Maria Montessori Quotes

The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.

There is no greater education than one that is self-driven.

Education can become a self-fulfilling activity, liberating in and of itself.

For among other things he had been counseled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom.

The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind.

Freedom is the basic thing. Consciousness grows in freedom and starts dying, becomes paralyzed and crippled, when things are forced. And up to now, this has been done. This is the greatest crime that parents have always committed against children. They go on forcing the child.

Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self reliant enough to be free.

The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.

We need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. It’s not about making learning happen; it’s about letting it happen.

Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.

Liberty is the first condition of growth. It is wrong, a thousand times wrong, if any of you dares to say, 'I will work out the salvation of this woman or child.

Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy-these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.

How often does a man ruin his disciples by remaining always with them! When men are once trained, it is essential that their leader leave them, for without his absence they cannot develop themselves. Plants always remain small under a big tree.

But little do or can the best of us: That little is achieved through Liberty.

It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality.

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.

Women no longer need to be in a relationship. You can pay for your own life, you can have children on your own, basically do whatever you want on your own. So if you're going to create an addition to your life, it should be about love. That makes me happy.

I never presumed to tell anyone who could make a rainbow what color to make children.

Education is something that other people do to you. Learning is something you do for yourself.

When it became clear that in fact my father was saying, "It will be interesting to see what you want to do when you grow up," I realized that there was no pressure on that front. And I remember huge relief: Hey, I can go and do what I really know I have to do!

It doesn't matter how much you learn in school; it's whether you learn how to go on and do things by yourself. And that can be done at any level.

I love learning, but hate being taught.

I was my own teacher and pupil, in a comradeship so firm and persevering that the most trying incidents of my life served only to strengthen the union.

The business of both parent and teacher is to enable and to help the child to educate himself, to develop his own intellectual, moral, aesthetic and practical capacities and to grow freely as an organic being, not to be kneaded and pressured into form like an inert plastic material