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• Method

1. It is based on years of patient observation of the child's nature.
2. It has proven itself to be of universal application. Within a single generation, it has been tried with complete success with children of almost every civilized country. Race, climate, nationality, social rank, type of civilization - all these make no difference to its successful application.
3. It has revealed the small child as a lover of work, intellectual work, spontaneously chosen and carried out with profound joy.
4. It is based on the child's imperious need to learn by doing. At each stage in the child's mental growth, corresponding occupations are provided by means of which he or she develops his or her faculties.
5. While it offers the child the maximum of spontaneity, it nevertheless enables each child to reach the same, or even higher, level of scholastic attainment as under the traditional systems.
6. Though it does away with the necessity of coercion by means of rewards and punishment, it achieves a higher discipline than formerly possible. It is an active discipline, which originates within the child and is not imposed from without.
7. It is based on a profound respect for the child's personality and removes him from the preponderant influences of the adult, thus leaving the child room to grow in biological independence. Hence the child is allowed a large measure of liberty (not license), which forms the basis of real discipline.
8. It enables the teacher to deal with each child individually in each subject, and thus guide each child according to his or her own unique individual requirements.
9. Each child works at his or her own pace. Hence the quick child is not held back by the slower child, nor is the latter, in trying to keep up with the former, obliged to flounder along hopelessly out of his depth. Each stone in the mental edifice is "well and truly laid" before the next is added.
10. It does away with the competitive spirit and its train of baneful results. More than this, at every turn it presents endless opportunities among the children for mutual help, which is joyfully given and gratefully received.
11. Since the child works from his own free choice, without competition and coercion, he or she is freed from danger of overstrain, feelings of inferiority and other experiences, which are apt to be the unconscious cause of profound mental disturbances in later life.
12. Finally, the Montessori Method develops the whole personality of the child, not merely the intellectual faculties, but also the powers of deliberation, initiative, and independent choice, with their emotional compliments. By living as a free member of a real social community, the child is trained in those fundamental social qualities which form the basis of good citizenship.

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