| "And so we discovered that education is not
something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural
process which develops spontaneously in the human being.
It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue
of experiences in which the child acts on his environment.
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.
My experiments, conducted in many different countries,
have now been going on for forty years, and as the
children grew up parents kept asking me to extend
my methods to the later ages. We then found that individual
activity is one factor that stimulates and produces
development, and that this is not more true for the
little ones of preschool age than it is for the junior,
middle and upper school children."
--Maria Montessori - from The Absorbent Mind
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