Maria Montessori and 10 famous graduates from her schools

10. Strong supporters

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Maria Montessori would have turned 142 on Friday. Her Montessori schools helped shape several prominent business leaders and celebrities.

This wraps up our 10 graduates. But several notable Americans also greatly supported the movement.

Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the first practical telephone, helped create the first Montessori school in Canada. Thomas Edison, inventor of the incandescent light bulb, kickstarted four such schools. And PBS host Fred "Mister" Rogers pushed for expanding Montessori education.

If you'd like to learn more about Maria Montessori, check out Laura Edwins' piece on how she broke gender boundaries

For more on how technology intersects daily life, follow Chris on Twitter @venturenaut.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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