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

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

The teacher, when she begins work in our schools, must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work.

When mental development is under discussion, there are many who say, 'How does movement come into it? We are talking about the mind.' And when we think of intellectual activity, we always imagine people sitting still, motionless. But mental development must be connected with movement and be dependent on it. It is vital that educational theory and practice should be informed by that idea.

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.

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

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.