"The goal of early childhood education should be to activate the child's own natural desire to learn."
"Supposing I said there was a planet without schools or teachers, where study was unknown, and yet the inhabitants -- doing nothing but live and walk about -- came to know all things, to carry in their minds the whole of learning; would you not think I was romancing? Well, just this, which seems so fanciful as to be nothing but the invention of a fertile imagination, is a reality. It is the child's way of learning."
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Source: The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori, Part I, (p. 9), 1949.
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