Montessori In Mountain View
By Marco Bardazzi, La Stampa
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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment