Interesting Facts

Below is a partial listing of persons you may be familiar with who were Montessori children. Strong supporters of Montessori are listed afterwards. Currently, a list of images for each person is being compiled, please come back and visit again to see the images.

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google

Will Wright, designer of The Sim video games

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia

Anne Frank, renowned World War II diarist

Katherine Graham, owner-editor of The Washington Post

Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, rapper and CEO of Bad Boy Records

Julia Child, chef and author

Prince William and Prince Harry, sons of Charles, Prince of Wales

Helen Hunt, Academy Award-winning actress

George Clooney, Academy Award-winning actor

Chelsea Clinton, Daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton

Joshua Bell, American violinist

Lea Salonga, multi-awarded singer and Broadway actress

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, editor, former first lady

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winner for Literature

T. Berry Brazelton, noted pediatrician and author

Melissa and Sara Gilbert, actors

Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer

Hugh Grant, actor

Mark Zuckerberg – the co-founder of Facebook

Alice Waters, chef, author, and the proprietor of Chez Panisse

Helen Keller, author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree

John and Joan Cusack, actors

Strong supporters of Montessori:

Alexander Graham Bell, noted inventor, and his wife Mabel provided financial support directly to Dr. Montessori and helped establish the first Montessori Class in theUnited Statesin 1913.

Mister Rogers, children’s TV personality

Thomas Edison, noted scientist and inventor, helped found a Montessori school.

President Wilson’s daughter was a Montessori teacher. There was a Montessori Classroom in the White House during Wilson’s presidency.

Jean Piaget, noted Swiss psychologist, made his first observations of children in a Montessori school. He was also head of the Swiss Montessori Society for many years.

Henry Ford, industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.

Sigmund Freud, neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis

Buckminster Fuller, engineer, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, futurist and second president of Mensa International, the high IQ society.

Leo Tolstoy, author

Bertrand Russell, philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic

Erik Erikson, developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on social development of human beings Mahatma Gandhi, the pre-eminent political and ideological leader of India during the Indian independence movement. A pioneer of satyagraha, or resistance to tyranny through mass civil disobedience — a philosophy firmly founded upon ahimsa, or total nonviolence

Helen Keller, author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree