The Absorbent Mind

Introduction

The present volume is based on lectures Dr. Maria Montessori gave at Ahmedabad during the first training course to be held after her internment in India, which lasted till the end of World War II. In it she illustrates the unique mental powers of the young child, which enable him to construct and firmly establish, within a few years, without teachers, without any of the usual aids of education, almost abandoned and often obstructed all the characteristics of the human personality

This achievement by a being born with great potentialities, yet so weak in body, so lacking in all the usual faculties of the mind that it may almost be called a zero, and which after no more than six years already surpasses all other species, is indeed one of the greatest mysteries of life.

In the present volume, Dr. Montessori not only sheds the light of her penetrating insight, based on close observation and just evaluation, on the phenomena of this earliest and yet most decisive period of human life, but also indicates the responsibility of adult humanity towards it. She gives a practical meaning to the now universally accepted necessity of “education from birth.”

This can be given only when education becomes a “help to life, and transcends the narrow limits of teaching and the direct transmission of knowledge or ideals from one mind