Maria Montessori Quotes - Page 7

Little children, from the moment in which they are weaned, are making their way toward independence.

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.

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 instruction

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.

When dealing with children there is greater need for observing than of probing

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.

Education must start from birth.

To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.

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.

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?

Human dignity ... is derived from a sense of 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.

Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.

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.

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.

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.

The essential thing is to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality.

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.

in nature everything is transformed but nothing destroyed.

The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do something

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

Children are not only sensitive to silence, but also to a voice which calls them ... Out of that silence.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.