Googleplex is a giant Montessori
nursery for adults, with colored pilates balls spread throughout,
fridges filled to the brim to satisfy any gastronomic desire, and paid
time-off to “invent things”. “Montessori really teaches you to do things
kind of on your own, at your own pace and schedule,” Brin told Levy.
Pointing to the Googleplex's pool tables and astronaut suits, he
adds: “It was a pretty fun, playful environment -- as is this." And
from this sunny campus, the two most famous Montessori kids in the world
continue to build a company worth $100 billion that has forever changed
America, and the lives of us all.
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