Maria Montessori Quotes - Page 4

Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.

Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence.

The development of the mind comes through movement

The unknown energy that can help humanity is that which lies hidden in the child.

Giving children the opportunity to stir up life and leave it free to discover.

The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities.

There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all of the life to be found around them in a real forest.

Two things are necessary, the development of individuality and the participation of the individual in a truly social life.

The child should live in an environment of beauty.

The role of education is to interest the child profoundly in an external activity to which he will give all his potential

The child who concentrates is immensely happy

Praise, help, or even a look, may be enough to interrupt him, or destroy the activity. It seems a strange thing to say, but this can happen even if the child merely becomes aware of being watched. After all, we too sometimes feel unable to go on working if someone comes to see what we are doing. The great principle which brings success to the teacher is this: as soon as concentration has begun, act as if the child does not exist. Naturally, one can see what he is doing with a quick glance, but without his being aware of it.

It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose, which it truly has.

Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.

There is in the child a special kind of sensitivity which leads him to absorb everything about him, and it is this work of observing and absorbing that alone enables him to adapt himself to life

The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.

The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child.

The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child.

It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was.

The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task.

The child will reveal himself through work.

Imitation is the first instinct of the awakening mind.

The needs of mankind are universal. Our means of meeting them create the richness and diversity of the planet. The Montessori child should come to relish the texture of that diversity.

It is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses exists; not that the child shall know colors, forms or qualities, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, comparison and judgment.