It is better to treat an adolescent as if he had greater value than he actually shows than as if he had less and let him feel that his merits and self-respect are disregarded.
MARIA MONTESSORIWhen the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.
More Maria Montessori Quotes
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Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
The selfsame procedure which zoology, a branch of the natural sciences, applies to the study of animals, anthropology must apply to the study of man; and by doing so, it enrolls itself as a science in the field of nature.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
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.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
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.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
Indeed there are powers in the small child that are far greater than is generally realized, because it is in this period that the construction, the building-up, of man takes place, for at birth, psychically speaking, there is nothing at all – zero!
MARIA MONTESSORI -
No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
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.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
The purpose of life is to obey the hidden command which ensures harmony among all and creates an ever better world.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
The study of expression ought to form a part of the study of psychology, but it also comes within the province of anthropology because the habitual, life-long expressions of the face determine the wrinkles of old age, which are distinctly an anthropological characteristic.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
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.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
The ancient superficial idea of the uniform and progressive growth of the human personality has remained unaltered, and the erroneous belief has persisted that it is the duty of the adult to fashion the child according to the pattern required by society.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
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.
MARIA MONTESSORI -
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.
MARIA MONTESSORI