The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities.
For what is the use of transmitting knowledge if the individual’s total development lags behind?
A great deal of time and intellectual force are lost in the world, because the false seems great and the truth so small and insignificant.
The objects in our system are instead a help to the child himself, he chooses what he wants for his own use, and works with it according to his own needs, tendencies and special interests. In this way, the objects become a means of growth.
Education, as conceived today, is something separated both from biological and social life.
The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment.
The first thing required of a teacher is that he be rightly disposed for his task.
The teacher’s task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.
Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises.
The greatest triumph of our educational method should always be this: to bring about the spontaneous progress of the child.
Love and the hope of it are not things one can learn; they are a part of life’s heritage.
One of the great problems facing men is their failure to realize the fact that a child possesses an active psychic life even when he cannot manifest it, and that the child must secretly perfect this inner life over a long period of time.
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.
Order is not goodness; but perhaps it is the indispensable road to arrive at it.
A vital force is active in every individual and leads it towards its own evolution.
The world of education is like an island where people cut off from the world are prepared for life by exclusion from it.
In the psychological realm of relationship between teacher and child, the teacher’s part and its techniques are analogous to those of the valet; they are to serve, and to serve well: to serve the spirit.
An interesting piece of work, freely chosen, which has the virtue of inducing concentration rather than fatigue, adds to the child’s energies and mental capacities, and leads him to self-mastery.
At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.
Education should therefore include the two forms of work, manual and intellectual, for the same person, and thus make it understood by practical experience that these two kinds complete each other and are equally essential to a civilized existence.