Maria Montessori Quotes about Children - Page 3

A child needs freedom within limits.

To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control is to betray the idea of freedom.

Children display a universal love of mathematics, which is par excellence the science of precision, order, and intelligence.

The teacher's task is not a small easy one! She has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger. She is not like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. The needs of the child are clearly more difficult to answer.

Children become like the things they love.

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 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.

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.

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 child will reveal himself through work.

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.

A child is a discoverer. He is an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form.

It is true that we cannot make a genius. We can only give to teach child the chance to fulfil his potential possibilities.

The child, in fact, once he feels sure of himself, will no longer seek the approval of authority after every step.