Maria Montessori Quotes

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

My learning process is by eye alone; it's not at all scientific.

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

We discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being.

All learning is in the learner, not in the teacher.

Are any of us self-taught? It just means I didn't go to school for it. But you do have teachers. You have mentors.

Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.

Most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

My mother tells this story that when I first went to school, I thought I was going to help the teachers. I didn't realise I was going to get educated.

One of the things that is very silly - and I hear from educators all the time - is that schools essentially teach kids to learn. They don't need school for that. Learning is what they do best.

I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

I never went to school for art or was told what to like or when. So every day is a learning process, like most of life.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.

I used to be really insecure about my self-education. I'm definitely always learning. But there's many ways to learn. There are many, many ways to always be a learner.

Whatever education I got was from experience and reading. But I also realize I wouldn't pass my friend's sixth-grade class.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.