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Education & Peace - Maria Montessori, Date Unknown The question of peace cannot be considered only in its negative side as is generally done in politics: that is as a problem of 'avoiding war' and consequently of solving the conflicts between nations without violence. ​ Peace also has a positive side which consists in a constructive social reform. It is often repeated that 'to have a new society a new man must be formed', but that is an abstract sentence. It is true that man himself can be improved and that society could be founded on principles of justice and love, but this represents a remote aspiration. ​ There is however a positive and immediate question to be considered with regard to peace: the society of man has stayed behind as to the form of organization needed at its present state. What must be considered therefore is the 'need of the present moment' not the organization of a better 'future'. ​ Today society lacks an adequate training of man for the present state of civil life, and a 'moral organization' of the masses. There is an absolute disorganization of humanity. Men are educated to consider themselves as isolated individuals who have to satisfy their own immediate interests in competition with other individuals. Instead there should be a powerful organization to understand and organize social events, to propose and pursue collective aims, thus ordaining the progress of civilization. ​ Today there is only an 'organization of things', but not of man. The environment is the only thing organized. Technical progress has set in motion a formidable mechanism that now moves of its own accord and drags the individuals after itself, as a magnet draws a cloud of iron dust, and they are crushed in its gearing. This can be said of everybody, manual and intellectual workers as well. They are all isolated in their interests; they are only looking for the profession that secures their material life; they are all drawn and absorbed by the material machines or the bureaucratic mechanisms. But it is evident that mechanism cannot draw man toward progress, because progress must depend on the man himself. There should be a moment when mankind should take command of its products and assume the directive. This moment has arrived. Either the masses organize themselves and master the mechanical world or the mechanical world will destroy mankind. ​ If it is recognized that it is this formidable progress and this universal participation of mankind to the realized progress that needs the organization of mankind to uphold itself, it will then also be understood that a new factor must be taken into consideration. Not only, but that this factor has already set to work and therefore urges the whole ofmankind to interfere and to fill up the gap that endangers the existence of civilization. Mankind must be organized, because the 'weak spot' through which enters the enemy - that is war - is not the material frontier of nations, but the lack of preparation of man and the isolation of the individual. It is necessary to develop the spiritual life of man and then to organize mankind for Peace. Peace has its positive side in reconstruction of human society on scientifically determined bases. The peaceful social harmony should have a unique foundation, this cannot be but man himself.

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Unsourced Quotes 1. No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child. 2. The organization of psychical life begins with the characteristic phenomenon of attention. 3. The process by which the human personality is formed is the secret work of incarnation. 4. 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. 5. Do not erase the designs the child makes in the soft wax of his inner life. 6. 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. 7. To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself. 8. The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent or teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens. 9. Any child who is self-sufficient, who can tie his shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy and sense of achievement the image of human dignity, which is derived from a sense of independence. 10. The life of the spirit prepares the dynamic power for daily life, and, on its side, daily life encourages thought by means of ordinary work. 11. Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction. 12. The most difficult thing to make clear to the new teacher is that because the child progresses, she must restrain herself and avoid giving directions, even if at first they are expected; all her faith must repose in his latent powers. 13. Certainly there is something that compels a teacher to advise very young students continually; ultimately she must be resigned to quelling every bit of vanity, or she will obtain no results. 14. The more the capacity to concentrate is developed, the more often the profound tranquility in work is achieved, then the clearer will be the manifestation of discipline within the child. 15. It is necessary, then, to give the child the possibility of developing according to the laws of his nature, so that he can become strong, and, having become strong, can do even more than we dared hope for him. 16. It is almost possible to say that there is a mathematical relationship between the beauty of his surroundings and the activity of the child; he will make discoveries rather more voluntarily in a gracious setting than in an ugly one. 17. We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction. 18. A felicitous environment that guides the children and offers them the means to exercise their own faculties permits the teacher to absent herself temporarily. The creation of such an environment is already the realization of great progress. 19. Respect all the reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them. 20. We must support as much as possible the child's desires for activity; not wait on him, but educate him to be independent. 21. If we have neither sufficient experience nor love to enable us to distinguish the fine and delicate expressions of the child's life, if we do not know how to respect them, then we perceive them only when they are manifested violently. 22. Our goal is not so much the imparting of knowledge as the unveiling and developing of spiritual energy. 23. 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. 24. We must help the child to liberate himself from his defects without making him feel his weakness. 25. The child is much more spiritually elevated than is usually supposed. He often suffers, not from too much work, but from work that is unworthy of him. 26. It is not the child as a physical but as a psychic being that can provide a strong impetus to the betterment of mankind. 27. 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. 28. The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is. 29. In their dealings with children adults do not become egotistic but egocentric. They look upon everything pertaining to a child's soul from their own point of view and, consequently, their misapprehensions increase. 30. There is in the soul of a child an impenetrable secret that is gradually revealed as it develops. 31. Plainly, the environment must be a living one, directed by a higher intelligence, arranged by an adult who is prepared for his mission. 32. No one can be free unless he is independent: therefore, the first, active manifestations of the child's individual liberty must be so guided that through this activity he may arrive at independence. 33. We habitually serve children; and this is not only an act of servility toward them, but it is dangerous, since it tends to suffocate their useful, spontaneous activity. 34. The liberty of the child should have as its limit the collective interest. 35. The prize and the punishment are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and therefore we cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them. 36. The first essential for the child's development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy. 37. The lesson must be presented in such a way that the personality of the teacher shall disappear. There shall remain in evidence only the object to which she wishes to call the attention of the child. 38. The exercises of practical life are formative activities, a work of adaptation to the environment. Such adaptation to the environment and efficient functioning therein is the very essence of a useful education. 39. But to ensure the psychic phenomena of growth, we must prepare the environment in a definite manner, and from this environment offer the child the external means directly necessary for him. 40. Experienced teachers understand better that liberty begins when the life that must be developed in the child is initiated, and they possess a tact which greatly facilitates orientation in the initial period. 41. The development of the child during the first three years after birth is unequaled in intensity and importance by any period that precedes or follows in the whole life of the child. 42. The teacher's skill in not interfering comes with practice, like everything else, but it never comes easily for even to help can be a source of pride. 43. Ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment. 44. One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child itself. 45. But if for the physical life it is necessary to have the child exposed to the vivifying forces of nature, it is also necessary for his psychical life to place the soul of the child in contact with creation. 46. 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. 47. Since adults have no concept of the importance of physical activity for the child, they put a damper on it as a cause of disturbance. 48. The training of the teacher who is to help life is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit. 49. The real preparation for education is the study of one's self. 50. This idea, that life acts of itself, and that in order to study it, to divine it's secrets or to direct its activity, it is necessary to observe it and to understand it without interfering - this idea, I say, is very difficult for anyone to assimilate. 51. It is my belief that the thing which we should cultivate in our teachers is more the spirit than the mechanical skill of the scientist; that is, the direction of the preparation should be toward the spirit rather than toward the mechanism. 52. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. 53. The teacher's first duty is to watch over the environment, and this takes precedence over all the rest. Its influence is indirect, but unless it be well done there will be no effective and permanent results of any kind, physical, intellectual or spiritual. 54. It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose which it truly has. 55. To aid life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself, that is the basic task of the educator. 56. And so we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. 57. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child. 58. We then found that individual activity is the one factor that stimulates and produces development, and that this is not more true for the little ones of preschool age than it is for upper school children. 59. Whoever touches the life of the child touches the most sensitive point of a whole which has roots in the most distant past and climbs toward the infinite future. 60. The activity of the child has always been looked upon as an expression of his vitality. But his activity is really the work he performs in building up the man he is to become. It is the incarnation of the human spirit. 61. The training of the teacher is something far more than a learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit. 62. The studies which have been made of early infancy leave no room for doubt: the first two years are important forever, because in that period, one passes from being nothing into being something. 63. The child becomes a person through work. 64. The word education must not be understood in the sense of teaching but of assisting the psychological development of the child. 65. Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities. 66. The role of education is the interest the child profoundly in an external activity to which he will give all of his potential. 67. Education is not something which the teacher does. It is a natural process which develops spontaneously. 68. Education between the ages of six and twelve is not a direct continuation of that which has gone before, although it is built upon that foundation. 69. The first duty of the educator, whether he is involved with the newborn infant or the older child, is to recognize the human personality of the young being and respect it. 70. The elementary child has reached a new level of development. Before he was interested in things: working with his hands, learning their names. Now he is interested mainly in the how and why... the problem of cause and effect. 71. Schools as they are today, are adapted neither to the needs of adolescence nor to the time in which we live. 72. My vision of the future is no longer of people taking exams and proceeding from secondary school to University but of passing from one stage of independence to a higher, by means of their own activity and effort of will. 73. The land is where our roots are. The children must be taught to feel and live in harmony with the Earth. 74. 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. 75. When the child goes out, it is the world itself that offers itself to him. Let us take the child out to show him real things instead of making objects which represent ideas and closing them up in cupboards. 76. Experience is a key for the intensification of instruction given inside the school. 77. It is self-evident that the possession of and contact with real things brings, above all, a real quantity of knowledge. 78. There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all of the life to be found around them in a real forest. 79. How often is the soul of man - especially in childhood - deprived because he is not allowed to come in contact with nature. 80. The needs of mankind are universal. Our means of meeting them create the richness and diversity of the planet. The Montessori child should come to relish the texture of that diversity. 81. The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. 82. Our aim is not only to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his innermost core. 83. We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional as well as physical, and for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind. 84. If the idea of the universe is presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying. 85. To do well, it is necessary to aim at giving the elementary age child an idea of all fields of study, not in precise detail, but an impression. The idea is to sow the seeds of knowledge at this age, when a sort of sensitive period for the imagination exists. 86. Bring the child to the consciousness of his own dignity and he will feel free. 87. We see no limit to what should be offered to the child, for his will be an immense field of chosen activity. 88. The teacher's task is no small or easy one! He has to prepare a huge amount of knowledge to satisfy the child's mental hunger, and he is not, like the ordinary teacher, limited by a syllabus. 89. Not in the service of any political or social creed should the teacher work, but in the service of the complete human being, able to exercise in freedom a self-disciplined will and judgment, unperverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear. 90. The first duty of an education is to stir up life, but leave it free to develop. 91. Schools cannot start too early to encourage the refinement of taste in children. To present for their learning the fine gradations between right and wrong, and to support their treasuring of a sense of the past. 92. Education starts at birth. 93. A new education from birth onwards must be built up. Education must be reconstructed and based on the law of nature and not on the preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society. ​ 94. Let us leave the life free to develop within the limits of the good, and let us observe this inner life developing. This is the whole of our mission. ​ 95. It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience. ​ 96. To keep alive that enthusiasm is the secret of real guidance, and it will not prove a difficult task, provided that the attitude towards the child's acts be that of respect, calm, and waiting, and provided that he be left free in his movements and experiences. ​ 97. 'Wait while observing.' That is the motto of the educator. ​ 98. Let us wait, and be always ready to share in both the joys and the difficulties which the child experiences. ​ 99. If we could say, "We are respectful and courteous in our dealing with children, we treat them as we should like to be treated ourselves," we should have mastered a great educational principle and be setting an example of good education. 100. Our intervention in this marvelous process is indirect; we are here to offer 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. 101. We seek to sow life in the child rather than theories, to help him in his growth, mental and emotional, as well as physical. And for that we must offer grand and lofty ideas to the human mind. 102. The training of the teacher is something far more than learning ideas. It includes the training of character. It is a preparation of the spirit. 103. Only practical work and experience lead the child to maturity. 104. The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. 105. Education is a natural process carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment. 106. The child passes little by little from the unconscious to the conscious, treading always in the paths of joy and love. 107. Our care of the children should be governed not by the desire to 'make them learn things', but by the endeavor always to keep burning within them the light which is called intelligence. 108. The essential thing is to arouse such an interest that it engages the child's whole personality. 109. The 'Children's House' is a garden of child culture, and we most certainly do not keep the children for so many hours in school with the idea of making students of them! 110. The first step we must take in our method is to call to the pupil. We call now to his attention, now to his interior life, now to the life he leads with others. 111. A man is not what he is because of the teachers he has had, but because of what he has done. 112. He who is served is limited in his independence. 113. The mind of one who does not work for that which he needs, but commands it from others, grows heavy and sluggish. 114. Nature offers an interior guidance, but to develop anything in the field, continuous effort and experience are required. 115. Growth comes from activity, not from intellectual understanding. 116. The 'absorbent mind' welcomes everything, puts its hope in everything, accepts poverty equally with wealth, adopts any religion and the prejudices and habits of its countrymen, incarnating all in itself. This is the child! 117. Needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces. 118. Our servants are not our dependents, rather it is we who are dependent upon them. 119. What purpose would education serve in our days unless it helped man to a knowledge of the environment to which he has to adapt himself? 120. Character formation cannot be taught. It comes from experience and not from explanation. 121. It can be said that the period of childhood is an age of 'inner life' which leads to the developing, maturing, and perfecting of all the faculties. 122. Considering the method as a whole, we must begin our work by preparing the child for the forms of social life, and we must attract his attention to these forms. 123. At a given moment a child becomes interested in a piece of work, showing it by the expression of his face, by his intense attention, by his perseverance in the same exercise. That child has set foot upon the road leading to discipline. 124. The education of the senses has, as its aim, the refinement of the differential perception of stimuli by means of repeated exercises. 125. The sense exercises constitute a species of auto-education, which, if these exercises be many times repeated, leads to a perfecting of the child's psycho-sensory processes. 126. Children show a great attachment to the abstract subjects when they arrive at them through manual activity. They proceed to fields of knowledge hitherto held inaccessible to them, as grammar and mathematics. 127. Written language can be acquired more easily by children of four years than by those of six. While children of six usually need at least two years to learn how to write children of four years learn this second language within a few months. 128. The development of language continues, in fact, up to the age of five years, and the mind during this period is in a phase of activity regarding everything that has to do with words. 129. The ability to write will be acquired as a result of the analysis of the words each one possesses and of the activity of one's mind which is interested in such a magical conquest. 130. One of the great problems facing men is their failure to realize the fact that a child possesses an active psychic life even when he cannot manifest it. 131. Children are human beings to whom respect is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future. 132. 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. 133. An adult who does not understand that a child needs to use his hands and does not recognize this as the first manifestation of an instinct for work can be an obstacle to the child's development. 134. It is the child who makes the man, and no man exists who was not made by the child he once was. 135. When dealing with children there is greater need for observing than of probing. 136. It is the spirit of the child that can determine the course of human progress and lead it perhaps even to a higher form of civilization. 137. Children decide on their actions under the prompting of natural laws. If someone usurps the function of this guide the child is prevented from developing either his will or his concentration. 138. What the child achieves between three and six does not depend upon doctrine but on a divine directive which guides his spirit to construction. 139. It is true that we cannot make a genius. We can only give to each child the chance to fulfill his potential possibilities. 140. The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator. 141. The child's development follows a path of successive stages of independence, and our knowledge of this must guide us in our behavior towards him. 142. We must help the child act, think, and will for himself. This is the art of serving the spirit, an art which can be practiced to perfection only when working with children. 143. The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned. 144. The child's first instinct is to carry out his actions by himself, without anyone helping him, and his first conscious bid for independence is made when he defends himself against those who try to do the action for him. 145. The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child, and liberty is activity. 146. Real freedom is a consequence of development. 147. Freedom without organization is useless. The organization of the work, therefore, is the cornerstone of this new structure. But even that organization would be in vain without the liberty to make use of it. 148. A child is a discoverer. He is an amorphous, splendid being in search of his own proper form. 149. Life is activity at its peak, and it is only through activity that the perfectionments of life can be sought and gained. 150. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence. 151. The human hand allows the mind to reveal itself. 152. Our educational aim must be to aid the spontaneous development of the mental, spiritual and physical personality, and not to make of the child a cultured individual in the commonly accepted use of the term. 153. And herein lies the art of the educator; in knowing how to measure the action by which we help the young child's personality to develop. 154. What advice can we give to mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent. 155. To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely. 156. Our schools show that children of different ages help one another. There are many things which no teacher can convey to a child of three, but a child of five can do it with ease. 157. The child's progress does not depend only on his age, but also on being free to look around him. 158. Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes. 159. The children must be free to choose their own occupations, just as they must never be interrupted in their spontaneous activity. 160. Choice and execution are the prerogatives and conquests of a liberated soul. 161. The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task... it is not sufficient to have a merely theoretical knowledge of education. 162. The teacher must have faith that the child will reveal himself through work. 163. We must learn how to call upon the man which lies dormant in the soul of a child. 164. The teacher must bring not only the capacity, but the desire to observe. 165. We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just becoming active; perhaps we suffocate life itself. 166. If the teacher cannot recognize the difference between pure impulse, and the spontaneous energies which spring to life in a tranquilized spirit, then her action will bear no fruit. 167. A teacher, by his passive attitude, removes from the children the obstacle that is created by his own activity and authority. 168. The teacher's mission has for its aim something constant and exact, bearing in mind the words, "He must grow while I diminish." 169. When the teacher shall have touched, in this way, soul for soul, each one of her pupils, a sign, a single word from her shall suffice; for each one will feel her in a living and vital way, will recognize her and will listen to her. 170. The directress must intervene to lead the child from sensations to ideas. 171. A child who is free to act not only seeks to gather sensible impressions from his environment but he also shows a love for exactitude in the carrying out of his actions. 172. Since it is through movement that the will realizes itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act. 173. A teacher, therefore, who would think that he could prepare himself for this mission through study alone would be mistaken. 174. Work is necessary; it can be nothing less than a passion; a person is happy in accomplishment. 175. Confidences would come more easily in the years they are longed for if they were invited in the years when living was exciting and every act a great adventure. 176. Imitation is the first instinct of the awakening mind. 177. The child wants to do something sensible. 178. If children are allowed free development and given occupation to correspond with their unfolding minds their natural goodness will shine forth. 179. I don't need to teach anything to children: it is they who, placed in a favorable environment, teach me. 180. What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." 181. The didactic materials control every error. It is precisely in these errors that the educational importance of the material lies. 182. The materials, in fact, do not offer to the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content. 183. Not upon the ability of the teacher does education rest, but upon the didactic system. When the control and correction of errors is yielded to the materials, there remains for the teacher nothing but to observe. 184. The education of the senses makes men observers. 185. The senses, being explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge. 186. It is exactly in the repetition of the exercises that the education of the senses exists; not that the child shall know colors, forms or qualities, but that he refine his senses through an exercise of attention, comparison and judgment. 187. Some students learn without having ever received any lessons, solely through listening to the lessons given to others. 188. An educational method which cultivates and protects the inner activities of the child is not a question which concerns merely the school or the teachers; it is a universal question. 189. The education of our day is rich in methods, aims and social ends, but one must still say that it takes no account of life itself. 190. Education, as today conceived, is separated from both biological and social life. 191. One who desires to be a teacher must have an interest in humanity that connects the observer more closely than that which joins the biologist or zoologist to nature. 192. The most urgent task facing educators is to come to know this unknown child and to free it from all entanglements. 193. It is solely from a child that a man is born. An adult cannot take part in this work. 194. An adult is more definitely excluded from a child's world than the child himself is from the transcendent social world of the adult. 195. These words reveal the child's inner needs: "Help me to do it alone." 196. No adult can bear a child's burden or grow up in his stead. 197. We could study a child from every angle and know everything about him from the cells of his body to the countless details of his every operation and we would still not perceive his ultimate goal, that is, the adult he is to become. 198. Adults manifest a contempt for children which they fail to realize. Though a parent may believe his child is beautiful and perfect, a secret urge makes him act as though his child is in need of filling and correction. 199. Without realizing it an adult, with his useless assistance and hypnotic influence, substitutes himself for the child and impedes his psychic growth. 200. Sometimes very small children in a proper environment develop a skill and exactness in their work that can only surprise us. 201. If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men. 202. Averting war is the work of politicians; establishing peace is the work of education. 203. If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future. 204. The teacher's task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child. 205. The education of our day is rich in methods, aims, and social ends, but one must still say that it takes no account of life itself. 206. The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life. 207. The child is not an inert being who owes everything he can do to us, as if he were an empty vessel that we have to fill. 208. We, also, when we speak of education are proclaiming a revolution, one in which everything we know today will be transformed. 209. Mothers, fathers, politicians: all must combine in their respect and help for this delicate work of formation, which the child carries on in the depth of a profound psychological mystery, under the tutelage of an inner guide. 210. This is the bright new hope for mankind. Not reconstruction, but help for the constructive work that the human soul is called upon to do, and to bring to fruition; a work of formation which brings out the immense potentialities with which children, the sons of men, are endowed. 211. The child has other powers than ours, and the creation he achieves is no small one; it is everything. 212. This the new path on which education has been put; to help the mind in its process of development, to aid its energies and strengthen its many powers. 213. The child's nature is to aim directly and energetically at functional independence. 214. Only through freedom and environmental experience is it practically possible for human development to occur. 215. The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind. 216. As I have so often said, it is true that we cannot make a genius. We can only give to each individual the chance to fulfill his potential possibilities. 217. To care for, and keep awake, the guide within every child is therefore a matter of the first importance. 218. Children become like the things they love. 219. The child builds his inmost self out of the deeply held impressions he receives. 220. Let us start with one very simple reflection: the child, unlike the adult, is not on his way to death. He is on his way to life. 221. Man is a sculptor of himself, urged by a mysterious inner force to the attainment of an ideal determined form. 222. Growth is not merely a harmonious increase in size, but a transformation. 223. No guide, no teacher can divine the intimate needs of each pupil and the time of maturation necessary to each; but only leave the child free and all this will be revealed to us under the guidance of nature. 224. The principle of liberty is not therefore a principle of abandonment, but rather one by which leading us from illusions to reality will guide us to the most positive and efficacious care of the child. 225. The secret of free development of the child consists, therefore, in organizing for him the means necessary for his internal nourishment. 226. Mind and movement are two parts of a single cycle, and movement is the superior expression. 227. The child should love everything he learns. Whatever is presented to him must be made beautiful and clear. Once this love has been kindled, all problems confronting the educationalist will disappear. 228. Do not offer the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content. 229. So here begins the new path, wherein it will not be the teacher who teaches the child, but the child who teaches the teacher. 230. The adult works to improve his environment while the child works to improve himself. 231. We are the sowers - our children are those who reap. We labor so that future generations will be better and nobler than we are. 232. The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. 233. 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. 234. The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity. 235. The observation of the way in which the children pass from the first disordered movements to those which are spontaneous and ordered -- this is the book of the teacher; this is the book which must inspire her actions . 236. We can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. 237. If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only one which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks. 238. 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. 239. Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. 240. If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it . . . For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind? 241. The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind. 242. Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment. 243. Man, as a spiritual being, has been left to the mercy of outer circumstances and is on the way to becoming a destroyer of his own constructions. 244. There is need of a syllabus which can give an understanding of the conditions of man in modern society with a cosmic vision of history and the evolution of human life. 245. Either education contributes to a movement of universal liberation by showing the way to defend and raise humanity or it becomes like one of those organs which have shriveled up by not being used during the evolution of the organism. 246. Our first teacher, therefore, will be the child himself, or rather the vital urge with the cosmic laws that lead him unconsciously.

Bootie Zimmer's Choice Bootie Zimmer's Choice By John Taylor Gatto CONFERENCE ON PRIVATE INITIATIVES IN EDUCATION Indianapolis, Indiana November 13/14, 1992 Sponsored by: Educational Choice Charitable Trust, The Philanthropy Roundtable, Texas Public Policy Foundation, and the State Policy Network. Attended by educators, legislators, corporate executives and other interested parties from 25 states and the U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C. KEYNOTE SPEECH: John Taylor Gatto Author, Educator, Teacher of the Year (New York, 1989), Lecturer. The government began to compel us all to send our children to school in 1852 in the state of Massachusetts, and from that state the compulsion spread south, west, and north. But did you know that in 1818, 34 years before compulsion laws began, Noah Webster estimated that over 5 MILLION copies of his Spelling Book had been sold? That's pretty good in a population of under 20 million, don't you think? And every purchase decision was made freely, by an individual or a family, and there were no federal, state or city tabs to run bulk purchases on - each decision was made privately, and in each somebody forked over some cash to buy a book. That would seem to suggest that most folks don't have to be compelled to learn, they do it on their own, because they want to. Here's another 5 million copy fact. Did you know that between 1813 and 1823, a fellow named Water Scott sold 5 million copies of his novels in the United States? That would be about equal to a writer selling 60 million books today, but we all know that could never happen. The puzzle becomes even denser when you pick up a Walter Scott novel and try to read it. Let me quote from the opening of Quentin Durward, published in 1823, and read by a lot of kids back then? "The latter part of the fifteenth century prepared a train of future events that ended by raising France to that state of formidable power which has ever since been the principal object of jealousy to the other European nations. Before that period she had to struggle for her very existence with the English, already possessed of her fairest provinces, while the utmost exertions of the King, and the gallantry of her people, could scarcely protect the remainder from a foreign yoke. Nor was this her sole danger..." That's pretty heady stuff, isn't it? I've never read an adequate explanation in John Dewey how an unschooled agricultural mob could manage such material, but I assure you the sales figures are accurate and drawn from the research of a well-respected American historian, Merle Curti. And remember, there was no compulsion then so the readers had to pretty much want to tackle stuff like that in between plowing and strangling the chicken. It seems almost unfair to tell you that there was another writer beloved of common Americans before we had government compulsion schools, but there was; he was a man from upstate New York who sold millions and millions of books, and who currently has a box-office bonanza movie on the boards called The Last of the Mohicans. His name was James Fenimore Cooper and he wrote material like this for ignorant, unschooled Americans: "The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745, when the settled portions of the colony of New York were confined to the four Atlantic counties, a narrow belt of country on each side of the Hudson, extending from the mouth of the falls near its head, and to a few advanced neighborhoods on the Mohawk and the Schoharie...A birds eye view of the whole region east of the Mississippi must then have offered one vast expanse of woods, relieved by a comparatively narrow fringe of cultivation along the seas... In such a vast region of solemn solitude..." Well, I'm sure you get the picture. Such attention to detail would take an ambitious college professor to attend to these days, a mere lecturer wouldn't have the span of attention for it. A transplanted Englishman, John Bristed, wrote in 1818 that the mass of Americans excelled every other people in the world in shrewdness of intellect, general intelligence, versatility and readiness to experiment with untried things. William Cobbett on his return to America in 1817 observed that every farmer was a reader, unlike the European peasant. How on earth did that come to pass and why isn't it true in our well-schooled era? You and I are confronted with a great mystery: we had a perfectly literate country before 1852 when, for the first time, we got government schooling shoved down our throats. How we achieved this amazing literacy is wrapped up in the secret that reading, writing and numbers are very easy to learn - in spite of what you hear from the reading, writing and number establishments. We aren't in the mess we're in today because we don't know how to do things right, but because "we" don't want to do them right. The incredibly profitable school enterprise has deliberately selected a procedure of literacy acquisition which is pedagogically bankrupt; thousands of years ago Socrates predicted this would happen if men were paid for teaching. He said they would make what is easy to learn seem difficult, and what is mastered rapidly they would stretch out over a long time. The first thing that an effective system of school choice would demonstrate is that our children have been held captive by a method of literacy transmission that ignores reality - and makes a very large fortune each year doing so. Eventually, with choice, the present system would run head-on into efficient competition that would destroy it. That would be inevitable because profitability would vanish once literacy is managed correctly. Let me guide you to a few private businesses where literacy is managed correctly right now - at a fraction of the public school cost. Before I do I want to caution you that the two places I'll cite use radically different methods from each other, are based on radically different theories - but the outcome in both places is very impressive. We'll start at 8801 Stenton Avenue in Philadelphia in a place called The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential which has been teaching babies to read, and teaching mothers t teach their own babies to read, since shortly after the Second World War. Babies. By the time these kids are 4 what they can do would cause you to think murderous thoughts about your local government school. And what is diabolical is that the kids have a great deal of fun learning. Study sessions only last a few minutes, and the kids learn all the mathematical operations, too, fluency in several languages - and the violin! Well, don't believe me - you have the address - write them a letter and go see for yourself. IAHP isn't going anywhere, it's been there for decades. You might want to ask your local school superintendent why you haven't heard of this place - presuming you're as impressed as I was. Place number two is 20 miles West of Boston, a few miles from Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous Wayside Inn on the outskirts of Framingham. It's the beautiful Sudbury Valley School, in the old Nathaniel Bowditch cottage, which looks suspiciously like a mansion to 20th century eyes. A place ringed about with handsome outbuildings, private lake, woods, and acres and acres of magnificent grounds. This place is a private school, of course, with a tuition of $3,500 a year - about 63% cheaper than a New York city public school seat costs. Sudbury teaches a lot of things, but two things it does not teach anybody is reading and numbers - and its kids range in age from 4 to 18! Kids learn reading and calculation at Sudbury at many different ages (but never as babies), but when they are ready to learn they teach themselves. Every kid who has stayed for long at the school over the past 25 years has learned to read and compute, about 2/3rds of them go on to college without ever taking a standardized test or getting a report card, and the school has never seen a case of dyslexia. The don't even believe such a condition exists outside of a few physically damaged kids and the fevered imaginations of compulsion school reading specialists. They don't teach reading and yet all the kids eventually learn to read and even to like it? A frustrating puzzle for many observers, but no more frustrating than trying to explain how Thomas Paine's Common Sense sold 600,000 copies in the year 1776 to a nation of two and a half million people, about 70% of whom were African slaves or indentured servants. It just boggles the mind to see today's graduate students in political science seminars wrestling with Paine (no pun intended) when young farmers whizzed through it with exhilaration over 200 years ago. One final, more or less modern, example of how easy it is to learn to read well - is myself. In 1941 when I went to first grade in Swissvale, Pennsylvania, a borough of Pittsburgh, at the age of 5, I could read fluently. For the first 200 years of our history most schools wouldn't accept children who couldn't read and count, so they must have learned it where I learned it, and where the Human Potential Institute children learn it - at home. My first grade teacher, Miss Dane, came to our home on Calumet Street shortly after the term began to protest: "Mrs. Gatto," she said, "your son reads, I would guess, on the 6th Grade level. He is ruining my class an I want you to make him shut up, keep his hand down, and not to answer any questions in class." How's that for pedagogy? I loved Miss Dane, who was a wonderful woman, so I'm not telling this story to insult her, just to give you something to think about. I suppose the skeptical among you are wondering who this miracle woman was who taught me to read so well before I went to school at the age of 5? Well, her name was Frances "Bootie" Zimmer, and she graduated from Monongahela High School in 1929, the same high school that Joe Montana, the great San Francisco quarterback came out of about a half century later. There wasn't enough money to send Bootie to college but nobody despaired about that in those days because the country seemed to run very well without college graduates. Did Bootie know some secret method of teaching that could have made her a fortune if she turned professional? I don't think so. What she knew was how to read to me every single day from the time I was 2 years old - read to me with me on her lap and her finger running under the words - read to me from increasingly difficult stuff, none of which seemed hard because I was having so much fun. She read real fairy tales, not scientifically simplified ones; she read real history books and real newspaper stories and real grown-up storybooks including some tales from The Decameron. What she didn't read were scientific readers of any sort, the books with 364-word sanitized vocabularies and a lot of pictures. Well, there we have the raw material for a revolution: the Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, the Sudbury Valley School, Frances "Bootie" Zimmer...these are important clues to how deep the mess we are in really is, clues to what its nature is. Here is evidence that we already possess the engineering know-how we need to revolutionize schooling. And if you look closely, here too is a warning that the trouble we are in is not what it appears to be (an avalanche of dumb kids), but instead an avalanche of kids who have been deliberately dumbed down by an industry that will not stop what it has been doing just because it is killing us. When we consider the course 20th century government schooling has taken deliberately it is clear we are in the presence of no simple mistake in engineering but that of a powerful ideological agenda, one so passionately and grimly held by its proponents we might almost see it as a religion. To understand how this happened, a brief tour through history is essential, otherwise you may continue to think that some tinkering or, God forbid, some more money will cure the disease of bad schooling. Come back with me then to 1812, when one of the founders of the immense DuPont fortune, a man named Pierre DuPont deNemours, published a book called Education in the United States. DuPont was many things but no one knew him as a soft-hearted fellow used to flattering people, so we can assign some credibility to his amazement at the phenomenal literacy he saw all around him compared to the European models he was familiar with. 1812. Forty years in advance of the passage of our first government compulsion school laws. Mr. DuPont said that less than 4 people out of every thousand in the new nation could not read and do numbers well. He saw a world in which nearly every child was trained in argumentation (*the old fashioned term for "critical thinking'). How would that be possible, do you suppose, without forced schooling? And yet two decades later a French aristocrat named deTocqueville wrote a book that's still in print, Democracy in America, in which he characterized us as the best educated people in history. And in 1838, still 14 years before the militia began marching recalcitrant children to school, another French aristocrat, Michael Chevalier, wrote a book that ranked the American farmer with the immortals of history, a book which said in effect that the farmer went into the field with his plow in one hand and Descartes in the other. So from 1776, when Common Sense was selling up a storm to unschooled colonists, until 1838, when farmers were observed reading Descartes, the American people seemed to be doing fairly well for themselves educationally, making their own education decisions, using, inventing, or substituting for schooling - as Ben Franklin did - as best they saw fit. Individuals made their own decisions, not government experts. This was America, after all, not Prussian Germany. How on earth did they do it? Almost immediately after the effective start-up of government factory schooling before the first World War it was obvious to anyone who cared to look closely that literacy was not what they were about, but that a redefinition of growing up was what was afoot. Growing up was not to be a socialization of the future labor force to suit some bureaucratic design determined by political experts. As the earlier lightly schooled America had proven, competency was not a scarce thing however you measured it - but the world of the government monopoly school set out to make it so. But the earlier, catch-as-catch-can entrepreneurial form of instruction offered abundant choices of useful ways to grow up, useful ways to read, write and think. Earlier schooling was about literacy, and that is why it succeeded. Literacy isn't very difficult to learn when the child perceives that the adults about him think that it's something important. I want you to consider the frightening possibility that we are spending far too much money on schooling, not too little, as schooling people contend. I want you to consider that we have too many people employed in interfering with the way children grow up - and that all this money and all these people, all the time we take out of children's lives and away from their homes and families and neighborhoods and private explorations - gets in the way of education! That seems radical, I know. Surely in a modern technological society it is the quantity of schooling and the amount of money you spend on it that buys value. Surely. And yet last year in St. Louis I heard a vice-president of IBM tell an audience of people assembled to discuss the process of redesigning teacher certification that in his opinion this country became computer-literate by self-teaching, not through any action of schools. He said 45 million people were comfortable with computers who had learned through dozens of non-systematic strategies, none of them very formal; if schools had preempted the right to teach computer use we would be in a horrible mess right now instead of leading the world in this literacy. MIT said a few years back that formal equipment seemed to play almost no role at all in scientific discovery and that inventors presented with state of the art equipment usually went sterile from then on! So MIT and IBM, which are both tied to being judged on outcomes, think one way, and compulsion schools which are tied to rhetoric about inputs, think another. If you're input-paralyzed you tend to stare at your abstract system when trouble arises, but if you care about results you tend to look at what makes Joe do best and you don't make the mistake of thinking that Joe is Sally. Now think about Sweden, a beautiful, healthy, prosperous and up-to-date country with a spectacular reputation for quality in everything it produces: Sixteen million people in a nation that makes its voice heard all over the planet to such an extent that if you didn't know it was so small you'd swear it must be a world power. It makes sense to think their schools must have something to do about it. Then what do you make of the fact that you can't go to school in Sweden until you are 7 years old? The reason the unsentimental Swedes have wiped out what would be first and second grades here, is that they don't want to pay the large social bill that quickly comes due when boys and girls are ripped away from their best teachers t home too early. Does that sound radical, or is what we do the radical thing? It just isn't worth the price, say the Swedes, to provide jobs for teachers and therapists if the result is sick, incomplete kids who can't be put back together again very easily. The entire Swedish school sequence isn't 12 years either - it's 9. Less schooling, not more. The direct savings of such a step in the U.S. would be 75-100 BILLION dollars, a lot of unforeclosed home mortgages, a lot of time freed up with which to seek an education. Who was it that decided to force your attention onto Japan instead of Sweden? Japan with its long school year and state compulsion, instead of Sweden with its short school year, short school sequence, and free choice where your kid is schooled? Who decided you should know about Japan, and not Hong Kong, an Asian neighbor with a short school year that outperforms Japan across the board in math and science? Whose interests are served by hiding that from you? Isn't that the question we should be asking? One of the principal reasons we got into the mess we're in is that we allowed schooling to become a very profitable monopoly, guaranteed its customers by the police power of the state. Systematic schooling attracts increased investment only when it does poorly, and since there are no penalties at all for such performance, the temptation not to do well is overwhelming. If that sounds like a shocking contention, it derives from a conservative reality that school staffs, both line and management, are involved in a guild system; in that ancient form of association no single member is allowed to outperform any other member, is allowed to advertise, or is allowed to introduce new technology or improvise without the advance consent of the guild. Violation of these precepts is severely sanctioned - as Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante and a large number of once-brilliant teachers found out. The structure of American schooling, 20th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon's amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is selling soldiers, losing a battle like that is serious. Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous "Address to the German Nation" which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders. I don't know how much you know about Prussia, but it's instructive to consider that Prussia began to police the female womb in the year 1735, long before the French and Indian wars. In Prussia unmarried women whose menses ceased had to register with the police. So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the Army. 2) Obedient workers to the mines. 3) Well-subordinated civil servants to government. 4) Well-subordinated clerks to industry. 5) Citizens who thought alike about major issues. School should create an artificial national consensus on matters which had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the heads of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia. Prussian industry boomed from the beginning. She was successful in warfare and her reputation in international affairs was very high. Twenty six years after this form of schooling began the King of Prussia was invited to North America to determine the boundary between the United States and Canada. Thirty-three years after that fateful invention of the central school institution, at the behest of Horace Mann and many other leading citizens, we borrowed the style of Prussian schooling as our own. You need to know this because over the first 50 years of our school institution, Prussian purpose - which was to create a form of state socialism - gradually forced out traditional American purpose, which in most minds was to prepare the individual to be self-reliant. The Prussian purpose was collective: the American purpose, as it had come down from history, was singular. In Prussia the purpose of the Volksschule, which educated 92% of the children, was not intellectual development at all, but socialization in obedience and subordination. Thinking was left to the Real Schulen, in which 8% of the kids participated. But for the great mass, intellectual development was regarded with managerial horror, as something that caused armies to lose battles. For Prussia the ideal model society was not intellectual Greece or muscular Rome but solid, settled Egypt - a pyramid of subordination where only the top leadership understood the big picture. Below this class were descending service classes, each larger than the one directly above it, each knowing less than the one above it until at the bottom almost nothing was known except how to do a small part of a larger task only dimly understood. Prussia concocted a method based on complex fragmentations to ensure that its school products would fit the grand social design. Some of this method involved dividing whole ideas into school subjects, each further divisible: some of it involved short periods punctuated by a horn so that self-motivation in study would be muted by ceaseless interruptions. There were many more techniques of training, of course, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy markers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively. One of the most interesting by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Let me cite two German thinkers on that subject. Erich Maria Remarque, in his classic, All Quiet on the Western Front, tell us that the first World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling. It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically - schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyzes the moral will as well as the intellect. It's true that sometimes well-schooled students sound smart, because they memorize many opinions of great thinkers, but they actually are badly damaged because their own ability to think is left rudimentary and undeveloped. We got from the United States to Prussia and back because a small number of very passionate ideological leaders visited Prussia in the first half of the 19th century, fell in love with the order, obedience and efficiency of its system, and relentlessly proselytized for a translation of Prussian vision onto these shores. If Prussia's ultimate goal was the unification of Germany, our major goal, so these men thought, was the unification of hordes of immigrant Catholics into a national consensus based on a northern European cultural model. To do that children would have to be removed from their parents and from inappropriate cultural influence. In this fashion compulsion schooling, a bad idea that had been around at least since Plato's Republic, a bad idea that New England had tried to enforce in 1650 without any success, was finally rammed home through the Massachusetts legislature in 1852. It was, of course, the famous "Know-Nothing" legislature that passed this law, a legislature that was the leading edge of a famous secret society which flourished at that time known as "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner", whose password was the simple sentence, "I know nothing." - hence the popular label attached to the secret society's political arm, "The American Party". Over the next 50 years state after state followed suit, ending schools of choice and ceding the field to a new government monopoly. There was one powerful exception to this - the children who could afford to be privately educated. They could avoid the American version of Volksschule if their families were prosperous or canny enough to catch on to the new game. By 1990 88% of all our children were being "public" schooled. Three major ideas were transferred almost intact from Prussia and slowly worked into the final structure of our national schooling. Each of these ideas had, of course, to overcome major resistance. This seldom was done by direct confrontation but instead by a gradual process of wearing away the opposition. It was not until the conclusion of the first World War that the last avenue of escape from the trap was closed. The first of this triumvirate of Prussian principles was the very sophisticated notion that State schooling did not exist to offer intellectual training, but to condition children to obedience, subordination and collective life. These social theorists included some of the greatest minds in history, including the most influential philosopher since Lord Bacon, Frederich Hegel. Each in his own way taught that general intellectual development will make central political control impossible, hence it is to be avoided. The will in children must be broken in order to make them plastic material. If the will could be broken all else would follow. Keep in mind that will-breaking was the central logic of child-rearing among our own Puritan colonists and you will see the natural affinity that existed between Prussian seeds and Puritan soil. Will-breaking had been carefully studied from time to time in European history, so to a leadership inclined that way, various devices proven in action were available - best known of these was the English practice of "boarding-out" where children were sent to live with and work for strangers at an early age - the constant stress of adapting to strange customs and practices usually produced a compliant, surface personality, easily manageable. In the Prussian system, imposed over 50 years by the new State Education Departments, a Prussian management concept heretofore unknown in the U.S. was adopted. Children were not to be taught to think, but to memorize. They were to be discouraged from assuming responsibility for each other, because that weakened the grasp of authority, and they were to be intimidated away from the pursuit of their own natural interests for the same reason. Henceforth, teachers would define what their interests were. From this new logic of school management arose the need to eliminate the familiar one-room schoolhouse, the main vehicle of schooling during the first 40 years or so of the new government monopoly. The one-room school invested too much responsibility in the children themselves - from such practices too much of the old, self-reliant, neighborly ways would be preserved. The second important discovery of the Prussian method was that extreme fragmentation of thinking into subjects, fixed time periods, sequences, units, externally imposed questioning, etc. would simplify the problems of leadership. Thoughts broken into fragments could be managed by a poorly trained, poorly paid teaching force; could be memorized even by a moron who made the effort; and lent themselves to the appearance of precision in testing and delivered beautiful distribution curves of "achievement". This form as curriculum (suggested by machine operation) was beginning to permeate Prussian factory operations, mining, and military life. It brilliantly solved the historical dilemma of leadership dependency on skilled craftsmen, too. A simplified workforce could be replaced quickly without damage to production. Such a workplace creates great psychological and social problems for the workers, true, but worker welfare was not a factor in this scheme. That we have created such a workforce in the United States through our schools was never better illustrated than in the strike of the air traffic controllers some year back. These supposedly "highly skilled" men and women were replaced overnight without any increase in accidents through the system. The social costs of such a system, in alcoholism, suicide, broken homes, violence, despair, etc. are not, as I inferred earlier, factored into the balance sheet. The third premise of Prussian schooling is that the government is the true parent of children - the State is sovereign over the family. In Western law that idea is known as the Parens Patriae power, I think, and at the most extreme pole of this notion is the idea that biological parents are really the enemies of their own children, not to be trusted. You can see this philosophy at work in court decisions which rule that parents need not be told when schools dispense condoms to their children, or consulted when daughters seek abortion. What is the evidence that a Prussian system of dumbing children down took hold in American schools? Actually the evidence is overwhelming. Thousands and thousands of young men from prominent American families journeyed to Prussia and other parts of Germany during the 19th century and brought home the PhD degree to a nation in which such a credential was unknown. These men preempted the top positions in the academic world, in corporate research, and in government, to the point where opportunity was almost closed to those who had not studied in Germany, or who were not the direct disciples of a German PhD, as John Dewey was the disciple of G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins. Virtually every single one of the founders of American schooling had made the pilgrimage to Germany, and many of these men wrote widely circulated reports praising the Teutonic methods. Horace Mann's famous '7th Report" of 1844, still available in large libraries, was perhaps the most important of these, but Calvin Stowe's report, and Dallas Bache's report, Henry Dwight's report, and Henry Barnard's report, the reports of Dr. Julius and Drs. Smith, Griscom and Woodbridge all sent the same signal: Follow Germany. By 1889, a little over one hundred years ago, the crop was ready for harvest. In that year the U.S. Commissioner of Education, William Torrey Harris, assured a railroad magnate, Collis Huntington, that American schools were "scientifically designed" to prevent "over-education" from happening. Harris is dead now, so we can't ask him what he meant by "over-education", but we can make a shrewd guess because Mr. Harris was among the leading German scholars in the nation. The average American would be content with his humble role in life, said the Commissioner, because he would not be tempted to think about any other role. My guess is that Harris meant he would not be able to think about any other role. In 1896 the famous John Dewey, then at the University of Chicago, said that independent, self-reliant people were a counter-productive anachronism in the collective society of the future. In modern society, said Dewey, people would be defined by their associations - the groups they belonged to - not by their own individual accomplishments. In such a world people who read too well or too early are dangerous because they become privately empowered, they know too much, and know hot to find out what they don't know by themselves, without consulting experts. Dewey said the great mistake of traditional pedagogy was to make reading and writing constitute the bulk of early schoolwork. He advocated that the phonics method of teaching reading be abandoned and replaced by the whole word method, not because the latter was more efficient (he admitted it was less efficient) but because independent thinkers are produced by hard books, thinkers who cannot be socialized very easily. By socialization Dewey meant a program of social objectives administered by the best social thinkers in government. This was a giant step on the road to state socialism, the form pioneered in Prussia, and it is a vision radically disconnected with the American past, its historic hopes and dreams. Dewey's former professor and close friend, G. Stanley Hall, said this at about the same time, "Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading." Hall was an important intermediary in the birth of modern American systematic schooling, one of the three men most responsible for building a gigantic administrative infrastructure over the classroom. How enormous that structure really became can only be understood by comparisons: New York State, for instance, employs more school administrators than all of the European Economic Community nations COMBINED! G. Stanley Hall is a name to conjecture with in many ways; he was the first American PhD out of Wilhelm Wundt's psychometric laboratories in Germany and subsequently a major eminence grise in the rise of American behaviorism, as the American promoter who brought Sigmund Freud to the United States to promote his theory that behavioral problems in later life can be traced to bad parenting and alleviated by expert interventions. Hall is also an important reason we have standardized testing in our schools. But back to Dewey. Learning to read too well, said Dewey, caused children to turn inward and made them competitive and independent. The phonics method of teaching reading provided no motives to follow a teacher's lead for very long; it was selfish, even if it did work. It only appealed to the intellectual aspect of our nature - the desire to get control of our own mind. Reading, writing and arithmetic were not the purpose of this new form of American schooling, a form which substituted memorization for thinking and which we still have with us. In 1923 Dr. Cattell, of "The Psychological Corporation", a private entity composed of the inner circle of American schoolmen like John Dewey, announced the purpose of schooling to its clientele who were expected to support its enterprises in testing and teacher training. Dr. Cattell said this about the purpose of government schooling in 1923: "The scientific control of conduct is what schools are about. The scientific control of conduct is of greater economic importance than the use of electricity or steel." Once you think that the control of conduct is what schools are about, the word "reform" takes on a very particular meaning. It means making adjustments to the machine so that young subjects will not twist and turn so, while their minds and bodies are being scientifically controlled. Helping kids to use their minds better is beside the point. Somewhere around the turn of the 20th century, making people dumb for their own good became the point of our national forced schooling exercise. If you find that hard to believe, use the evidence of your own eyes and ears to confirm it. Do you think you can find a better way to teach? You're right, of course you can -but not a better way to teach obedience. Throughout the 19th century to a crescendo achieved at the turn of the 20th century, a small band of very influential people, substantially financed by money and ideas from the Rockefeller foundations and the Carnegie foundations, introduced a system of state socialism into our national education picture. Privately they had determined that this was the best course for the American democracy and with little wasted motion, and no public discussion, they pointed our nation toward that end. Bertrand Russell once observed that American schooling was among the most radical experiments in human history, that America was deliberately denying its children the tools of critical thinking. When you want to teach children to think you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. You keep the games and songs and pretty colors in balance with the soberer purpose. That's if you want to teach them to think. There is no evidence that has been a State purpose since the start of compulsion schooling. When Frederich Froebel, the inventor of kindergarten in 19th century Germany fashioned his idea he did not have a "garden for children" in mind, but a metaphor of teachers as gardeners and children as the vegetables. Kindergarten was created to be, and was quietly celebrated as, a way to break the influence of mothers on their children once and for all. I note with interest the growth of day care in the U.S. and the repeated urgings to extend school downward to include 4 year olds. The movement toward state socialism I've been speaking to you about today is not some historical curiosity but a powerful dynamic force in the world around us. It is fighting for its life against those forces which would, through vouchers or tax credits, deprive it of financial lifeblood, and it has countered this thrust with a demand for even more control over children's lives, and even more money to pay for the extended school day and year that its control requires. Herr Froebel disliked his own family intensely, a fact that may be useful to you when you come to regard the encroachment of school institutions on infancy. A movement as visibly destructive to individuality, family and community as government-system schooling has been might be expected to collapse in the face of its dismal record, coupled with an increasingly aggressive shake-down of the taxpayer, but this has not happened. The explanation is largely found in the transformation of schooling from a simple service to families and towns to an enormous, centralized corporate enterprise. While this development has had a markedly adverse effect on people, and on our democratic traditions, it has made schooling the single largest employer in the United States, and the largest grantor of contracts, next to the Defense Department. Both of these low-visibility phenomena provide monopoly schooling with powerful political friends, publicists, advocates and other useful allies from positions apparently outside the loop until an analysis map of special interest is drawn. This is a large part of the explanation why no amount of failure ever changes things in schools, or changes them for very long. School people are in a position to out-last any storm and to keep short-attention-span public scrutiny thoroughly confused. An overview of the short history of this institution reveals as pattern marked by intervals of public outrage, followed by enlargement of the monopoly in every case. The net result of public alarm has been to diminish worthwhile alternatives, surely the richest of all the ironies, a cosmic reversal testifying to the secret systems of nourishment available to schooling, exactly as it is. After nearly 30 years spent inside a number of public schools, some considered good and some bad, I feel certain that management cannot clean its own house. The structure is too brilliantly designed to allow that. It relentlessly marginalizes all significant change, or degrades it, and no watchdog mechanism exists to effectively combat how that happens - nor is it possible, in my opinion. Teaching the way children learn involves a dynamic too complicated to bureaucratize. Failure to see that simple truth, or our simple inability to act upon it in a monopoly situation when it is seen, dooms all in-system reform to trivialization. There are no incentives for the "owners" of the structure to reform it, nor can there be without outside competition. Indeed, I'm afraid that competition too tightly monitored from a central point, as it would be in a national test situation (which involves wildly incorrect assumptions about learning that are too complicated to go into in this essay), will not touch the existing monolith. What is needed for several decades is the kind of wildly-swinging free market we had at the beginning of our national history. It cannot be overemphasized that nobody of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or which learning is of most worth. By pretending the existence of such we have cut ourselves off from the information and innovation that only a real market can provide. Fortunately our national situation has been so favorable, so dominant through most of our history, that the margin of error afforded has been vast in a material sense. We all eat whether we do this school thing right or not. But the future is not so clear. Perhaps materially a case can be made that our position of advantage is too great at this point to squander, but when we enter the arena of emotional capital, of simple satisfaction with life and joy in living, our relative position has been slipping for many years. That holds true whether we compare ourselves to certain other nations or to standards we set for our own lives based on values, traditions and myths. Violence, narcotic addictions, divorce, alcoholism, loneliness...all these are but tangible measures of a poverty in education. Surely schools, as the institutions monopolizing the day-times of childhood, can be called to account for this. In a democracy the final judges cannot be experts, but only the people. And the courtroom of the people is the free market. Over 50 years ago my mother, Bootie Zimmer, chose to teach me how to read. She had no degrees, no government salary, no encouragement, yet her non-expert choice has given me a wonderful and interesting life. I have never been a public charge. Trust the people, give them choices, and the school nightmare will vanish in a generation. jtg 1992

Library This is a free library, available through the generous efforts of authors, publishers, and - perhaps most importantly - volunteer typists. Excerpted ABC-Clio titles are provided by arrangement with the publisher and Robert Neville, Editorial Director, ABC-Clio, Ltd. The Montessori Method , by Maria Montessori. Presented in its entirety. The Absorbent Mind , by Maria Montessori. Introduction, Translator's Note, Chapters 1 & 2 Basic Ideas of Montessori's Educational Theory , by Maria Montessori. Compiled by Paul Oswald and Günter Schulz-Benesch. Forward to the English edition, Chapters 1 & 2 The California Lectures of Maria Montessori, 1915 , by Maria Montessori. Edited by Robert G. Buckenmeyer. Introduction, Lecture, Article, Original synopsis, Additional articles The Child In The Family , by Maria Montessori. Translated by Nancy Rockmore Cirillo. "The Blank Page" and "The Newborn Child" From Childhood to Adolescence , by Maria Montessori. Chapters 1 & 2 The Discovery of the Child , by Maria Montessori. Chapters 1 & 2 Education for a New World , by Maria Montessori. Introduction, "Discovery & Development" The Formation of Man , by Maria Montessori. Part One: Prejudices and Nebulae What You Should Know About Your Child . Based on the lectures of Maria Montessori. Preface, Forward, Note, Chapters 1 & 2 To Educate the Human Potential , by Maria Montessori. Introduction, Chapters 1 & 2 Volunteer Typists: Jen McGraw - The Absorbent Mind, What You Should Know Connie Black - Basic Ideas of Montessori's Educational Theory Anna Colgan - The Child In The Family, Education for a New World, Formation of Man Julie Winnette - The Discovery of the Child Siobhan Henshilwood - To Educate the Human Potential Germaine Koomen - From Childhood to Adolescence

How It All Happened - Maria Montessori, 1942 Today is the anniversary of the opening of the first House of Children. When I tell you briefly how it started, the few words of its history will seem like a fairy-tale, but their message may prove useful. ​ Many times people ask with doubt in their minds whether the method is suitable for poor children or whether it is at all adaptable to them. ​ In order that you may be able to answer such questions, I should like you to have a small idea of how our work started, of the indirect way in which it has arisen. ​ It came about in a strange way, I have pondered much about it and tried to understand the reason for it. I don't know if it is an indication of destiny, or if it was established by fate itself. All that I know is that it has something to do with the House itself. It may seem curious that I express it in this way but I do so to render the ensuing story clear. ​ Many years ago, Rome was a capital of a state in very rapid development, which manifested itself in a mania for building. Every small available space was utilized to build houses, every little open space. One of the many was delimited on one side by the old Roman-walls which had witnessed many battles and on the other by the modern cemetery. This area was the last place to be filled, no doubt because of the superstition that it was not lucky to live near the dead, for fear of ghosts and also for hygienic reasons. ​ But probably because of the beautiful and historical situation, one building society decided to stake its money into building there. It was a tremendous scheme, five houses on the scale of palaces, 5 or 6 stories high. But the idea had been too vast so that the society went bankrupt before the buildings were completed and the scheme failed. There were only the walls with open holes for doors and windows, there was no plumbing and the erections stood as a sort of skeleton. ​ For many years this enormous skeleton remained abandoned and neglected. It became a shelter for homeless beggars, a hiding place for evil-doers who wished to avoid recognition and who if discovered, could easily escape into this labyrinth. Criminals of all sorts, thieves and murderers, took refuge in them. People lived there in the same conditions as the cavemen of old did in their caves. All those who were homeless, and those who wished to hide, found shelter within those walls. Even the police did not go near them, or dared to, as they did not know their way within these grim walls of crime and horror. ​ Slowly, the number grew, until thousands of people crowded in these abandoned buildings. People were found dead, murdered or succumbed to diseases; the place became a breeding place of infection for the whole land; a center of crime and of the lowest prostitution. ​ The 'Quartiere di San Lorenzo' became known as the shame of Italy. People were too afraid to do anything about it; no one knew what happened within those dark walls. There were no small shops for provisions anywhere near, no itinerant vendor would go there to sell. Even the lowest laborer, or the poorest fisherman would seem as princes in comparison, for however poor, they would have at least some honest livelihood whereas those who lived inside the gloom had no work, no means to pay, their only livelihood was derived from crime. ​ The problem of clearing this pit of inhumanity demanded a solution. Another building society of very wealthy bankers, considered the problem and decided that as the walls already stood, only a small expenditure would be necessary to make fruitful whatever capital was invested. The district, due to its ill-repute, would of course never become a fashionable quarter, therefore only small renovations were necessary to render it habitable for those people already so unfortunate. Regarding it thus as a business venture, they started with one building which they discovered would house a thousand people. They used some white-wash, put in some doors and windows, and laid in a few water pipes and drains. ​ It was estimated that in this area lived at least 10,000 people, therefore how could they discriminate which among them would be the best? They chose the married ones who by reason of their relation with one another would be the most human. As it happened there were only a very few children. It seems perhaps logical that under such conditions although there were thousands of men and women there should be only fifty children. ​ But these children, wild and uncivilized as they were, presented a serious problem of damage to the houses. Left alone while the parents went to work, they were free to carry out any wild fancy. So the director of the concern decided that the only obvious thing to keep them out of mischief was to collect all of the children and confine them. ​ One room was set aside for this purpose, resembling in every way a children's prison. It was hoped that a person would be found with enough social courage to tackle the problem. ​ I in my capacity of medical officer of hygiene was approached to take an interest in the work. Having considered the situation I demanded that at least the commonest aids in hygiene, food, and sanitation be made available. ​ At the time it had become fashionable among society ladies to interest themselves in social uplift. They were approached to do something to collect funds, because we were confronted with the strange problem that while the bankers had agreed to invest money to improve the housing situation, they were not at all interested in education. One could not expect any returns from money put into anything with an educational purpose. ​ Although society had embraced the ideal of improving the conditions of these unfortunate people, the children had been forgotten. There were no toys, no school, no teacher. I was able to find one woman of 40 years, whose help I asked and who I put in charge. On the 6th of January 1907 this room was inaugurated to collect the 50 children. The room had already been in use some little time but it was inaugurated that day. Throughout Italy the 6th of January is looked upon as 'the' day of feast for the children. It was on this day that the Three Kings arrived before the Child Christ and offered him their gifts. It is celebrated as the Feast of Epiphany. ​ It was striking at the time this interest of society imbued with the idea that their giving hygienic houses to the homeless would be the means of purifying the evil core in their midst, consisting of a group of ten-thousand criminals and pitiful humanity. I also was imbued with this sentiment. ​ But while everyone had had the idea that by giving houses and sanitation, the people would be purified, no one had taken in consideration the children; no one had thought to bring toys or food for them. When the children, ranging between the ages of 2 to 6 entered, they were all dressed alike in some thick, heavy, blue drill. They were frightened and being hindered by the stiff material, could move neither arms nor legs freely. Apart of their own community they had never seen any people. To get them to move together they were made to hold hands. The first unwilling child was pulled, thus dragging along the whole line of the rest. All of them were crying miserably. The sympathy of the society ladies was aroused and they expressed the hope that in a few months they would improve. I had been asked to make a speech for the occasion. Earlier that day, remembering that it was the Feast of the Epiphany, I had read the lesson in my mass book. When I made my speech I read it as an omen for the work to follow. ​ 'Arise, be enlightened, O Jerusalem; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold darkness shall cover the earth, and a mist the people; but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and His glory shall be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall walk in thy light, and kings in the brightness of thy rising. Lift up thine eyes round about, and see; all these are gathered together, they are come to thee; thy sons shall come from afar, and thy daughters shall rise up at thy side. Then shalt thou see, and abound and thy heart shall wonder and be enlarged, when the multitude of the sea shall be converted to thee, the strength of the Gentiles shall come to thee. The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Madian and Epha; all they from Saba shall come, bringing gold and frankincense, and showing forth praise to the Lord.' ​ I don't know what came over me but I had a vision and inspired by it, I was enflamed and said that this work we were undertaking would prove to be very important and that someday people would come from all parts to see it. ​ In reporting this new whim of society, the press also mentioned that Dr. Montessori had made a beautiful speech, but what an exaggeration in what she had said! ​ It was from then that the real work began. ​ Remember that all these children were completely illiterate. Their parents were also illiterate and they were born and grown in the environment I have described. ​ What happened more than thirty years ago now, will always remain a mystery to me. I have tried since then to understand what took place in those children. Certainly there was nothing of what is to be found in any House of Children. There were only rough large tables. ​ I brought them some of the materials which had been used for our work in experimental psychology, the items which we use today as sensorial material and materials for the exercises of practical life. I merely wanted to study the children's reactions. I asked the woman in charge not to interfere with them in any way as otherwise I would not be able to observe them. Someone brought them paper and colored pencils but in itself this was not the explanation of the further events. There was no one who loved them, I myself only visited them once a week and during the day the children had no communication with their parents. ​ The children were quiet, they had no interference either from the teacher or from the parents, but their environment contrasted vividly from that which they had been used to; compared to that of their previous life, it seemed fantastically beautiful. The walls were white, there was a green plot of grass outside, though no one had thought to plant flowers in it yet, but most beautiful of all was the fact that they had interesting occupation in which no one, no one at all, interfered. They were left alone and little by little the children began to work with concentration and the transformation they underwent, was noticeable. From timid and wild as they were before, the children became sociable and communicative. They showed a different relationship with each other, of which I have written in my books. Their personalities grew and, strange though it may seem, they showed extraordinary understanding, activity, vivacity, and confidence. They were happy and joyous. ​ This fact was noticed after a while by the mothers who came to tell us about it. As the children had had no one to teach them or interfere with their actions, they acted spontaneously, their manners were natural. ​ But the most outstanding thing about these children of the St. Lawrence Quarter was their obvious gratitude. I was as much surprised by this as everyone else. When I entered the room, all the children sprang to greet me and cried their welcome. Nobody had taught them any manner of good behavior. And the strangest thing of all was that although nobody had cared for them physically, they flourished in health as if they had been secretly fed on some nourishing food. And so they had, but in their spirit. These children began to notice things in their homes, a spot of dirt on their mother's dress, untidiness in the room. They told their mothers not to hang the washing in the windows but to put flowers there instead. Their influence spread into the homes, so that after a while also these became transformed. ​ Six months after the inauguration of the House of Children, some of the mothers came to me and pleaded that as I had already done so much for their children, and they themselves could do nothing about it because they were illiterate, would I not teach their children to read and write? ​ It cannot have come from an adult person; the thought, the very principle that the adult should stand aside to make room for the child, could never have come from the adult. Anyone who wants to follow my method must understand that he should not honor me but follow the child as his leader.

Attributed Quotes Top Preparation of the Teacher | Liberty & Discipline | Human Tendencies | Planes of Development | Normalization | Prepared Environment | Sensitive Periods | Absorbent Mind | Role of Environment | Sensorial Preparation of the Teacher "The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 149 "We must be taught and we must be willing to accept guidance if we wish to become effective teachers." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 149 "...a teacher should never forget that he is a teacher and that his mission is one of education." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 153 "When we think about mixed ages, we must make sure we aren't starving children intellectually or physically... we should not have a supermarket, but just what is essential." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 152 "The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 152 "The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 150 "In brief, the teacher's principle duty in the school may be described as follows: She should explain the use of the material. She is the main connecting link between the material, that is the objects, and the child. This is a simple, modest duty, and yet it is much more delicate than that found in the older schools, where the material simply helps the children to understand the mind of the teacher, who must pass on her own ideas to a child, who must in turn receive them." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 151 "To become acquainted with the material, a teacher should not just look at it, study it in a book, or learn its use through the explanations of another. Rather, she must exercise herself with it for a long time, trying in this way to evaluate through her own experience the difficulties of, or the interests inherent in, each piece of material that can be given to a child, trying to interpret, although imperfectly, the impressions which a child himself can get from it. moreover, if a teacher has enough patience to repeat an exercise as often as a child, she can measure in herself the energy and endurance possessed by a child of a determined age. For this final purpose, the teacher can grade the materials and thus judge the capacity of a child for a certain kind of activity at a given stage of his development." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 152-3 "They do not understand us, they cannot defend themselves from us, and they accept whatever we tell them. They not only accept abuse, but feel guilty whenever we blame them." - Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 151 "Adults dominate children by virtue of a recognized natural right. To question this right would be the same as attacking a kind of consecrated sovereignty." - Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 152 "The conflict between adult and child has consequences reaching out almost to infinity, like the waves that are propagated when a stone is thrown into the surface of a tranquil late. A disturbance is started that spreads out in a circle in all directions." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 153 "The inexperienced teacher, filled with enthusiasm and faith in this inner discipline which she expects to appear in our little community finds herself faced with no light problems." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 263 "Let us always remember that inner discipline is something to come and not something always present." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 248 "Our goal is not so much the imparting of knowledge as the unveiling and developing of spiritual energy." - The Child in the Family :: The Clio Montessori Series, 1996 :: p. 63 "The different types of deviated children do not shake the faith of this teacher, who sees a different type of child in the spiritual field, and looks confidently for this self to show when attracted by work that interests. She waits for the children to show signs of concentration." - Education for a New World :: Clio Press, 1988 :: p.67 "We must help the child to act for himself, will for himself, think for himself; this is the art of those who aspire to serve the spirit." - Education for a New World :: Clio Press, 1988 :: p. 69 "....you yourselves must be filled with wonder and when you have acquired that, then you are prepared." - Montessori, Her Life and Work :: The Penguin Group, 1987 :: p. 309 Liberty and Discipline [TOP ] "Discipline, the first result of an order establishing itself within, is the principal phenomenon to be looked for as the 'external sign' of an internal process that has been initiated." - Spontaneous Activity in Education :: Clio Montessori Series, 1994 :: p. 68 "Let us always remember that inner discipline is something to come, and not already present. Our task is to show the way to discipline. Discipline is born when the child concentrates his attention on some objects that attracts him and provides him not only with a useful exercise but with a control of error." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 240 "The roots of every plant seek out, from among the many substances which the soil contains, only those which they need." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 248 "She (the directress) understands and believes that the children must be free to choose their own occupations just as they must never be interrupted in their spontaneous activities. No work may be imposed - no threats, no rewards, no punishments." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Montessori Press, 1994 :: p240. "This is the period in which discipline becomes established: a form of active peace, of obedience and love, when work is perfected and multiplied, just as when the flowers in spring get their colours and prepare a distant harvest of sweet and nourishing fruit." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Montessori Press, 1994 :: p. 251 "So what we call the first level of obedience is that in which the child can obey, but not always. It is a period in which obedience and disobedience seem to be combined." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Montessori Press, 1994 :: p. 237 "The second level is when the child can always obey, or rather when there are no longer any obstacles deriving from his lack of control." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Montessori Press, 1994 :: p. 237 "The children are almost like saints or godly and I didn't want to spoil it by saying anything wrong. They are so innocent, I didn't want to mislead them." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Montessori Press, 1994 :: p. 237 Human Tendencies [ TOP ​ ] "A child's sensitivity to order may be noticed even in the first months of his existence. A positive manifestation of it may be seen in the enthusiasm and joy which children who at seeing things in their proper places." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 49. "Man is not a vegetating body which lives on material nourishment, nor is he destined to sensual emotions alone. Man is that superior being who is endowed with intelligence and is destined to do a great task on earth. he must transform it, conquer it, utilize it and construct a new world full of marvels which surpasses and overrules the wonders of nature. It is man who creates civilization. This work is unlimited and it is the aim of his physical limbs. From his first appearance on earth, man has been a worker." - Formation of Man :: Clio Press, reprinted 1994 :: p. 69 "The skill of man's hand is tied up with the development of his mind, and with the light of history, we see it connected with the development of civilization."... "Hence the development of manual skill keeps pace with mental development. Certainly, the more delicate the work, the more it needs the care and attention of an intelligent mind to guide it." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 138 "The human hand, so delicate and so complicated, not only allows the mind to reveal itself but it enables the whole human being to enter into special relationships with its environment. We might even say that man takes possession of his environment with his hands." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 81 Four Planes of Development [ TOP ​ ] "With regard to the child, education should correspond to them, so that instead of dividing the schools into nursery, primary, secondary and university, we should divide education in planes and each of these should correspond to the phase the developing individuality goes through." - Four Planes of Education :: AMI, 1971 (Edinburgh and London lectures) :: p. 3 "And gradually we educators are confronted with a simple but important fact: that to help the child is not what he needs, and indeed that to give help is an impediment for the child. Therefore he must be allowed to act freely on his own initiative in this free environment." - Four Planes of Education :: AMI, 1971 (Edinburgh and London lectures) :: p. 4 "Culture and education have no bounds or limits; now man is in a phase in which he must decide for himself how far he can proceed in the culture that belongs to the whole of humanity." - Four Planes of Education :: AMI, 1971 (Edinburgh and London lectures) :: p. 11 Normalization [ TOP ​ ] "What matters is not physics, or botany, or the works of the hand, but the will and the components of the human spirit which construct themselves through work. The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Montessori Press, 1994 :: p. 201 "As soon as children find something that interests them they lose their instability and learn to concentrate." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 145 " I would not be able to cite a single example of a conversion taking place without an interesting task that concentrated the child's activities. There are wide varieties of conversions that have occurred in this way. Children of a nervous temperament have become calm. The depressed have regained their spirits, and all have advanced together along the path of disciplined work, making progress through the outward manifestation of an inner energy which has found a means of expressions." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 147 "A fugue is a kind of flight, a taking refuge. A flight into play or into a world of fancy often conceals an energy that has been divided. It represents a subconscious defense of the ego which flees from suffering or danger and hides itself behind a mask." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 157 "The average intelligence of normal children is low compared to that of normalized children. Because their energies have been misdirected, they are like children with broken bones who have need of special care if they are to become physically fit again. But instead of receiving the delicate treatment which they need for the correction of their psychic disorders and the furthering of their intellectual growth, children are frequently bullied about. A diverted mind cannot be forced and any attempt to correct it in this way will provoke a psychological reaction." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 157 "What matters is not physics, or botany, or the works of the hand, but the will and the components of the human spirit which construct themselves through work. The child is the spiritual builder of mankind, and obstacles to his free development are the stones in the wall by which the soul of man has become imprisoned." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 201 Prepared Environment [ TOP ​ ] "There is only one basis for observation: the children must be able to express themselves and thus reveal those needs and attitudes which would otherwise remain hidden or repressed in an environment that did not permit them to act spontaneously. An observer obviously needs something to observe, and if he must be trained to be able to see and recognize objective truth, he must have at his disposal children placed in such an environment that they can manifest their natural traits." - The Discovery of the Child :: The Clio Montessori Series reprinted 1994 :: p. 48. "The first aim of the prepared environment is, as far as it is possible, to render the growing child independent of the adult. " - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 267 "A child is an eager observer and is particularly attracted by the actions of the adults and wants to imitate them. In this regard an adult can have a kind of mission. He can be an inspiration for the child's actions, a kind of open book wherein a child can learn how to direct his own movements. But an adult, if he is to afford proper guidance, must always be calm and act slowly so that the child who is watching him can clearly see his actions in all their particulars." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 93 ​ "But in those countries where the toy making industry is less advanced, you will find children with quite different tastes. They are also calmer, more sensible and happy. Their one idea is to take part in the activities going on about them. They are more like ordinary folk, using and handling the same things as the grown-ups." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 154 Sensitive Periods of Development [ TOP ​ ] "A teacher said a word rapidly in passing, and on return saw it had been written with moveable letters. For these mites of four, once was enough, though a child of seven requires much repetition before he grasps the word correctly. All this was due to that special period of sensitivity; the mind was like soft wax, susceptible at this age to impressions which could not be taken in at a later stage, when this special malleability would have disappeared." - Education for a New World :: Clio Montessori Series,1996 :: p. 5 "A child learns to adjust himself and make acquisitions in his sensitive periods. These are like a beam that lights interiorly or a battery that furnishes energy. It is this sensibility which enables a child to come into contact with the external world in a particularly intense manner. At such a time everything is easy; all is life and enthusiasm. Every effort marks an increase in power. Only when the goal has been obtained does fatigue and the weight of indifference come on." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 40 The Absorbent Mind [ TOP ​ ] "The absorbent mind is indeed a marvelous gift to humanity! By merely ‘living' and without and conscious effort the individual absorbs from the environment even a complex cultural achievement like language. If this essential mental form existed in the adult, how much easier would our studies be!" - The Formation of Man :: Clio Press, 1994 :: p.64. "It is a mental chemistry that takes place in the child, producing a chemical transformation. These impressions not only penetrate the mind of the child, they form it; they become incarnated, for the child makes his own ‘mental flesh' in using the things that are in his environment. We have called this type of mind the ‘absorbent mind' and it is difficult for us to conceive the magnitude of its powers." - Education for a New World :: Clio Press Limited, 1989 :: p. 14 "Horme belongs to life in general, to what might be called the divine urge, the source of evolution... and stimulates the child to action if he is allowed to grow, it shows in the joy of life." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 76 Role of Montessori Environment in the Absorbent Mind [ TOP ​ ] "We must give the child relaxation from the continuous direction of adults. So we give them the right environment, relaxation and freedom from orders. This is an indirect treatment; it is not the correction of the individual but the preparation for a new life. This is something children have never had, even in the grandest and richest of homes. For even in a palace, you find that the children are relegated to some obscure nursery." - The Child, Society and the World :: Clio Press, 1998 :: p. 78 "The concept of an education centered upon the care of the living being alters all previous ideas. Resting no longer on a curriculum, or a timetable, education must conform to the facts of human life." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 12 "The characteristic of children under 6 years of age is that it is almost impossible to teach them; children of this age cannot take from a teacher. Therefore they are considered to be too young to go to school and therefore education does not begin until 6 years of age. Another characteristic of this age is that the children know and understand a great deal. They are full of knowledge. This would seem to be a contradiction, but the truth is that these children must take knowledge by themselves from the environment." - The Child, Society and the World :: Clio Press, 1998 :: p. 44 "During this early period, education must be understood as a help to the unfolding of the child's inborn psychic powers. This means that we cannot use the orthodox methods of teaching, which depends on talk." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 4 "This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 279 "In the mysterious period which follows immediately after birth, the child-who is a psychic entity endowed with a specially refined form of sensitiveness - might be regarded as an ego asleep. But all of a sudden he wakes up and hears delicious music; all his fibers begin to vibrate. The baby might think that no other sound had ever reached his ears, but really it was because his soul was not responsive to other sounds. Only human speech had any power to stir him." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: pp. 199, 120 "The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator." - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 121 "How easily his helplessness can cause him mental anguish, and how much our understanding of his language can help us to save him from this, and calm his mind!" - The Absorbent Mind :: Clio Press Limited, 1994 :: p. 121 "Writing is a key to a double gain. It enables the hand to master a vital skill like that of speaking and to create a second means of communication that reflects the spoken word in all its details. Writing is thus dependent upon mind and hand." - The Secret of Childhood :: Fides Publishers, 1966 :: p. 131 "One of the marvellous things that the children showed in their work was their reaction to written language. The children we had, learnt to write with very little help, almost by themselves." - The Child, Society and the World :: Clio Press, 1998 :: pp. 21, 22 Sensorial [ TOP ​ ] "The training and sharpening of the senses has the obvious advantage of enlarging the field of perception and of offering an ever more solid foundation for intellectual growth. The intellect builds up its store of practical ideas through contact with, and exploration of, its environment. Without such concepts the intellect would lack precision and inspiration in its abstract operations." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 110 "Aesthetic and moral education are also closely connected with the training of the senses. By multiplying sense experiences and developing the ability to evaluate the smallest differences in various stimuli, ones sensibilities are refined and ones pleasures increased. Beauty is found in harmony, not in discord; and harmony implies affinities, but these require a refinement of the sense if they are to be perceived. The beautiful harmonies of nature and of art escape those whose senses are dull. " - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 148 "A child at this time is ready to rediscover his own environment and the inner wealth of impressions which he has of it." "... we may mention the great assistance given by our sensorial materials and the exercises done with them in the detection of functional defects in the senses at a time when much can be done to correct them." - Discovery of the Child :: Clio Press, 1988 (reprinted 1996 edition) :: p. 102 Liberty Tendencies Planes Normalization Prepared Periods Absorbent Role Sensorial

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Closing Address - Maria Montessori, Copenhagen Montessori Congress, 1937 Generally the child is considered as a 'dear little thing', in need of help and support, to be assisted in difficulties, to be consoled when crying, to be cared for when ill. And as he is considered from this materialist point of view, he is nursed when ill and taught when ignorant. But this is not our point of view. ​ The figure of the child must stand before us as a light and a symbol, a light that will show us reality and a symbol that will teach us. This idea is perhaps too far from the concrete conception which we have of the child today; it needs to be proved by the revelations of practical psychology. And as precisely these revelations have been made, and also confirmed by positive experiments, we wish to make them known everywhere. These revelations show us things that were unknown before, things that the child can teach us, and that we must learn if we would take the road of Peace. If, however, we cannot accept this spiritual conception , and prefer to be practical, it will be necessary to consider the child from a different point of view. Socially speaking, we want to see the child regarded as a human being, a citizen, a man with a certain dignity, with the right to live and be protected. To whatever social rank, to whatever race he may belong, in every country of the world, the child must be recognized as a citizen. ​ The protection combined with the education of the child, and implying also the education of the adult, would be a way of preserving the great riches we possess, and might also lead us nearer to that light which we call Peace. May I say to you that no amount of discussion or no meditation on the sufferings of the child can help, but that the new orientation can convert us, and on this conversion everything depends. ​ We do not wish only to speak to educational experts, but also to the general public. And above all to the conscience of parents, for it is the parents who should defend the rights of their children. In fact, the child has not been brought into the world by nature alone, but by a father and a mother to whom it has been given in trust, and whose duty is love! When this union between fathers and mothers is found to imply new social responsibilities, it may lead mankind further along the road of civilization. For all men, in all countries and of all races, have children, and in the child they may find a common interest through which universal sympathy and cooperation may become possible. The task of protection becomes a great and good work which may help us to realize a better world by 'valorizing' the forgotten part of mankind. And this is a practical step towards the realization of Peace.

The Psychology of Mathematics - Maria Montessori, Cambridge Education Society, Trinity College, 1935 The honor of your invitation to come and speak to you on mathematics derives, I believe, from my recent publication of two books the titles of which are unusual among books of the kind; that is to say, Psico-Arithmetic and Psico-Geometry. ​ These results from experiments made during nearly 20 years in our schools, where the child is left free in his choice of occupation; and where culture is actively acquired by the children themselves by means of apparatus scientifically prepared. ​ These experiments have not been limited only to the baby class, or to the junior school, but extend also to the first years of secondary education, and they are interesting on account of their great originality. In fact, progress in the study of mathematics is guided by the child's psychology instead of by pre-established programmes, and therefore they truly constitute unpublished chapters of an unsuccessful psychology. ​ In fact, numbers and their derivatives have become for the child scientific stimuli which provoke vital psychic activities, and have awakened a profound logic which would not have been thought possible in little children. The result has been a real enthusiasm for learning arithmetic and geometry; subjects which generally seem dry and difficult, and which have caused the study of mathematics to be regarded as a 'rock' or 'barrier' in the ordinary schools. ​ Yet it might have been logical to suppose that mathematics, being a pure creation of human intelligence would be for that reason interesting in a special way to the human mind in the course of its development. If we base ourselves on the psychology of the child we find the transmission of culture made unexpectedly easier. Nature has implanted in the child irresistible psychic impulses which incline him towards special actions necessary for his development. ​ There are throughout growth so-called 'sensitive periods' during which - and only during which - the different natural faculties of man can acquire perfection. Therefore subjects of instruction can become real helps to development at these periods. They are absorbed with extraordinary intensity. ​ Culture becomes identifiable with the construction of the personality itself; we might say it incarnates itself within the being and lives. It is then that the child-mind can give surprising revelations. The child becomes indefatigable in work, provided we offer the necessary means. Mathematical material in particular, presented in the sensitive period in suitable fashion, permits the child to understand fundamental truths, and not only that, but to discover new relationships. ​ Yes, it has actually happened that children in their vital impulse of growth have found a way into questions which the already formed and rigid mind of the adult teacher had never been able to reach. ​ When the child was placed into an environment which corresponded to his mental necessities for development, he at once showed how erroneous were the paths we had followed hitherto in the older ways of transmitting culture. In the schools we obliged him to listen, whereas what he really needed was to 'act', to act with concentration, and therefore not to listen to someone speaking. We gave the children things which were too simple for the level their intelligence had reached, and this bored instead of interesting them. Here is one of the most important points: we have to give the children more difficult things to interest them. The level of work in ordinary schools is proportionate not to the true capacities of the child, but to defenses which his mind sets up against an erroneous method of teaching. ​ Once this truth had been understood, it became my aim to study ways of putting children's minds in contact with superior ideas which they had not been formerly allowed to reach; analyzing all the difficulties and presenting them separately by means of concrete apparatus. That is to say, to 'materialize the abstractions', abstractions that are not in themselves inaccessible to the child, but which need a material bridge to lead to their comprehension and penetration. ​ In this way children of nine have been able to take an interest in algebra and in the fourth and fifth powers of the binomial; in the extraction of cube roots going to many figures. ​ These materializations did not keep the child's mind away from abstractions. What they did was lead to abstraction, giving a point of departure materially clear and capable of experimental verification. ​ Generally children in the schools do not arrive at the true abstractions of arithmetic, but merely learn by heart abstract formulae, which they have not understood and which therefore are uninteresting. Instead the materialization makes one penetrate into the understanding of the idea and therefore it is a bridge which leads truly toward the abstract world. Hence problems and formulae which in the ordinary school are communicated to the children by the teacher's voice are here materialized in a group of objects. Placed in contact with this material the child shows two fundamental things. One is that 'understanding' - having grasped the idea and learned it (which is the final point aimed at in the ordinary methods of instruction) - represents in the process of his growth only the first step of a prolonged and repeated activity. The child is like a sportsman who hunts for hours and hours, or an athlete, rejoicing day after day in his favorite exercise. That is to say, the child, after having understood, becomes a student of the question, and an enthusiastic worker in it. ​ The second thing we noticed was that the child's mentality and his capacity for understanding are, during the sensitive periods in which certain subjects can be learned, much greater than those of adults. ​ In fact, the material was constructed to communicate certain special basic truths. ​ But the child, in the prolonged use which he made with this material, discovered truths which it had never been our intention to include within it; and these truths discovered by the child contained surprises even for the teacher, who was often completely ignorant that these cases existed. ​ Theorems, corollaries and the questions asked by the child, were often so new that they could not be found in the text-books which are used in elementary and secondary schools. This caused our teachers to go and ask professors of mathematics to give them the explanation. "Look, sir", said one, "a child in my class has discovered that the square constructed on the diagonal of another square has an area twice the latter. He also found that the equilateral triangle which has the height of another for its side, is three-quarters of this other, and that the theorem of Pythagoras is applicable not only to squares, but to all regular polygons. Is this true?" Hence, far from the results being due to the genius of a teacher, these results derive from the active and joyous enthusiasm of the children themselves. Children who have not yet turned ten years of age. And when we think that children so young have begun to study algebraic formulae and that they love studying the extensions of the theorem of Pythagoras, we must realize that the child's mind had been depressed instead of aided by the school. ​ These considerations of the psychological type are important from a general and human point of view; joy replaces fatigue and enormous progress is made in the acquisition of culture. ​ To achieve this, however, we have to put the personality of the child in the place of honor which it ought to have in the school - in that social environment which has been specially prepared for his aid and benefit.

Thanks Sue Weisman Sue and I worked together on the children's unit at Westwood Lodge, a psychiatric hospital in Westwood, MA. She was also working at Woodside Montessori School , where they were looking for a teacher to pilot a new elementary program. Sue suggested I apply for the job, and enrolled her own children after we opened the classroom. ​ Ravi Kaur Khalsa Ravi was the owner, director, and a 3-6 teacher at Woodside. Her faith in my potential and financial support for my training enabled me to become a Montessori teacher. ​ Gary Davidson Gary is the founder/director at Seacoast Center for Education , a Montessori teacher training organization. His patience, experience, and wry insights helped guide and support me as a teacher. ​ Charles Terranova Another Seacoast instructor with a long and successful Montessori career, Charles' vast experience, and infectious joy inspired and encouraged me along the way. ​ Rob Keys Rob still teaches at Seacoast, and over the years turned into a true friend. We eventually taught together at the Cornerstone School in Stratham, NH, some of the best memories of my life.