Maria Montessori
Education should therefore include the two forms of work, manual and intellectual, for the same person, and thus make it understood by practical experience that these two kinds complete each other and are equally essential to a civilized existence.Collection: Two
We do not believe in the educative power of words and commands alone, but seek cautiously, and almost without the child's knowing it, to guide his natural activity.Collection: Children
No adult can bear a child’s burden or grow up in his stead.Collection: Children
But an adult if he is to provide proper guidance, must always be calm and act slowly so that the child who is watching him can clearly see his actions in all their particulars.Collection: Children
The child's true constructive energy, a dynamic power, has remained unnoticed for thousands of years. Just as men have trodden the earth, and later tilled its surface, without thought for the immense wealth hidden in its depths, so the men of our day make progress after progress in civilized life, without noticing the treasures that lie hidden in the psychic world of infancy.Collection: Children
No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child ... No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent ... Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child.Collection: Children
The world of education is like an island where people cut off from the world are prepared for life by exclusion from it.Collection: Cutting
A teacher, therefore, who would think that he could prepare himself for his mission through study alone would be mistaken. The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.Collection: Teacher
It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.Collection: Effort
Conventions which camouflage a man's true feelings are a spiritual lie which help him adapt himself to the organized deviations of society.Collection: Spiritual
The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.Collection: Teacher
Nothing is created or destroyed in nature.Collection: Destroyed
In nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself.Collection: Nature
In the psychological realm of relationship between teacher and child, the teacher's part and its techniques are analogous to those of the valet; they are to serve, and to serve well: to serve the spirit.Collection: Teacher
One who has drunk at the fountain of spiritual happiness says good-by of his own accord to the satisfactions that come from a higher professional status ... What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist.Collection: Spiritual
It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.Collection: Children
The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.Collection: Children
Today, however, those things which occupy us in the field of education are the interests of humanity at large and of civilization, and before such great forces we can recognize only one country-the entire world.Collection: Country
Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises.Collection: Soul
For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?Collection: Use
Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline.Collection: Discipline
Education, as conceived today, is something separated both from biological and social life.Collection: Today
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
To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.Collection: Children
Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.Collection: Children
Happiness is not the whole aim of education. A man must be independent in his powers and character; able to work and assert his mastery over all that depends on him.Collection: Character
Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.Collection: Children
An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.Collection: Children
If I am going up a ladder, and a dog begins to bite at my ankles, I can do one of two things - either turn round and kick out at the it, or simply go on up the ladder. I prefer to go up the ladder!Collection: Dog
... the first thing his education demands is the provision of an environment in which he can develop the powers given him by nature. This does not mean just to amuse him and let him do what he likes. But it does mean that we have to adjust our minds to doing a work of collaboration with nature, to being obedient to one of her laws, the law which decrees that development comes from environmental experience.Collection: Mean
The observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered -- this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions . . .Collection: Teacher
But if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation.Collection: Children
It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.Collection: Children
What advice can we give to new mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.Collection: Mother
Except when he has regressive tendencies, the child's nature is to aim directly and energetically at functional independence.Collection: Children
Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.Collection: Children
He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth.Collection: Mean
The principal agent is the object itself and not the instruction given by the teacher. It is the child who uses the objects; it is the child who is active, and not the teacher.Collection: Teacher
The human hand allows the mind to reveal itself.Collection: Hands
The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.Collection: Art
Plainly, the environment must be a living one, directed by a higher intelligence, arranged by an adult who is prepared for his mission.Collection: Adults
Culture and education have no bounds or limits; now man is in a phase in which he must decide for himself how far he can proceed in the culture that belongs to the whole of humanity.Collection: Men
A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.Collection: Intellectual
Order is ... the true key to rapidity of reaction.Collection: Keys
A child starts from nothing and advances alone. It is the child's reason about which the sensitive periods revolve. The reason provides the initial force and energy, and a child absorbs his first images to assist the reason and act on it.Collection: Children
The child endures all things.Collection: Children
Growth and psychic development are therefore guided by: the absorbent mind, the nebulae and the sensitive periods, with their respective mechanisms. It is these that are hereditary and characteristic of the human species. But the promise they hold can only be fulfilled through the experience of free activity conducted in the environment.Collection: Independent
It is almost possible to say that there is a mathematical relationship between the beauty of his surroundings and the activity of the child; he will make discoveries rather more voluntarily in a gracious setting than in an ugly one.Collection: Children
This then is the first duty of an educator: to stir up life but leave it free to develop.Collection: Childhood