The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them.

The first aim of the prepared environment is, as far as it is possible, to render the growing child independent of the adult.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

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

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

These words reveal the child’s inner needs; ‘Help me to do it alone’.

...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. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. 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.