The child’s parents are not his makers but his guardians.
Interpretation
Parents guide and protect their children rather than creating them.
This quote by Maria Montessori emphasizes that while parents play a crucial role in a child's life, they do not create their child's intrinsic nature or identity. Instead, they serve as guardians, responsible for nurturing and providing a safe environment where children can grow and develop their unique selves.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech at a parenting workshop.
... the first thing his education demands is the provision of an environment in which he can develop the powers given him by nature. This does not mean just to amuse him and let him do what he likes. But it does mean that we have to adjust our minds to doing a work of collaboration with nature, to being obedient to one of her laws, the law which decrees that development comes from environmental experience.
When we want to infuse new ideas, _x000D_ to modify or better the habits and customs of a people, _x000D_ to breathe new vigor into its national traits, _x000D_ we must use the children as our vehicle; for little can be accomplished with adults.
Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.
What we need is a world full of miracles, like the miracle of seeing the young child seeking work and independence, and manifesting a wealth of enthusiasm and love.
To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.
It is fortunate, I think, that nature is not bounded by human reason and by laboratory work and experimentation, for by the laws of pure reason and by microscopic investigation, it might easily have been proved, long before this, that children could not be born.
Let us in education dream of an aristocracy of achievement arising out of a democracy of opportunity
It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.
You cannot make thousands of universities or hundreds of thousands of professors, but with technology and the Internet you can have great courses and make a digital university.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends upon knowing that secret; that secrets can only be known in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags.
Every job I took was really me getting paid to learn about a new industry.
Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.