Maria Montessori Quotes

Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.

Social grace, inner discipline and joy. These are the birthright of the human being who has been allowed to develop essential human qualities.

The child has other powers than ours, and the creation he achieves is no small one; it is everything.

My vision of the future is no longer of people taking exams and proceeding from secondary school to University but of passing from one stage of independence to a higher, by means of their own activity and effort of will.

The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.

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.

A child is an eager observer and is particularly attracted by the actions of the adults and wants to imitate them. In this regard an adult can have a kind of mission. He can be an inspiration for the child's actions, a kind of open book wherein a child can learn how to direct his own movements. But an adult, if he is to afford proper guidance, must always be calm and act slowly so that the child who is watching him can clearly see his actions in all their particulars.

Except when he has regressive tendencies, the child's nature is to aim directly and energetically at functional independence.

How does he achieve this independence? He does it by means of a continuous activity. How does he become free? By means of constant effort. we know that development results from activity. The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.

At one year of age the child says his first intentional wordhis babbling has a purpose, and this intention is a proof of conscious intelligenceHe becomes ever more aware that language refers to his surroundings, and his wish to master it consciously becomes also greater.Subconsciously and unaided, he strains himself to learn, and this effort makes his success all the more astonishing.

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

There must be provision for the child to have contact with nature; to understand and appreciate the order, the harmony and the beauty in nature.

The hand is the prehensile organ of the mind.

Joy is the evidence of inner growth.

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.

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

To have a vision of the cosmic plan, in which every form of life depends on directed movements which have effects beyond their conscious aim, is to understand the child's work and be able to guide it better.

The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment.

An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.

When children come into contact with nature, they reveal their strength.

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

Education must start from birth.

To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.

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

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 human hand allows the mind to reveal itself.

A teacher, therefore, who would think that he could prepare himself for his mission through study alone would be mistaken. The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.

The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth.

Childhood constitutes the most important element in an adult's life, for it is in his early years that a man is made.

The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned.

It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.

In nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself.

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.

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.

In the psychological realm of relationship between teacher and child, the teacher's part and its techniques are analogous to those of the valet; they are to serve, and to serve well: to serve the spirit.

The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.

Nothing is created or destroyed in nature.

The child can only develop fully by means of experience in his environment. We call such experience 'work'.

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.

Let the children be free; encourage them; let them run outside when it is raining; let them remove their shoes when they find a puddle of water; and when the grass of the meadows is wet with dew, let them run on it and trample it with their bare feet; let them rest peacefully when a tree invites them to sleep beneath its shade; let them shout and laugh when the sun wakes them in the morning.

Happiness is not the whole aim of education. A man must be independent in his powers and character; able to work and assert his mastery over all that depends on him.

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.

Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.

The activity of the child has always been looked upon as an expression of his vitality.

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.

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.