Maria Montessori Quotes

The fundamental purpose of schools is to grow adults.

Education must not simply teach work - it must teach Life.

How on earth do people imagine we equip children for life if we never show them the sorts of issues other people encounter, if we never talk through with them how they might deal with difficulty or violence or unexpected shocks and surprises?

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.

Never set a child afloat on the flat sea of life with only one sail to catch the wind.

A child develops individuality long before he develops taste.

Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purpose.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one's resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

By education, I mean an all-round drawing of the best in child and man in body, mind and spirit.

How can those of us who are parents help our children recognize their bliss?

The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life.

Children are taught to fear and obey; the avarice, pride, or timidity of parents teaches children economy, arrogance, or submission. They are also encouraged to be imitators, a course to which they are already only too much inclined. No one thinks of making them original, courageous, independent.

At the Brooklyn Ethical Culture School, we learned to express ourselves, and I've been expressing myself ever since.

One of the best ways of understanding human nature is to study children. After all, if we want understand who we are, we should find out how we got to be that way.

There are obviously two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.

Education is not just about going to school and getting a degree. It's about widening your knowledge and absorbing the truth about life.

I think it is totally wrong and terribly harmful if education is defined as acquiring knowledge.

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.

I've learned so much as both a writer and a human.

I am sure it is one's duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one's own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

Education is not solely about earning a great living. It means living a great life.

Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world.