Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.
MARIA MONTESSORIFree the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.
MARIA MONTESSORIThere can be no ‘graduated exercises in drawing’ leading up to an artistic creation. That goal can be attained only through the development of mechanical technique and through the freedom of the spirit.
MARIA MONTESSORIIt is not true that I invented what is called the Montessori Method… I have studied the child; I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it, and that is what is called the Montessori Method.
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 MONTESSORIThe man of character is the persistent man, the man who is faithful to his own word, his own convictions, his own affections.
MARIA MONTESSORIThe child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it.
MARIA MONTESSORIIt 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.
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 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 MONTESSORIBooks are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two ‘languages.’ It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.
MARIA MONTESSORIThe 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.
MARIA MONTESSORIWhen you have solved the problem of controlling the attention of the child, you have solved the entire problem of its education.
MARIA MONTESSORIIf education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?
MARIA MONTESSORIWe recommend for the training of teachers not only a considerable artistic education in general but special attention to the art of reading.
MARIA MONTESSORIWe cannot create observers by saying ‘observe’, but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.
MARIA MONTESSORIDependence 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