Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
MARIA MONTESSORINever help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
MARIA MONTESSORIIt is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes.
MARIA MONTESSORIWe teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.
MARIA MONTESSORIThe consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.
MARIA MONTESSORINo, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.
MARIA MONTESSORIIf an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.
MARIA MONTESSORIIf the ways of the Almighty are not humanly logical, it is not the fault of the Almighty but of the limitations of human logic.
MARIA MONTESSORITravel stories teach geography; insect stories lead the child into natural science; and so on.
MARIA MONTESSORIThe greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’
MARIA MONTESSORIEstablishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
MARIA MONTESSORIIndeed 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 MONTESSORIIf the whole of mankind is to be united into one brotherhood, all obstacles must be removed so that men, all over the surface of the globe, should be as children playing in a garden.
MARIA MONTESSORIThrough 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 MONTESSORIFree the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.
MARIA MONTESSORINow, 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.
MARIA MONTESSORISuddenly, the child becomes very sensitive to the rudeness and humiliations which he had previously suffered with patient indifference.
MARIA MONTESSORI