Kotaku – Maria Montessori, The 138-Year-Old Inspiration Behind Spore

Kotaku has a lengthy article in which Will Wright discusses his childhood and his time spent in the Montessori school he attended.  I don’t have time to read it at the moment, I’ll have to jump back reading it after work, but I thought some of you would want to check it out.

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

“In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms,” Wright says. “You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it.”

“Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that’s almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model .”

article here