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. (Maria Montessori)
Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world. (Maria Montessori)
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. (Maria Montessori)
To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator. (Maria Montessori)
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. (Maria Montessori)
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. (Maria Montessori)
We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. (Maria Montessori)
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 . . . (Maria Montessori)
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. (Maria Montessori)
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 . . . (Maria Montessori)
The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything! (Maria Montessori)
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. (Maria Montessori)
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. (Maria Montessori)
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. (Maria Montessori)
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. (Maria Montessori)
More Maria Montessori Quotations (Based on Topics)