
06/29/2025
A REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION
The discovery that the child has a mind able to absorb on its own account produces a revolution in education. We can now understand easily why the first period in human development, in which character is formed, is the most important. At no other age has the child greater need of an intelligent help, and any obstacle that impedes his creative work will lessen the chance he has of achieving perfection. We should help the child…because he is endowed with great creative energies, which are of their nature so fragile as to need a loving and intelligent defence. To these energies we want to bring help… When we understand that the energies belong to an unconscious mind, which has to become conscious through work and through an experience of life gained in the world, we realize that the mind of the child in infancy is different from ours, that we cannot reach it by verbal instruction, nor intervene directly in the process of its passing from the unconscious to the conscious – the process of making human faculty – then the whole concept of education changes. It becomes a matter of giving help to the child’s life, to the psychological development of man…
This is the new path on which education has been put; to help the mind in its process of development, to aid its energies and strengthen its many powers. Page 23-24 from the book The Absorbent Mind: https://montessori-pierson.com/vol-1-the-absorbent-mind.html; https://montessori-pierson.com/sp-3-mente-absorbente-del-ni-o.html