Maria Montessori
66 quotes
Biography
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer.
"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.'"
"Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create."
"Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called intelligence."
"It seems as though a new epoch were in preparation, a truly human epoch, and as though the end had almost come of those evolutionary periods which sum up the history of the heroic struggles of humanity; an epoch in which an assured peace will promote the brotherhood of man, while morality and love will take their place as the highest form of human superiority. In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of woman in approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects man always has yielded women the palm."
"Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed."
"The task of the educator of young children lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity."
"* "In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child.""
"We have in ourselves tendencies that are not good and which flourish like weeds in a field. (Original sin). These tendencies are many; they fall into seven groups, known of old as the Seven deadly sins. All deadly sins tend to separate us from the child; for the child compared to us, is not only purer but has mysterious qualities, which we adults as a rule cannot perceive, but in which we must believe with faith, for Jesus spoke to them so clearly and insistently that all the Evangelists recorded His words: Unless ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall nor enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. That which the educator must seek is to be able to see the child as Jesus saw him. It is with this endeavour, thus defined and delimited, that we wish to deal."
"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"
"The peril of servilism and dependence lies not only in that "useless consuming of life," which leads to helplessness, but in the development of individual traits which indicate all too plainly a regrettable perversion and degeneration of the normal man. I refer to the domineering and tyrannical behaviour with examples of which we are all only too familiar. The domineering habit develops side by side with helplessness. It is the outward sign of the state of feeling of him who conquers through the work of others. Thus it often happens that the master is a tyrant toward his servant. It is the spirit of the task-master toward the slave."
"Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them. The remedy is not that adults should gain some new intellectual knowledge or achieve a higher standard of culture. No, they must find a different point of departure. The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is."
"If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to possess them."
"Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities."
"The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task."
"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."
"We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind."
"One who has drunk at the fountain of spiritual happiness says good-by of his own accord to the satisfactions that come from a higher professional status … What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist.""
"If a teacher can discern what a child is trying to do in his informational interaction with the environment, and if that teacher can have on hand materials relevant to that intention, if he can impose a relevant challenge with which the child can cope, supply a relevant model for imitation, or pose a relevant question the child can answer, that teacher can call forth the kind of accommodative change that constitutes psychological development or growth."
"We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry."
"Establishing lasting peace is the work of education all politics can do is keep us out of war."
"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?"
"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."
"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?"
"One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child."