Quotes from Maria Montessori

Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.

For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

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.

The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.

The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six.

Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future.

Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.

It is by developing the individual that he is prepared for that wonderful manifestation of the human intelligence, which drawing constitutes. The 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.

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

Now, 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.

Children display a universal love of mathematics, which is par excellence the science of precision, order, and intelligence.

The whole of mankind is one and only one, one race, one class and one society.

Giving children the opportunity to stir up life and leave it free to discover.

There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all of the life to be found around them in a real forest.

The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child.

No one can be free unless he is independent.

Two things are necessary, the development of individuality and the participation of the individual in a truly social life.

Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life.

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was.

The hand is, in the highest degree, a human characteristic. It is man's organ of grasp and of the sense of touch, while in animals these two functions are relegated to the mouth.

The maternal duty of suckling her own children, prescribed to mothers by hygienists, is based on a physiological principle: the mother's milk nourishes an infant more perfectly than any other.

There 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.

A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.

The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world