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Quotes by Maria Montessori

Italian educator & physician (1870 - 1952)

Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.

I keep pointing at the child; they keep staring at my finger.

The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master.

The child's true constructive energy, a dynamic power, has remained unnoticed for thousands of years. Just as men have trodden the earth, and later tilled its surface, without thought for the immense wealth hidden in its depths, so the men of our day make progress after progress in civilized life, without noticing the treasures that lie hidden in the psychic world of infancy.