For one, all the people you mentioned were in preschool before the Montessori craze really took over in the States and all the ones the article mentioned besides Julia Child were later. And of course, you will never find 100% success in one method and 0% success in all others.

But the Montessori method is fascinating, and does have a few studies backing it. On a personal level as a Montessori kid, I know it definitely gave me a head start over many of my peers (by encouraging my math fascination, I was able to do long division before I entered kindergarten and my sister had a similar experience with reading) and a much more enjoyable/inspiring early education experience. There is no one true way, but I know I will personally place any of my children in Montessori.

I don't remember most of my Montessori school experience (other than making baked apples and learning how to wrap a sari), but I know that despite going to a very competitive and exclusive K-12 school afterward, I was one of only two kids in my kindergarten class who could already read. I used to sit in the back of the room and read during nap time.

I also vaguely remember having a head start on math as well, which allowed me to breeze through the math games during computer time and play more advanced games like Rocky's Boots (a game where you assemble logic gates). Like the "January-born hockey player" thing in Outliers, I feel that going to Montessori school may have possibly given me a compounding head start in my computer education. Either that or it just gave me an inflated ego.

I was born and raised until age 12 in an eastern European country, and I will tell you that I was shocked when I first set foot in an American classroom in 6th grade - they were learning "longhand" division, something I did in grade 2.

What I take away from your anecdote combined with my personal experience isn't that the Montessori system is really awesome or that European schools rock, but that the public education system in America is really terrible.

> I was shocked when I first set foot in an American classroom in 6th grade - they were learning "longhand" division, something I did in grade 2.

I attended an American public school in the suburbs of New York 20-some years ago, and I very clearly remember learning long division in second grade. I remember it because I missed that day, and the teacher told me to learn it from a friend, which didn't work out so well.

The real trouble with public education in the US is that funding is almost entirely a function of where the school is located. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods will generally be good, and schools is poor neighborhoods will be awful. It's an absurd system.

Wow, you all must be genuises or something.

I went to a decent primary school in Australia and spend a year ( out of phase, so put forward into the second half of Year 3 and then Year 4) in the US at age 8. The thing that threw me at this age, that was part of the natural progression in that stage, was 'subtract with carry' (I'm pretty sure that was it).

I was 'put forward' past this interesting tidbit in my US school, assessed on a test that was almost entirely centeres around it, found wanting, and placed in the lowest class in school with about 7 streams. Each test I moved up a class. All up they regarded it as a triumph of American education :-)

Neither of these schools was terrible, either, and both had 'subtract with carry' around year 3. That's a far cry from longhand division.

No-one at my kids current school is doing long division in Year 2, either, although I have creeping doubts about its rigor.

I am hoping this pace continued for all y'all, so that you were doing calculus in Year 7, and proving exotic conjectures by Erdős in your first or second year of university, etc. :-)

I don't know about exotic conjectures by Erdos (nice one, btw), but in elementary school I distinctly remember in second grade my dad ripped my He-Man comic books because I failed a test in my math class. After that, two things happened: 1) I studied really hard for my final end-of-year exam and remember that we were dealing with simple algebra with variables (e.g. x - 5 = 3, find x), and 2) I never read comic books since (sad, I know).

I was really lucky to have a good math teacher in middle school who introduced us to logic and induction in seventh grade (in hindsight, he prepared me for linear algebra in college, and I haven't even heard the words "modus ponens" since middle school until I got to college, second or third year).

Unfortunately, in high school I decided to coast a little bit on my previous knowledge, so I didn't get good grades, but I didn't read comic books anymore anyway, and my dad couldn't just rip the computer apart because he is a techie too :)

Edit: the seventh grade teacher is in the US, he taught "magnet" (gifted) classes. So, not all hope is lost in the US. Good teachers and good classes exist even in public schools, we just need to bring up the standard.

I genuinely don't have a horse in this race, but I am far from convinced that learning concepts sooner is a recipe for long-term win. In many cases, I think you just get to the same place sooner at much higher levels of effort.

I think the GP's isn't to discredit the Montessori method via counter-example, but rather to show that people have been successful long before the Montessori method came about (as you mentioned) and will continue to be successful and productive long after the craze has died down.

At the same time, just because someone went to a Montessori school doesn't automatically mean they will be a successful person. My wife worked in a Montessori school a while ago and I can't say that I agree with their method of teaching - and this is coming from a guy who went to LAUSD from grade 6 and up.