Maria Montessori

Only when the child is able to identify its own center with the center of the universe does education really begin.

The teacher’s first duty is to watch over the environment, and this takes precedence over all the rest. It’s influence is indirect, but unless it be well done there will be no effective and permanent results of any kind, physical, intellectual or spiritual.

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.

Sometimes very small children in a proper environment develop a skill and exactness in their work that can only surprise us.

Social grace, inner discipline and joy. These are the birthright of the human being who has been allowed to develop essential human qualities.

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.

To teach details is to bring confusion; to establish the relationship between things is to bring knowledge.

When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards.

A child needs freedom within limits.

There must be provision for the child to have contact with nature; to understand and appreciate the order, the harmony and the beauty in nature.

Peace is what every human being is craving for, and it can be brought about by humanity through the child.

A child's work is to create the person she/he will become.

Freedom in intellectual work is found to be the basis of internal discipline.

The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child.

Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content.

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

Our aim is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core.

Whatever is presented to him must be made beautiful and clear, striking his imagination. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationist will disappear.

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.

The child, making use of all that he finds around him, shapes himself for the future.

He who experiments must, while doing so, divest himself of every preconception. It is clear then that if we wish to make use of a method of experimental psychology, the first thing necessary is to renounce all former creeds and to proceed by means of the method in the search for truth.