Maria Montessori - Development Quotes

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We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind.

Maria Montessori
If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities.

Maria Montessori
If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to posses them.

Maria Montessori
The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned.

Maria Montessori
The development of the individual can be described as a succession of new births at consecutively higher levels.

Maria Montessori
If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?

Maria Montessori
The peril of servilism and dependence lies not only in that "useless consuming of life," which leads to helplessness, but in the development of individual traits which indicate all too plainly a regrettable perversion and degeneration of the normal man. I refer to the domineering and tyrannical behaviour with examples of which we are all only too familiar. The domineering habit develops side by side with helplessness. It is the outward sign of the state of feeling of him who conquers through the work of others. Thus it often happens that the master is a tyrant toward his servant. It is the spirit of the task-master toward the slave.

Maria Montessori
The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child.

Maria Montessori