"When Barbara Walters, who interviewed Google founders Messrs. Page and Brin in 2004, asked if having parents who were college professors was a major factor behind their success, they instead credited their early Montessori education"
Ahem. I spy a latent variable in this correlation. Can you find it?
Hint: Montessori education may or may not have advantages. But unless you control for educational background and income of the family, your analysis has a problem.
"Montessori education may or may not have advantages. But unless you control for educational background and income of the family, your analysis has a problem."
This WAS controlled for. Correct analysis WAS done, peer reviewed, and published.
It's a shame this is so highly upvoted. Pointing out that correlation does not equal causation is the very first most obvious criticism to make of a finding, but don't sail in with that criticism until you've made sure that causation wasn't actually suggested by legitimate research.
"It's a shame this is so highly upvoted. Pointing out that correlation does not equal causation is the very first most obvious criticism to make of a finding"
What a shame.
The Science paper cited at the bottom of this article found that Montessori kids from one school in Wisconsin had slightly better performance on some kinds of academic tests. The story's "finding" is that Montessori kids are overrepresented amongst the creative/business/economic elite. Clearly, one follows from the other, right?
But yes, let's talk about the up-voting of comments that sound approximately correct, but actually aren't.
I think the dispute here isn't so much whether or not Montessori education has or doesn't have advantages, rather it's the confirmation bias inherent in finding famous people who had a Montessori education and then using them to hint that their success is primarily due to their education.
See for example statements from the article like "perhaps it’s just a coincidence that Montessori alumni lead two of the world’s most innovative companies...". To which I would say, yes, it almost certainly is coincidence. Look at the (non-Montessori educated) leaders of pretty much every other company in the world as counterexamples.
The description of Jeff Bezos's behaviour makes it sound like he was an exceptional example of children in that system (unless Montessori teachers routinely have to pick kids out of their chairs), so probably not a good example of typical results from that system.
I have a hard time believing that. Around here, Montessori schools are private and expensive. These school are all established is wealthy neighborhoods, so even if you forget that they are expensive, you still need a pretty good income to live in a place where it is convenient to get your kids to school everyday or be willing to go through important sacrifices for your children's education.
This is exactly right. I suspect that the parents of people who attend Montessori schools are more educated than average to begin with.
Go into an inner city Los Angeles elementary, and I guarantee you the great majority of parents wont have even heard of the name.
TL;DR: the parents of people who care enough about their education to enroll them in a montessori school, would have probably turned out pretty bright kids regardless.
On several dimensions, children at a public inner city Montessori school
had superior outcomes relative to a sample of Montessori applicants who,
because of a random lottery, attended other schools. By the end of
kindergarten, the Montessori children performed better on standardized
tests of reading and math, engaged in more positive interaction on
the playground, and showed more advanced social cognition and
executive control.
TL;DR: Montessori kids turn out better on many measures when controlling for "bright parents".
I understand that research into something as complicated as education can't control all variables. But I can immediately think of numerous other variables - what about the other children at the schools backgrounds? what about the level of funding the schools received? the level of training of the teachers?
I think Montessori and Steiner are far more dogmatic than sense dictates - but stay this way, despite the negatives, in order to give their system a magical quality. Determining the quality of a school is hard. So people are willing to cling to a belief because they don't know any better.
Just one example of negative; Montessori doesn't use imaginative play. It's been shown to be a great tool to give kids better concentration spans. But the writings of Montessori are against it and the dogma has to be followed.
Yes most likely, believe me I think there are fantastic Montessori schools out there. I just think that they are dogmatic about these questions for the sake of dogma.
If we just looked at all schools like that study did, even with a lottery, we'd probably come to the conclusion that the stodgiest, most regressive kinds of top private schools is the way to go.
*Edit: Read the link more thoroughly. This answer is completely subjective but I can't really believe many people would agree with that characterisation of imaginative play and creativity who weren't rationalising their belief in a particular dogma. It doesn't ring true to me at all.
You can't control for "bright parents." You can control for parents' income, parents' education, parents' height and weight, but you can't control for the kind of attitude towards childrearing and towards life that would cause a couple to send their kids to Montessori school.
This is why so many social science results that are "controlled" for various variables actually don't make any sense.
Wouldn't accepting 1000 applications, and teaching Montessori-style to 500 of them and traditional-style to the other 500 pretty accurately control for all of those self-selection biases?
Only if you put the 500 non-Montessori children in a separate school, with the same level of funding as the Montessori school. From the little that I know about these studies, at least some of the differences could be explained by the mixing of the 'control group' into an environment that is less ambitious or focused as the Montessori group.
(I walk pass 2 schools on my way to work each day - one Montessori, one not, sometimes around the time where children are dropped off by their parents. Even not knowing anything about the relative merits of the systems, I can easily tell which school I'd want to send my daughter to in a few years time; at the risk of sounding elitist, it's like standing next to the exit of an opera performance vs a soccer stadium).
To add to this, The Steiner system places a lot of value in surroundings and buildings and a lot of time and effort (or is it money?) goes into making the "learning environment" inspiring and stimulating.... Etc etc. Basically the ones I've been to look fantastic.
Read the paper in full -- it doesn't say anything that supports the article's conclusion. It studies a small population of kids at one school, and finds a very slight average improvement on some test scores. That's it.
The Science article is fine for what it is, but it's hardly the evidence that Montessori schools produce disproportionate numbers of billionaires. Based on the data provided, you can't even rule out the possibility that the teachers at the one school in question were just better than average.
> the parents of people who care enough about their education to enroll them in a montessori school...
Really? You think it's just a matter of caring enough to make it so? I think I'd phrase this differently -- that the parents of people who have the means to send them to a montessori school probably would have the means to give them other advantages in life as well, so their kids are probably going to do pretty well regardless.
> the parents of people who have the means to send them to a montessori school probably would have the means to give them other advantages in life as well, so their kids are probably going to do pretty well regardless.
I disagree with the emphasis on the "means" of the family. Contrast the success of immigrant families who struggle to get an education for a child with the wastrel habits of many "rich kids".
I don't think most immigrant families who struggle for the education of their kids do so by sending them to private grade school. More often they take maximum advantage of the public options available to them and augment it with good parenting.
> Care is critical. Wealth may be helpful.
Certainly I agree if we're talking about raising a successful child but that wasn't the issue we were discussing. When it comes to sending your kid to private school, I think money usually goes a lot further than care.
Definitely. You cannot assume causality simply because a few results turned out a certain way. Although I have to admit I want to since I would have enjoyed building stuff much more than listening to a prof lecture for an hour.
To your point though, you could also cite a number of people not educated in Montessori schools who were very creative and achieved big things.
Yeah absolutely, but the irony is if you spend all your time perfecting your scientific approach to decision-making about parenting, you are not necessarily more likely to make better decisions than if you paying very close attention to them and using your intuition.
It goes without saying I don't have a citation for that, but based on my personal experience as a child and a parent I strongly believe it be true.
I don't have the book handy to quote, but Freakonomics had a similar assertion about specific parenting styles not being a major factor in the educational outcome (test scores) of children. I can't remember what "styles" were part of the data though.
Ahem. I spy a latent variable in this correlation. Can you find it?
Hint: Montessori education may or may not have advantages. But unless you control for educational background and income of the family, your analysis has a problem.