Maria Montessori

Philosopher, Organization founder

1870 – 1952

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Who was Maria Montessori?

Maria Tecla Artemesia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. Her educational method is in use today in public and private schools throughout the world.

Famous Quotes:

  • 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.
  • What is a scientist? We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself.
  • The teacher must derive not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.
  • There is in every child a painstaking teacher, so skilful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!
  • If we can, when we have established individual discipline, arrange the children, sending each one to his own place, in order, trying to make them understand the idea that thus placed they look well, and that it is a good thing to be thus placed in order, that it is a good and pleasing arrangement in the room, this ordered and tranquil adjustment of theirs -- then their remaining in their places, quiet and silent, is the result of a species of lesson, not an imposition. To make them understand the idea, without calling their attention too forcibly to the practice, to have them assimilate a principle of collective order -- that is the important thing.
  • If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men.
  • The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity.
  • If an educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that 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.
  • 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. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual's total development lags behind?
  • 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.

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Born
Aug 31, 1870
Chiaravalle, Marche
Also known as
  • Dr. Maria Montessori
  • Maria Tecla Artemesia Montessori
Parents
Children
Religion
  • History of the term "Catholic"
  • Catholicism
Ethnicity
  • Italian people
Nationality
  • Italy
Profession
Education
  • University of Rome La Sapienza
    (1890 - 1896)
  • Regio Istituto Tecnico Leonardo da Vinci
    (1886 - 1890)
  • Regia Scuola Tecnica Michelangelo Buonarroti
    ( - 1886)
Employment
  • University of Rome La Sapienza
Lived in
  • Laren
Died
May 6, 1952
Noordwijk
Resting place
Noordwijk

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

Citation

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"Maria Montessori." Biographies.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.biographies.net/people/en/maria_montessori>.

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