What are the key premises of Montessori?
• Children are to be respected as different from adults, and as individuals who differ from each other. • Children possess unusual sensitivity and mental powers for absorbing and learning from their environment that are unlike those of the adults both in quantity and capacity. • The most important years of growth are the first six years of life when unconscious learning is gradually brought to the conscious level. • Children have a deep love and need for purposeful work. The child works, however, not as an adult for profit completion of a job, but for the sake of the activity itself. It is this activity which accomplishes the most important goal for the child: the development of his or her mental, physical and psychological powers.
