Welcome to our collection of quotes (with shareable picture quotes) by Maria Montessori. We hope you enjoy pondering them and that you will share them widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Maria Montessori
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori ( MON-tiss-OR-ee, Italian: [maˈriːa montesˈsɔːri]; August 31, 1870 – May 6, 1952) was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
The greatest sign of success for a teacher ... is to be able to say, 'The children are now working as if I did not exist.'
The adult works to improve his environment while the child works to improve himself.
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.
Never help a child with a task that they feel they can complete themselves.
Only through freedom and environmental experience is it practically possible for human development to occur.
It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.
The greatest source of discouragement is the conviction that one is unable to do something.
The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be.
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.
The child is an enigma… He has the highest potentialities, but we do not know what he will be.
A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.
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.
If we really want children to grow into independent and resourceful adults, we should stop pouring their milk as soon as they have learned to pour it themselves and stop fastening their buttons as soon as they can fasten them without help.
We weep in front of the dead and we aspire towards saving humanity from destruction, but it is not the salvation from dangers, it is the elevation that is the destiny of everyone of us which should stand before our mind's eye. It is not death, but the lost paradise that should afflict us.
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.
We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction.
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.
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.
If children are allowed free development and given occupation to correspond with their unfolding minds their natural goodness will shine forth.
The activity of the child has always been looked upon as an expression of his vitality.
When a child is given a little leeway, he will at once shout, I want to do it! But in our schools, which have an environment adapted to children's needs, they say, Help me to do it alone. And these words reveal their inner needs.
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.
If I am going up a ladder, and a dog begins to bite at my ankles, I can do one of two things -- either turn round and kick out at the it, or simply go on up the ladder. I prefer to go up the ladder!
The adult ought never to mold the child after himself, but should leave him alone and work always from the deepest comprehension of the child himself.
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.
We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.
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.
It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.
Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.
Culture and education have no bounds or limits; now man is in a phase in which he must decide for himself how far he can proceed in the culture that belongs to the whole of humanity.
When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards.
Sometimes very small children in a proper environment develop a skill and exactness in their work that can only surprise us.
A child starts from nothing and advances alone. It is the child's reason about which the sensitive periods revolve. The reason provides the initial force and energy, and a child absorbs his first images to assist the reason and act on it.
But if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation.
The first essential for the child's development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.
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.
The observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered -- this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions.
The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil.
The first aim of the prepared environment is, as far as it is possible, to render the growing child independent of the adult.
The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one's self.
The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.
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 teacher, when she begins work in our schools, must have a kind of faith that the child will reveal himself through work.
The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.
Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them.
It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was.
The child, in fact, once he feels sure of himself, will no longer seek the approval of authority after every step.
Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.
To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely.
Our aim is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core.
A man is not what he is because of the teachers he has had, but because of what he has done.
The land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the Earth.
The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge.
Education should no longer be most imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.
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.
Education today, in this particular social period, is assuming truly unlimited importance. And the increased emphasis on its practical value can be summed up in one sentence: education is the best weapon for peace.
Love and the hope of it are not things one can learn; they are a part of life's heritage.
How often is the soul of man -- especially in childhood -- deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature.
The principal agent is the object itself and not the instruction given by the teacher. It is the child who uses the objects; it is the child who is active, and not the teacher.
We do not believe in the educative power of words and commands alone, but seek cautiously, and almost without the child's knowing it, to guide his natural activity.
Preventing war is the work of politicians, establishing peace is the work of educationists.
Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements.
Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.
He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth.
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination.
By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man.
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.
An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Conventions which camouflage a man's true feelings are a spiritual lie which help him adapt himself to the organized deviations of society.
Our goal is not so much the imparting of knowledge as the unveiling and developing of spiritual energy.
Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.
Learning to speak, therefore, and the power it brings of intelligent converse with others, is a most impressive further step along the path of independence ... Learning to walk is especially significant, not only because it is supremely complex, but because it is done in the first year of life.
To stimulate life, leaving it then free to develop, to unfold, herein lies the first task of the teacher.
Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises.
The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them.
The first duty of the educator, whether he is involved with the newborn infant or the older child, is to recognize the human personality of the young being and respect it.
It is not the child as a physical but as a psychic being that can provide a strong impetus to the betterment of mankind. It is the spirit of the child that can determine the course of human progress and lead it perhaps even to a higher form of civilization.