Do not tell them how to do it. Show them how to do it and do not say a word. If you tell them, they will watch your lips move. If you show them, they will want to do it themselves.
Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world.
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.
Teach by teaching, not by correcting.
It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.
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!
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.
It is in the encounter of the maternal guiding instincts with the sensitive periods of the newly born that conscious love develops between parent and child.
We must therefore turn to the child as to the key to the fate of our future life.
Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements.
The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent of teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.
A humankind abandoned in its earlier formative stage becomes its own greatest threat to survival.
The children are now working as if I did not exist.
Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child’s spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.
Such prizes and punishments are, if I may be allowed the expression, the bench of the soul, the instrument of slavery for the spirit.
Our work is not to teach, but to help the absorbent mind in its work of development. How marvelous it would be if by our help, if by an intelligent treatment of the child, if by understanding the needs of his physical life and by feeding his intellect, we could prolong the period of functioning of the absorbent mind!
Even so those who teach little children too often have the idea that they are educating babies and seek to place themselves on the child’s level by approaching him with games, and often with foolish stories. Instead of all this, we must know how to call to the man which lies dormant within the soul of the child.
Needless help is an actual hindrance to the development of natural forces.
The environment acts more strongly upon the individual life the less fixed and strong this individual life may be.
I was more than an elementary teacher, for I was present, or directly taught the children, from eight in the morning to seven in the evening without interruption. These two years of practice are my first and indeed my true degree in pedagogy. From the very beginning of my.