Maria Montessori Quotes (24 Quotes)

We cannot know the consequences of suppressing a child's spontaneity when he is just beginning to be active. We may even suffocate life itself. That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.

Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.

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

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

We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.

In her 1946 book, Education in a New World, ... education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

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 greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion that education must start from birth.

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 only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

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.

Discipline must come through liberty.... We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silentas a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

We 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.

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

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child.

If 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?

If 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.

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."

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.