Maria Montessori
I have studied the child. I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it and that is what is called the Montessori method.Collection: Children
The fundamental basis of education must always remain that one must act for oneself. That is clear. One must act for him or herself.Collection: Fundamentals
Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.Collection: Teacher
Only practical work and experience lead the young to maturity.Collection: Maturity
Discipline must come through liberty.Collection: Discipline
When the children had completed an absorbing bit of work, they appeared rested and deeply pleased. It almost seemed as if a road had opened up within their souls that led to all their latent powers, revealing the better part of themselves. They exhibited a great affability to everyone, put themselves out to help others and seemed full of good will.Collection: Children
Social grace, inner discipline and joy. These are the birthright of the human being who has been allowed to develop essential human qualities.Collection: Discipline
The adult ought never to mold the child after himself, but should leave him alone and work always from the deepest comprehension of the child himself.Collection: Children
We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active.Collection: Children
No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the childCollection: Children
There should be music in the child's environment, just as there does exist in the child's environment spoken speech. In the social environment the child should be considered and music should be provided.Collection: Children
We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instructionCollection: Children
Education today, in this particular social period, is assuming truly unlimited importance. And the increased emphasis on its practical value can be summed up in one sentence: education is the best weapon for peace.Collection: Weapons
The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.Collection: Teacher
The child is an enigma… He has the highest potentialities, but we do not know what he will be.Collection: Children
When dealing with children there is greater need for observing than of probingCollection: Children
Education must start from birth.Collection: Birth
There is in every child a painstaking teacher so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one teaches them anything.Collection: Teacher
Freedom without organization of work would be useless. The child left free without means of work would go to waste, just as a new-born baby, if left free without nourishment, would die of starvation.The organization of the work, therefore, is the cornerstone of this new structure of goodness [in education], but even that organization would be in vain without the liberty to make use of it.Collection: Baby
The great constructive energies of the child ... have hitherto been concealed beneath an accumulation of ideas concerning motherhood. We used to say it was the mother who formed the child; for it is she who teaches him to walk, talk, and so on. But none of this is really done by the mother. It is an achievement of the child. What the mother brings forth is the baby, but it is the baby who produces the man. Should the mother die, the baby still grows up and completes his work of making the man.Collection: Mother
No one who has ever done anything really great or successful has ever done it simply because he was attracted by what we call a 'reward' or by the fear of what we call a 'punishment.'Collection: Successful
Learning to speak, therefore, and the power it brings of intelligent converse with others, is a most impressive further step along the path of independence ... Learning to walk is especially significant, not only because it is supremely complex, but because it is done in the first year of life.Collection: Independent
With younger children the greatest reward is to be able to pass on to a new stage in each subject. It is a punishment to a young child not to be allowed to use the apparatus but to sit still and do nothing.Collection: Children
If we try to think back to the dim and distant past... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.Collection: Art
The laws governing the universe can be made interesting and wonderful to the child, more interesting even that things in themselves, and he begins to ask: What am I? What is the task of man in this wonderful universe? Do we merely live here for ourselves, or is there something more for us to do? Why do we struggle and fight? What is good and evil? Where will it all end?Collection: Children
The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this worldCollection: Children
He who is served is limited in his independence.Collection: Independence
The child's conquest of independence begins with his first introduction to life. While he is developing, he perfects himself and overcomes every obstacle that he finds in his path. A vital force is active within him, and this guides his efforts towards their goal. It is a force called the 'horme', by Sir Percy Nunn.Collection: Children
A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.Collection: Responsibility
The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but from work that is unworthy of him.Collection: Children
This is education, understood as a help to life; an education from birth, which feeds a peaceful revolution and unites all in a common aim, attracting them as to a single centre. Mothers, fathers, politicians: all must combine in their respect and help for this delicate work of formation, which the little child carries on in the depth of a profound psychological mystery, under the tutelage of an inner guide. This is the bright new hope for mankind.Collection: Mother
At birth, the child leaves a person - his mother's womb - and this makes him independent of her bodily functions. The baby is next endowed with an urge, or need, to face the out world and to absorb it. We might say that he is born with 'the psychology of world conquest.' By absorbing what he finds about him, he forms his own personality.Collection: Mother
One of the great problems facing men is their failure to realize the fact that a child possesses an active psychic life even when he cannot manifest it, and that the child must secretly perfect this inner life over a long period of time.Collection: Children
At one year of age the child says his first intentional wordhis babbling has a purpose, and this intention is a proof of conscious intelligenceHe becomes ever more aware that language refers to his surroundings, and his wish to master it consciously becomes also greater.Subconsciously and unaided, he strains himself to learn, and this effort makes his success all the more astonishing.Collection: Children
If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be placed in order . . .Collection: Children
The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth.Collection: Change
To have a vision of the cosmic plan, in which every form of life depends on directed movements which have effects beyond their conscious aim, is to understand the child's work and be able to guide it better.Collection: Children
The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned.Collection: Spiritual
The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them.Collection: Children
We cannot create observers by saying 'observe,' but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.Collection: Philosophy
When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, 'How does movement come into it? We are talking about the mind.' And when we think of intellectual activity, we always imagine people sitting still, motionless. But mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.Collection: Educational
Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.Collection: Children
An adult who does not understand that a child needs to use his hands and does not recognize this as the first manifestation of an instinct for work can be an obstacle to the child's developmentCollection: Children
The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.Collection: Children
How does he achieve this independence? He does it by means of a continuous activity. How does he become free? By means of constant effort. we know that development results from activity. The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.Collection: Children
It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.Collection: Animal
Independence is not a static condition; it is a continuous conquest, and in order to reach not only freedom, but also strength, and the perfecting on one's powers, it is necessary to follow this path of unremitting toil.Collection: Independent
The teacher’s first duty is to watch over the environment, and this takes precedence over all the rest. It’s influence is indirect, but unless it be well done there will be no effective and permanent results of any kind, physical, intellectual or spiritual.Collection: Spiritual