Maria Montessori
Educator, Physician
"The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child's own natural desire to learn."
Children quotes
Children
25.4K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Maria Montessori
Educator, Physician
"The education of even a small child, therefore, does not aim at preparing him for school, but for life."
Maria Montessori
Educator, Physician
"Let the children be free; encourage them; let them run outside when it is raining; let them remove their shoes when they find a puddle of water; and when the grass of the meadows is wet with dew, let them run on it and trample it with their bare feet; let them rest peacefully when a tree invites them to sleep beneath its shade; let them shout and laugh when the sun wakes them in the morning."
Lewis Grizzard
Author, Humorist
"It's better to have died a small child than to be a politician who gets caught in a scandal during a slow news month."
Maria Montessori
Educator, Physician
"There is a great sense of community within the Montessori classroom, where children of differing ages work together in an atmosphere of cooperation rather than competitiveness. There is respect for the environment and for the individuals within it, which comes through experience of freedom within the community."
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Children quotes (page 1 of 1272)
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"To assist a child we must provide him with an environment which will enable him to develop freely."
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"The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six."
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"The child who has felt a strong love for his surroundings and for all living creatures, who has discovered joy and enthusiasm in work, gives us reason to hope that humanity can develop in a new direction."
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"The essence of independence is to be able to do something for one’s self. Adults work to finish a task, but the child works in order to grow, and is working to create the adult, the person that is to be. Such experience is not just play... it is work he must do in order to grow up."
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"Peace is what every human being is craving for, and it can be brought about by humanity through the child."
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"A large part of our attitude toward things is conditioned by opinions and emotions which we unconsciously absorb as children from our environment. In other words, it is tradition—besides inherited aptitudes and qualities—which makes us what we are. We but rarely reflect how relatively small as compared with the powerful influence of tradition is the influence of our conscious thought upon our conduct and convictions."
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"Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world."
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"Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farm workers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another."
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
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"Our aim is not merely 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."
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"The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study."
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"When you teach a child something you take away forever his chance of discovering it for himself."
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"Those who kill their own children and discriminate daily against them because of the color of their skin; those who let the murderers of blacks remain free, protecting them, and furthermore punishing the black population because they demand their legitimate rights as free men - how can those who do this consider themselves guardians of freedom?"
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"When children attend schools that place a greater value on discipline and security than on knowledge and intellectual development, they are attending prep schools for prison."
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"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand, that which we allow him to discover for himself will remain with him visible for the rest of his life."
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"The first thing I ask is that people should not make use of my name, and should not call themselves Lutherans but Christians. What is Luther? The teaching is not mine. Nor was I crucified for anyone...How did I, poor stinking bag of maggots that I am, come to the point where people call the children of Christ by my evil name?"
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"Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration"
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"If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself."
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"Are we forming children who are only capable of learning what is already known? Or should we try to develop creative and innovative minds, capable of discovery from the preschool age on, throughout life?"
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"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."
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