There is a woman whose name comes up on our show a lot, maybe because this woman was a rebel from the beginning. She was a voracious reader who in the 1880s enrolled in an all-male school, determined to make something of herself.

But she encountered resistance at every step. She couldn’t get into the medical school she wanted, and had to take additional classes to beef up her resume.

When she did eventually get in, she discovered that women tended to be sidelined. Men didn’t want to be in classes with her. It seemed inappropriate, kind of risqué to talk about and look at human anatomy in a class with both sexes. So the aspiring doctor had to do much of her homework and lab work by herself, during after school hours.

When she graduated, she assisted with surgeries and worked in a psychiatric clinic, often helping young kids. Soon, this young, female doctor, who was already testing social boundaries, decided that she should test another one.

She began to advocate for children to be taught according to their abilities and interests, not forced into a classroom and made to conform. She started educating students herself, kids who had trouble in school and were called “feeble-minded.”

After two years, those kids took a major exam, and every single one succeeded, beating out many students who had gone to respected state schools.

That was when Maria Montessori knew that education was her calling. She started a model school in Italy and was invited to lecture all over the world.

Today, there are thousands of Montessori schools – and they may shape our lives more than we realize. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin, all went to Montessori school.

Page once said that his success might be attributable to those early experiences. Because, as he put it, her schools were about “not following rules and orders,” but about “questioning what's going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently.”