Maria Montessori Quotes

Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental.

The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.

All learning is in the learner, not in the teacher.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being "with it," yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Education is what you learn after you leave school.

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

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

I used to be really insecure about my self-education. I'm definitely always learning. But there's many ways to learn. There are many, many ways to always be a learner.

I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way.

We think we learn from teachers, and we sometimes do. But the teachers are not always to be found in school or in great laboratories. Sometimes what we learn depends upon our own powers of insight.

I learned a lot I wouldn't have learned roaming the streets of Dallas.

One of the things that is very silly - and I hear from educators all the time - is that schools essentially teach kids to learn. They don't need school for that. Learning is what they do best.

The ultimate goal of the educational system is to shift to the individual the burden of pursing his own education. This will not be a widely shared pursuit until we get over our odd conviction that education is what goes on in school buildings and nowhere else.

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'?

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one - reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new - that's my prayer.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught.

But, if you observe children learning in their first few years of life, you can see that they can and do learn on their own - we leave them alone to crawl, walk, talk, and gain control over their bodies. It happens without much help from parents.

The education of a man is never completed until he dies.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Man learns from the cradle to the grave.

The true teachers and educators are not those who have learned pedagogy as the science of dealing with children, but those in whom pedagogy has awakened through understanding the human being.