Maria Montessori Quotes

The Montessori Method- learning by doing-once again became my stock in trade.

I have studied the child. I have taken what the child has given me and expressed it and that is what is called the Montessori method.

I learn in a different way. I learn experientially.

We do not believe in the educative power of words and commands alone, but seek cautiously, and almost without the child's knowing it, to guide his natural activity.

Rousseau ranks among the great educational theorists of the modern era, even if he was the last man to put in charge of a classroom. Young adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their distinctive way.

I always believe that a person can learn so much by just jumping into something and trying to do it rather than having someone else teach you everything.

The drills we do, where you're telling kids to memorize things, don't actually work. What works is engaging them and letting them do things and discover things.

I don't learn as well, I think, in like a structured way. I kind of have to be thrown into it.

It is cheering to note that [Martin] Luther (1524) did not see why schools should not be fun as well: "Now since the young must leap and jump, or have something to do, because they have a natural desire for it which should not be restrained (for it is not well to check them in everything) why should we not provide for them such schools, and lay before them such studies?

Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.

Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.

Crucial to science education is hands-on involvement: showing, not just telling; real experiments and field trips and not just 'virtual reality.'

Kids get bored easily. They have got to get out and get their hands dirty: make things, dismantle things, fix things.

Kids can learn a lot by seeing things rather than reading it.

Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.

Seriously, who really cares how long the Nile river is, or who was the first to discover cheese? How is memorizing that ever going to help anyone? Instead, we need to give kids projects that allow them to exercise their minds and discover things for themselves.

What would happen if we finally succeeded in following the directions of nature and recognized that the great secret of education lies hidden in the maxim, 'Do not educate'?

You can learn so much just by doing, not by listening to anybody.

You learn more doing than doing training.

Learners are encouraged to discover facts and relationships for themselves.

We need a pedagogy free from fear and focused on the magic of children's innate quest for information and understanding.

We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test.

A living art of teaching, one that rests on a true understanding of the human being, has a thread of strength running through it that stimulates individual students to participate so that it is not necessary to keep their attention through direct 'individualized' treatment.

You can go to school and learn and that works for some people. But I think the best kind of learning is practical and learning on the job.

The kids have got their iPads, but they prefer to get out climbing trees and coming out with me. That's the kind of learning I want them to have: experiences.