Maria Montessori - The Absorbent Mind (1949)

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One who has drunk at the fountain of spiritual happiness says good-by of his own accord to the satisfactions that come from a higher professional status … What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist."

Maria Montessori
The world of education is like an island where people, cut off from the world, are prepared for life by exclusion from it.

Maria Montessori
At one year of age the child says his first intentional wordhis babbling has a purpose, and this intention is a proof of conscious intelligenceHe becomes ever more aware that language refers to his surroundings, and his wish to master it consciously becomes also greater.Subconsciously and unaided, he strains himself to learn, and this effort makes his success all the more astonishing.

Maria Montessori
Education, as conceived today, is something separated both from biological and social life.

Maria Montessori
The greatest step forward in human evolution was made when society began to help the weak and the poor, instead of oppressing and despising them.

Maria Montessori
The study of love and its utilization will lead us to the source from which it springs, The Child.

Maria Montessori
The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator.

Maria Montessori
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
Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.

Maria Montessori
Growth comes from activity, not from intellectual understanding.

Maria Montessori
The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth.

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
Love and the hope of it are not things one can learn; they are a part of life's heritage.

Maria Montessori
There is... in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

Maria Montessori
Infancy is a period of true importance, because, when we want to infuse new ideas, to modify or better the habits and customs of a people, to breathe new vigor into its national traits, we must use the child as our vehicle; for little can be accomplished with adults.

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