Quote collection
321 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child."
"By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man."
"It is not the child as a physical but as a psychic being that can provide a strong impetus to the betterment of mankind. 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."
"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."
"Education, as conceived today, is something separated both from biological and social life."
"No one can be free unless he is independent... In reality, he who is served is limited in his independence."
"At one year of age the child says his first intentional wordhis babbling has a purpose, and this intention is a proof of conscious intelligenceHe becomes ever more aware that language refers to his surroundings, and his wish to master it consciously becomes also greater.Subconsciously and unaided, he strains himself to learn, and this effort makes his success all the more astonishing."
"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."
"Order is ... the true key to rapidity of reaction."
"An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity."
"It is easy to substitute our will for that of the child by means of suggestion or coercion; but when we have done this we have robbed him of his greatest right, the right to construct his own personality."
"If I am going up a ladder, and a dog begins to bite at my ankles, I can do one of two things - either turn round and kick out at the it, or simply go on up the ladder. I prefer to go up the ladder!"
"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."
"Scientific observation then has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment."
"The hand is the prehensile organ of the mind."
"in nature everything is transformed but nothing destroyed."
"Since it is through movement that the will realises itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act."
"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."
"The child endures all things."
"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."