“I do not believe there is a method better than Montessori for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life.”
Gabriel García Márquez was a Nobel Prize winner in literature. His most famous novels, pictured above, are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.
García with fellow writers (photo: Wiki)
As a child, García attended a Montessori school. In his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, he talks praisingly of his time there:
"In Cataca [García's hometown] they had opened a Montessori school ... It was wonderful to be alive then — studying was like playing."
Later in the book, García notes that before attending Montessori he had struggled to read. But his Montessori teacher taught language differently (using phonetics), and so things quickly changed for the better:
“It took me a long time to learn to read. It did not seem logical to me that the letter “m” was called “eme”... It was impossible for me to read like that.
Finally, when I arrived at Montessori, the teacher did not teach me the names but the sounds of the consonants. So I could read the first book I found in a dusty chest ... It was unstitched and incomplete but it absorbed me in a very intense way.”
García speaks lovingly of his youth in general, as noted in an interview: "There is not a line in one of my books that does not have its origin in my childhood. During the first eight years of my life, I lived the experiences that later made up my poetic and literary creations. ... I would say that all my work has its origins in the early years of childhood."
García at age 2 (photo: UT Austin)
García holding a friend's grandson (photo: Flickr)
One's early education and experience as a child can have a profound impact on his or her future as an adult, as García makes clear in his own life.
Not every child will have the good fortune of having a Montessori education, but happily for the thousands and thousands of boys and girls like the young García, Montessori schooling* offers a caring environment prepared specifically to aid them toward success in adulthood — or, in García's poetic words, "for making children sensitive to the beauties of the world and awakening their curiosity regarding the secrets of life."
*To learn more about Montessori schooling, visit here.
In 2014, Gabriel García Márquez passed away. He was 87 years old. (Photo: Wiki)
Jesse McCarthy is the Founder and Head Guide of Montessori Education, an organization dedicated to helping parents and teachers raise independent, flourishing children — while enjoying themselves along the way.