Insightful-Maria Montessori

• • • It is not enough for the teacher to love the child. She must first love and understand the universe. She must prepare herself, and truly work at it.
    • Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.
    • Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life.
    • Adults look upon a child as something empty that is to be filled through their own efforts, as something inert and helpless for which they must do everything, as something lacking an inner guide and in constant need of inner direction. . . . An adult who acts in this way, even though he may be convinced that he is filled with zeal, love, and a spirit of sacrifice on behalf of his child, unconsciously suppresses the development of the child’s own personality.
    • The real preparation for education is the study of one’s self.
    • We are here to offer to this life, which came into the world by itself, the means necessary for its development, and having done that we must await this development with respect.
    • There is a part of a child’s soul that has always been unknown but which must be known.  With a spirit of sacrifice and enthusiasm we must go in search, like those who travel to foreign lands and tear up mountains in their search for hidden gold.
    • No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child.
    • The adult ought never to mold the child after himself, but should leave him alone and work always from the deepest comprehension of the child himself.
    • Knowing what we must do is neither fundamental nor difficult, but to comprehend which presumptions and vain prejudices we must rid ourselves of in order to be able to educate our children is most difficult.
    • To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.
    • It is not the child as a physical but as a psychic being that can provide a strong impetus to the betterment of mankind.
    • One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child itself.
    • The land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the Earth.
    • Growth comes from activity, not from intellectual understanding.
    • If a child is to be treated differently than he is today a radical change, and one upon which everything else will depend, must first be made; and that change must be made in the adult.
    • No adult can become a teacher of love without a special effort, without opening the eyes of his consciousness in order to see a world more vast than his own.

-Maria Montessori, Italian physician & educator