We await the successsive births in the soul of the child. We give all possible material, that nothing may lack to the groping soul, and then we watch for the perfect faculty to come, safeguarding the child from interruption so that it may carry its efforts through.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of nurturing a child's development without interruption, providing everything they need for growth and learning.
Maria Montessori highlights the role of educators and caregivers in fostering a child's inner potential. By providing a supportive environment and necessary resources, adults can ensure that a child's natural abilities can flourish. The focus is on being patient and allowing the child to navigate their own learning journey, free from unnecessary interference.
In practice
In an educational seminar focused on child development.
... 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.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
Study as if you were going to live forever; live as if you were going to die tomorrow.
As children growing up here in the East Bay, we were raised by a community with a deep belief in the promise of our country - and, a deep understanding of the parts of that promise that still remain unfulfilled.
You can never learn anything that you did not already know
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