Maria Montessori Quotes

It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.

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

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world

The development of the mind comes through movement

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

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.

Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces a real happiness

This is what is intended by education as a help to life; an education from birth that brings about a revolution: a revolution that eliminates every violence, a revolution in which everyone will be attracted towards a common center. Mothers, fathers, statesmen all will be centered upon respecting and aiding this delicate construction which is carried on in psychic mystery following the guide of an inner teacher. This is the new shining hope for humanity. It is not so much a reconstruction, as an aid to the construction carried out by the human soul as it is meant to be, developed in all the immense potentialities with which the new-born child is endowed.

If salvation and help are to come, it is through the child ; for the child is the constructor of man.

We must support as much as possible the child's desires for activity; not wait on him, but educate him to be independent.

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.

Teach by teaching, not by correcting

How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?

Such prizes and punishments are, if I may be allowed the expression, the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit.

The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life.

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.

Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.

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

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

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.

The more perfect the approximation to truth, the more perfect is art.

Moral Education is the source of that spiritual equilibrium on which everything else depends and which may be compared to that physical equilibrium or sense of balance, without which it is impossible to stand upright or to move into any other position.

A child needs freedom within limits.

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.

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

There should be music in the child's environment, just as there does exist in the child's environment spoken speech. In the social environment the child should be considered and music should be provided.

Within the child lies the fate of the future.

Needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces.

Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.

We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.

Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.

Nothing is created or destroyed in nature ...

Education should therefore include the two forms of work, manual and intellectual, for the same person, and thus make it understood by practical experience that these two kinds complete each other and are equally essential to a civilized existence.

The laws governing the universe can be made interesting and wonderful to the child, more interesting even that things in themselves, and he begins to ask: What am I? What is the task of man in this wonderful universe? Do we merely live here for ourselves, or is there something more for us to do? Why do we struggle and fight? What is good and evil? Where will it all end?

What advice can we give to new mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.

No one can help us to achieve the intimate isolation by which we find our secret worlds, so mysterious, rich and full. If others intervene, it is destroyed. This degree of thought, which we attain by freeing ourselves from the external world, must be fed by the inner spirit, and our surroundings cannot influence us in any way other than to leave us in peace.

We all know the sense of comfort of which we are conscious when a good half of the floor space in a room is unencumbered; this seems to offer us the agreeable possibility of moving about freely.

It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The ability to see reality in form, in color, in proportion, to be master of the movements of one's own hand - that is what is necessary.

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

If education is protection to life, you will realize that it is necessary that education accompany life during its whole course.

To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.

Observation, very general and wide-spread, has shown that small children are endowed with a special psychic nature. This shows us a new way of imparting education!

The child endures all things.

It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.

The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do something

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

Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.

Under the urge of nature and according to the laws of development, though not understood by the adult, the child is obliged to be serious about two fundamental things ... the first is the love of activity ... The second fundamental thing is independence.

We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active.

The unknown energy that can help humanity is that which lies hidden in the child.

There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease.

The man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his own word, his own convictions, his own affections.

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

We await the successsive births in the soul of the child. We give all possible material, that nothing may lack to the groping soul, and then we watch for the perfect faculty to come, safeguarding the child from interruption so that it may carry its efforts through.

All our handling of the child will bear fruit, not only at the moment, but in the adult they are destined to become.

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.

The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be.

Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.

Two things are necessary, the development of individuality and the participation of the individual in a truly social life.

An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the virtue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child's energies and mental capacities, and leads him to self-mastery.

Dependence is not patriotism. A man does not love his mother if he hangs about her to the point of burdening her with a weak, feckless son.

Children have an anxious concern for living beings, and the satisfaction of this instinct fills them with delight. It is therefore easy to interest them in taking care of plants and especially of animals. Nothing awakens foresight in a small child such as this. When he knows that animals have need of him, that little plants will dry up if he does not water them, he binds together with a new thread of love today's passing moments with those of the morrow.

If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be placed in order ...

When we want to infuse new ideas,
to modify or better the habits and customs of a people,
to breathe new vigor into its national traits,
we must use the children as our vehicle; for little can be accomplished with adults.

Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future.

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

All the movements of our body are not merely those dictated by impulse or weariness; they are the correct expression of what we consider decorous. Without impulses, we could take no part in social life; on the other hand, without inhibitions, we could not correct, direct, and utilize our impulses.

Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.

With man, the life of the body depends on the life of the spirit.

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.

Now, what really makes a teacher is love for the human child; for it is love that transforms the social duty of the educator into the higher consciousness of a mission.

If we try to think back to the dim and distant past ... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art ... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.

The whole of mankind is one and only one, one race, one class and one society.

If education recognizes the intrinsic value of the child's personality and provides an environment suited to spiritual growth, we have the revelation of an entirely new child whose astonishing characteristics can eventually contribute to the betterment of the world.

Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects, man always has yielded woman the palm.

Travel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on. The teacher, in short, can use reading to introduce her pupils to the most varied subjects; and the moment they have been thus started, they can go on to any limit guided by the single passion for reading.

The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one's self.

The adult works to improve his environment while the child works to improve himself.

The child's parents are not his makers but his guardians.

Temptation, if it is not to conquer, must not fall like a bomb against another bomb of instantaneous moral explosions, but against the strong walls of an impregnable fortress strongly built up, stone by stone, beginning at that distant day when the foundations were first laid.

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.

A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.

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

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.

To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

No adult can bear a child's burden or grow up in his stead.

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

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.

The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man's organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.

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.

At three years of age, the child has already laid the foundations of the human personality and needs the special help of education in the school. The acquisitions he has made are such that we can say the child who enters school at three is an old man.

The person who is developing freely and naturally arrives at a spiritual equilibrium in which he is master of his actions, just as one who has acquired physical poise can move freely.

It would be so simple to allow children, when tired of sitting, to rise, and when tired of writing, to desist, and then their bones would not be twisted.

He does it with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence.

Solicitous care for living things affords satisfaction to one of the most lively instincts of the child's mind. Nothing is better calculated than this to awaken an attitude of foresight.

When dealing with children there is greater need for observing than of probing

This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations.

Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.

Early childhood education is the key to the betterment of society.