External Activity & Potential

"The role of education is to interest the child profoundly in an external activity to which he will give all his potential. We are concerned here with bringing him liberty and independence while interesting him in an activity through which he will subsequently discover reality. And for him this is the means by which he may free himself of the adult."

Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence, p 11

Importance of Education

"What makes Montessori education so special is that its objective is to help human beings with the enormous task of inner construction necessary to pass from childhood to full adulthood. Education is an essential aspect of human development. We cannot become fully adult without it. The level of formation the individual personality can reach depends on it."

Mario M. Montessori, Jr. Education for Human Development, p97

Awareness

A child who gathers in the smallest details must look upon us with a certain degree of contempt since he is unaware of the mental syntheses which we are constantly making . He must as a consequence look upon us as being somewhat inefficient, as individuals who do not see well. From a child's viewpoint we are not very exact.

Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, p 69

War

Men will waste their efforts, and their wealth, they will lay themselves open to the destruction of their own achievements and run the risk of famine, simply because they have been ordered to do so.

Maria Montessori, Peace and Education, p 26

Gaining Impressions

A child does not have the same feeling for order that we do. Experience has made us indifferent. But a child is poor and in the process of gaining impressions. He starts from nothing and feels the fatigue of creation.

Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood, p 58

Scourge of War

War today is really a scourge which can have no other meaning than that of being an eternal chastisement attached to the moral errors which darken the human mind.

Maria Montessori, Peace and Education, p 26

Builder of Man

 

The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who have filled him up with it. No, the child is the builder of man. There is no man existing who has not been formed by the child he once was. In order to form a man great powers are necessary and these powers are possessed only by the child.

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p 19

Task of the Teacher

So we found that education is not what the teacher gives: education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual. It is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiencing upon the environment. The task of the teacher then becomes not one of talking, but one of preparing a series of motives of cultural activity spread in a specially prepared environment.

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p 7

Basis of Second Plane

The three characteristics we have just isolated for examination - the child's felt need to escape the closed environment, the passage of his mind from the concrete to the abstract, and the birth in him of a moral sense - serve as the basis for a scheme of the second period.

Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence, p 7

Second Plane of Development

The seven to twelve year old period, then, constitutes one of particular importance for moral education. The adult must be aware of the evolution that is occurring in the mind of the child at this time and adapt his methods to conform with it.

Maria Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence, p 6

Hindering the child

Above all it is to be noted that the child has a passionate love for order and work, possesses intellectual qualities superior by far to what might have been expected. It is very evident that, subjected to the usual education, the child has had not only to withdraw within himself, but to dissimulate his powers, in order to adapt himself to the judgement of the adult who lorded it over him.

Maria Montessori, Peace and Education, p 21

Montessori in Practice

Montessori believed that it was only by seeing the children in her classrooms that adults could understand the phenomenon of human development and how it was assisted by her educational approach.

Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori Today, p 43

Ideas

"Children do not judge whether something is good or bad, ugly or beautiful, nice or not. They judge just and beautiful what you consider just and beautiful, you who are their group?"

Mario M. Montessori, The Human Tendencies and Montessori Education, p 44

Graduating to the conscious

"Little by little the child becomes conscious of all the things, these form his consciousness. And so we see the path followed by the child. He acquires all unconsciously, gradually passing from unconscious to conscious, following a path of pleasure and love."

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p36

Moving to Abstraction

"Children show great attachment to the abstract subjects when they arrive at them through manual activity."

Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential, p 13

Follow the Interests of the Child

"The child should love everything that he learns, for his mental and emotional growths are linked. Whatever is presented to him must be made beautiful and clear, striking his imagination. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationist will disappear."

Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential, p 25

Permanence

"The old spiritual values are being attacked, the new ideologies are struggling against them and against each other: nothing seems sure or permanent. It is bad enough for us, adults, who are already set in our ideas, but how much more difficult it is for most of the children! No matter how many psychologists come to their help - if conditions remain as they are, and if we educators do nothing to make it possible for the child to build for himself a basic behaviour by incarnating the stable realities hidden under the chaotic appearance, he will not find it easy to grow feeling confident in life."

Mario M. Montessori, The Human Tendencies and Montessori Education, p 17

Power of the Real

"By offering the child the story of the universe, we give him something a thousand times more infinite and mysterious to reconstruct with his imagination, a drama no fable can reveal. If imagination be educated merely by fairy tales, at most the pleasure it gives will be continued later in novel-reading, but we should never so limit its education."

Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential, p16

Gift of Love

"Love is a gift of the Universal Consciousness for a special aim and purpose, as is everything lent to man by the Cosmic Consciousness. If the aim is not fulfilled, then nothing can sustain itself and all crumbles away."

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p420

Acquisition of Consciousness

"This consciousness seems to us a great acquisition. To become conscious; to acquire a human mind! But we pay for it. Because as soon as we become conscious, every new acquisition causes hard work and fatigue."

Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p 37

Natural Hand Movements

"But let us observe the spontaneous drawings of normal children...That vertical strokes should prepare for alphabetical writing seems incredibly illogical. The alphabet is made up of curves..."

Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method, p259

Deportment

"In the 'Children's Houses' the child will not only learn to move gracefully and properly, but will come to understand the reason for such deportment."

Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method, p84