Maria Montessori
The teacher, when she begins work in our schools, must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work.Collection: Teacher
A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.Collection: Law
At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.Collection: Children
Adults look upon a child as something empty that is to be filled through their own efforts, as something inert and helpless for which they must do everything, as something lacking an inner guide and in constant need of inner direction. . . . An adult who acts in this way, even though he may be convinced that he is filled with zeal, love, and a spirit of sacrifice on behalf of his child, unconsciously suppresses the development of the child's own personality.Collection: Children
The aim of education should not be to teach how to use human energies to improve the environment, for we are finally beginning to realize that the cornerstone of education is the development of the human personality, and that in this regard education is of immediate importance for the salvation of mankind.Collection: Education
What is a scientist?... We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.Collection: Love
It is not the child as a physical but as a psychic being that can provide a strong impetus to the betterment of mankind. It is the spirit of the child that can determine the course of human progress and lead it perhaps even to a higher form of civilization.Collection: Strong
Our goal is not so much the imparting of knowledge as the unveiling and developing of spiritual energy.Collection: Spiritual
Children must grow not only in the body but in the spirit, and the mother longs to follow the mysterious spiritual journey of the beloved one who to-morrow will be the intelligent, divine creation, man.Collection: Mother
Preventing war is the work of politicians, establishing peace is the work of educationists.Collection: War
Order is not goodness; but perhaps it is the indispensable road to arrive at it.Collection: Order
Environment is undoubtedly a secondary factor in the phenomena of life; it can modify in that it can help or hinder, but it can never create.Collection: Helping
This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations.Collection: Children
It is necessary, then, to give the child the possibility of developing according to the laws of his nature, so that he can become strong, and, having become strong, can do even more than we dared hope for him.Collection: Strong
Let us treat them [children], therefore, with all the kindness which we would wish to help to develop in them.Collection: Kindness
Little children, from the moment in which they are weaned, are making their way toward independence.Collection: Children
Human dignity ... is derived from a sense of independence.Collection: Independence
We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind.Collection: Children
Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.Collection: Children
If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.Collection: Children
The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life.Collection: Ideas
How can we speak of Democracy or Freedom when from the very beginning of life we mould the child to undergo tyranny, to obey a dictator? How can we expect democracy when we have reared slaves? Real freedom begins at the beginning of life, not at the adult stage. These people who have been diminished in their powers, made short-sighted, devitalized by mental fatigue, whose bodies have become distorted, whose wills have been broken by elders who say: "your will must disappear and mine prevail!"-how can we expect them, when school-life is finished, to accept and use the rights of freedom?Collection: Children
Under the urge of nature and according to the laws of development, though not understood by the adult, the child is obliged to be serious about two fundamental things ... the first is the love of activity... The second fundamental thing is independence.Collection: Children
The ancient saying, "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses," and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.Collection: World
To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.Collection: Teacher
A child's character develops in accordance with the obstacles he has encountered... or the freedom favoring his development that he has enjoyed.Collection: Children
The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth.Collection: Education
Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.Collection: Education
Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.Collection: Children
The instructions of the teacher consist then merely in a hint, a touch-enough to give a start to the child. The rest develops of itself.Collection: Teacher
The essential thing is to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality.Collection: Children
in nature everything is transformed but nothing destroyed.Collection: Nature
Red RodsBefore elaborating any system of education, we must therefore create a favorable environment that will encourage the flowering of a child's natural gifts. All that is needed is to remove the obstacles. And this should be the basis of, and point of departure for, all future education. The first thing to be done, therefore, is to discover the true nature of a child and then assist him in his normal development.Collection: Children
Children are not only sensitive to silence, but also to a voice which calls them ... Out of that silence.Collection: Children
Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.Collection: Children
The child’s progress does not depend only on his age, but also on being free to look around him.Collection: Children
The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do somethingCollection: Discouragement
The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child’s own natural desire to learn.Collection: Goal
Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces a real happiness.Collection: Real
The real preparation for education is the study of one’s self.Collection: Real
The ancient saying, “There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in some way in the senses,” and senses being explorers of the world, opens the way to knowledge.Collection: Firsts