The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth.
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.
First the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect.
To give a child liberty is not to abandon him to himself.
We must, therefore, quit our roles as jailers and instead take care to prepare an environment in which we do as little as possible to exhaust the child with our surveillance and instruction.
There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it.
If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to ‘things’ and desires to posses them.
It follows that at the beginning of his life the individual can accomplish wonders without effort and quite unconsciously.
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!
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.