Maria Montessori Quotes
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If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men. The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities.
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* '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.'
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Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.
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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.
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The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.
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If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.
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'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'
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The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task.
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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.
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The task of the educator of young children lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.
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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.'
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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.
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As attributed in Winning Strategies for Classroom Management (2000), p. 2.