Maria Montessori Quotes - Page 9

How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.

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.

The child endures all things.

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.

This then is the first duty of an educator: to stir up life but leave it free to develop.

Knowing what we must do is neither fundamental nor difficult, but to comprehend which presumptions and vain prejudices we must rid ourselves of in order to be able to educate our children is most difficult.

The child's conquests of independence are the basic steps in what is called his 'natural development'.

The development of the individual can be described as a succession of new births at consecutively higher levels.

Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity, and he will be free. We see no limit to what should be offered to the child, for his will be an immense field of chosen activity.

When a child is given a little leeway, he will at once shout, "I want to do it!" But in our schools, which have an environment adapted to children's needs, they say, "Help me to do it alone." And these words reveal their inner needs.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in old-time discipline . . . A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a classroom very well disciplined indeed.

Supposing I said there was a planet without schools or teachers, where study was unknown, and yet the inhabitants -- doing nothing but live and walk about -- came to know all things, to carry in their minds the whole of learning; would you not think I was romancing? Well, just this, which seems so fanciful as to be nothing but the invention of a fertile imagination, is a reality. It is the child's way of learning.

The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child.

A child in his earliest years, when he is only two or a little more, is capable of tremendous achievements simply through his unconscious power of absorption, though he is himself still immobile. After the age of three he is able to acquire a great number of concepts through his own efforts in exploring his surroundings. In this period he lays hold of things through his own activity and assimilates them into his mind.

Concentration is a part of life. It is not the consequence of a method of education.

A man is not what he is because of the teachers he has had, but because of what he has done

The undisciplined child enters into discipline by working in the company of others; not being told he is naughty.” “Discipline is, therefore, primarily a learning experience and less a punitive experience if appropriately dealt with.

There are many who hold, as I do, that the most important part of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when a man's intelligence itself, his greatest implement, is being formed. But not only his intelligence; the full totality of his psychic powers.

If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

The children are now working as if I did not exist.

If the idea of the universe is presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying.

Beauty lies in harmony, not in contrast; and harmony is refinement; therefore, there must be a fineness of the senses if we are to appreciate harmony.

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.

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?