58 quotes found
"It seems as though a new epoch were in preparation, a truly human epoch, and as though the end had almost come of those evolutionary periods which sum up the history of the heroic struggles of humanity; an epoch in which an assured peace will promote the brotherhood of man, while morality and love will take their place as the highest form of human superiority. In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of woman in approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honour, and in these respects man always has yielded women the palm."
"Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed."
"The task of the educator of young children lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity."
"In the vivid description of the Gospel, it would seem that we must help the Christ hidden in every poor man, in every prisioner, in every sufferer. But if we paraphrased the marvelous scene and applied it to the child, we should find that Christ goes to help all men in the form of the child."
"We have in ourselves tendencies that are not good and which flourish like weeds in a field. (Original sin). These tendencies are many; they fall into seven groups, known of old as the Seven deadly sins. All deadly sins tend to separate us from the child; for the child compared to us, is not only purer but has mysterious qualities, which we adults as a rule cannot perceive, but in which we must believe with faith, for Jesus spoke to them so clearly and insistently that all the Evangelists recorded His words: Unless ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall nor enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. That which the educator must seek is to be able to see the child as Jesus saw him. It is with this endeavour, thus defined and delimited, that we wish to deal."
"The child is essentially alien to this society of men and might express his position in the words of the Gospel: My kingdom is not of this world"
"Freedom without organization of work would be useless. The child left free without means of work would go to waste, just as a new-born baby, if left free without nourishment, would die of starvation.The organization of the work, therefore, is the cornerstone of this new structure of goodness [in education], but even that organization would be in vain without the liberty to make use of it."
"To prepare teachers in the method of the experimental sciences is not an easy matter. When we shall have instructed them in anthropometry and psychometry in the most minute manner possible, we shall have only created machines, whose usefulness will be most doubtful. Indeed, if it is after this fashion that we are to initiate our teachers into experiment, we shall remain forever in the field of theory. The teachers of the old school, prepared according to the principles of metaphysical philosophy, understood the ideas of certain men regarded as authorities, and moved the muscles of speech in talking of them, and the muscles of the eye in reading their theories. Our scientific teachers, instead, are familiar with certain instruments and know how to move the muscles of the hand and arm in order to use these instruments; besides this, they have an intellectual preparation which consists of a series of typical tests, which they have, in a barren and mechanical way, learned how to apply. The difference is not substantial, for profound differences cannot exist in exterior technique alone, but lie rather within the inner man. Not with all our initiation into scientific experiment have we prepared new masters, for, after all, we have left them standing without the door of real experimental science; we have not admitted them to the noblest and most profound phase of such study, — to that experience which makes real scientists."
"We give the name scientist to the type of man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth of life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets, and who, in this pursuit, has felt arising within him a love for the mysteries of nature, so passionate as to annihilate the thought of himself. The scientist is not the clever manipulator of instruments, he is the worshipper of nature and he bears the external symbols of his passion as does the follower of some religious order. To this body of real scientists belong those who, forgetting, like the Trappists of the Middle Ages, the world about them, live only in the laboratory, careless often in matters of food and dress because they no longer think of themselves; those who, through years of unwearied use of the microscope, become blind; those who in their scientific ardour inoculate themselves with tuberculosis germs; those who handle the excrement of cholera patients in their eagerness to learn the vehicle through which the diseases are transmitted; and those who, knowing that a certain chemical preparation may be an explosive, still persist in testing their theories at the risk of their lives. This is the spirit of the men of science, to whom nature freely reveals her secrets, crowning their labours with the glory of discovery. There exists, then, the "spirit" of the scientist, a thing far above his mere "mechanical skill," and the scientist is at the height of his achievement when the spirit has triumphed over the mechanism. When he has reached this point, science will receive from him not only new revelations of nature, but philosophic syntheses of pure thought."
"The peril of servilism and dependence lies not only in that "useless consuming of life," which leads to helplessness, but in the development of individual traits which indicate all too plainly a regrettable perversion and degeneration of the normal man. I refer to the domineering and tyrannical behaviour with examples of which we are all only too familiar. The domineering habit develops side by side with helplessness. It is the outward sign of the state of feeling of him who conquers through the work of others. Thus it often happens that the master is a tyrant toward his servant. It is the spirit of the task-master toward the slave."
"Let us picture to ourselves a clever and proficient workman, capable, not only of producing much and perfect work, but of giving advice in his workshop, because of his ability to control and direct the general activity of the environment in which he works. The man who is thus master of his environment will be able to smile before the anger of others, showing that great mastery of himself which comes from consciousness of his ability to do things. We should not, however, be in the least surprised to know that in his home this capable workman scolded his wife if the soup was not to his taste, or not ready at the appointed time. In his home, he is no longer the capable workman; the skilled workman here is the wife, who serves him and prepares his food for him. He is a serene and pleasant man where he is powerful through being efficient, but is domineering where he is served. Perhaps if he should learn how to prepare his soup he might become a perfect man! The man who, through his own efforts, is able to perform all the actions necessary for his comfort and development in life, conquers himself, and in doing so multiplies his abilities and perfects himself as an individual. We must make of the future generation, powerful men, and by that we mean men who are independent and free."
"Adults have not understood children or adolescents and they are, as a consequence, in continual conflict with them. The remedy is not that adults should gain some new intellectual knowledge or achieve a higher standard of culture. No, they must find a different point of departure. The adult must find within himself the still unknown error that prevents him from seeing the child as he is."
"If a child finds no stimuli for the activities which would contribute to his development, he is attracted simply to 'things' and desires to possess them."
"Rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child's spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities."
"The best instruction is that which uses the least words sufficient for the task."
"This is our mission: to cast a ray of light and pass on. I compare the effects of these first lessons the impressions of a solitary wanderer who is walking serene and happy in a shady grove, meditating; that is leaving his inner thought free to wander. Suddenly a church bell pealing out nearby recalls to himself; then he feels more keenly that peaceful bliss which had already been born, though dormant, within him. To stimulate life, leaving it free, however, to unfold itself, that is the first duty of the educator. For such a delicate mission great art is required to suggest the right moment and to limit intervention, last one should disturb or lead astray rather than help the soul which is coming to life and which will live by virtue of its own efforts. This art must accompany the scientific method, because the simplicity of our lessons bears a great resemblance to experiments in experimental psychology."
"If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future."
"If help and salvation are to come they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men. The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities."
"We teachers can only help the work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man who will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind."
"The child is truly a miraculous being, and this should be felt deeply by the educator."
"One who has drunk at the fountain of spiritual happiness says good-by of his own accord to the satisfactions that come from a higher professional status … What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher thus transformed? It is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist.""
"If a teacher can discern what a child is trying to do in his informational interaction with the environment, and if that teacher can have on hand materials relevant to that intention, if he can impose a relevant challenge with which the child can cope, supply a relevant model for imitation, or pose a relevant question the child can answer, that teacher can call forth the kind of accommodative change that constitutes psychological development or growth."
"Maria Montessori, busy giving lectures in various cities, committed herself to raising public awareness of “modern charity,” where the theme of the “new woman” emerged. She became a champion of women's emancipation and ideals of peace. In March 1896, she became co-founder and deputy secretary of a Roman women's association and in 1899 she joined the Maternal Union. She took up the women's cause in international forums, such as the Women's Congress in London in 1899, where she was approached by Guido Baccelli (1830-1916), who had experienced the barricades that defended the Roman Republic from the assault of French troops in 1849 and was seven times Minister of Education. Also in 1899, Montessori joined the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 in New York for the study and dissemination of theosophy (divine wisdom) and esoteric sciences. Adhering to the Masonic principle of “universal brotherhood,” theosophy was based on the motto “there is no religion higher than truth.” No specific profession of faith was required of its members. This institution and its official organ, The Theosophist (1879), were founded by Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891), a Russian-born American philosopher, theosophist, occult essayist, and medium, and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907) ."
"I have lost a bit of my sight, much of my hearing. At conferences, I can't see the presentations and can't hear well. But I think more now than when I when I was twenty. The body can do whatever it likes. I am not the body: I am the mind."
"Man is ruined by servility, conformism, obsequiousness, rather than aggressiveness, which is much more common in the environment than within ourselves."
"In life one should never give in, surrender oneself to mediocrity, but rather move out of that grey area where everything is habit and passive resignation. One has to grow the courage to rebel."
"The women who changed the world never needed to show anything other than their own intelligence."
"I never had any hesitation or regrets in this sense. My life has been enriched by excellent human relations, work and interests. I have never felt lonely."
"Rare are those people who use the mind, few use the heart and really unique are those who use both."
"Everything came easy to me in life. I could always shake off difficulties, like water on a duck's wings."
"I'm an atheist: I don't know what it means to believe in God."
"Those who are lucky enough to have faith are granted with a great support in all stages of life. If instead of an anthropomorphous God, who rewards the good, one replaces the imperative chiselled in our genetic program that good deeds have a price in themselves, and that evil has its own punishment, both the non-believer and the believer will find the same answer."
"Better to add life to your days than days to your life."
"I consider imperfection a Darwinian spring of natural selection. For example, present day insects are identical to those of six million years ago: they were already perfect, and there was no reason for them to change. Man was instead imperfect, and this was the proxy for his own development and evolution."
"The young need to know how lucky they are to have been born in this splendid country, Italy."
"It is imperfection — not perfection — that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development."
"After centuries of dormancy, young women can now look toward a future moulded by their own hands."
"The allegations against Fidia cannot be true. The process for awarding Nobel prizes is so complex that it cannot be corrupted."
"She had this feeling for what was happening biologically. She was an intuitive observer, and she saw that something was making these nerve connections grow and was determined to find out what it was."
"She seemed able to face with equal equanimity the rigours of fascist cruelty and suppression that she was dealt as a Jew; the problems of practising underground medicine in wartime; the difficulties posed by prejudice and discrimination against women; and the near isolation and challenges of those working at the cutting edge of science."
"Modern imperialism finds its ideological justification in the now fashionable linguistic philosophy which either regards all meanings as wholly arbitrary (e.g., Quine, White, Goodman, etc.), or reduces them to the facticity of everyday discourse (e.g., Wittgenstein, Austin, etc.). In this fashion, all meanings are either equally unfounded, or they can be founded only in the domain of the given. In either case, imperialism is implicitly justified, for, in the first case it is regarded as at least as rational a system as any other, thus neutralizing any possible rational arguments for its debunking, or else, in the second case, since all meanings reduce to the given and the given is, in fact, imperialist, imperialism itself becomes the criterion of all meaningfulness."
"All meaning is necessarily teleological in character and historically rooted in the concrete operations of human subjects."
"The abstract categories of imperialism are neither exempt from the need of a foundation, nor will the fact that they are coextensive with ordinary discourse provide them with the needed foundation."
"They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident."
"We struggle to break capital’s plan for women, which is an essential moment of that planned division of labour and social power within the working class, through which capital has been able to maintain its power. Wages for housework, then, is a revolutionary demand not because by itself it destroys capital, but because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class."
"At the core of capitalism there is not only the symbiotic relation between waged-contractual labor and enslavement but, together with it, the dialectics of accumulation and destruction of labor-power, for which women have paid the highest cost, with their bodies, their work, their lives."
"Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was "also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class," whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as "race" and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat."
"Indeed, the Europe that was preparing to become a Promethean world-mover, presumably taking humankind to new technological and cultural heights, was a place where people never had enough to eat."
"With the marginalization of the midwife, the process began by which women lost the control they had exercised over procreation, and were reduced to a passive role in child delivery, while male doctors came to be seen as the true "givers of life" (as in the alchemical dreams of the Renaissance magicians)."
"With their expulsion from the crafts and the devaluation of reproductive labor poverty became feminized, and to enforce men's "primary appropriation" of women's labor, a new patriarchal order was constructed, reducing women to a double dependence: on employers and on men."
"As if following the script laid out by the witch-hunt, the new laws demonized the relation between white women and black men. When they were passed in the 1660s, the witch-hunt in Europe was coming to an end, but in America all the taboos surrounding the witch and the black devil were being revived, this time at the expense of black men."
"The witch hunts that are presently taking place in Africa or Latin America are rarely reported in Europe and the United States, in the same way as the witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries, for a long time, were of little interest to historians ... But if we apply to the present the lessons of the past, we realize that the reappearance of witch-hunting in so many parts of the world in the '80s and '90s is a clear sign of a process of "primitive accumulation," which means that the privatization of land and other communal resources, mass impoverishment, plunder, and the sowing of divisions in once-cohesive communities are again on the world agenda."
"The physicists' approach to the equivalence of Seiberg-Witten and Donaldson theory is based on Witten's interpretation of Donaldson's theory as a twisted supersymmetric Quantum Field Theory ... and on the concept of electro-magnetic duality."
"Noncommutative geometry, as developed by Connes starting in the early ’80s ..., extends the tools of ordinary geometry to treat spaces that are quotients, for which the usual “ring of functions”, defined as functions invariant with respect to the equivalence relation, is too small to capture the information on the “inner structure” of points in the quotient space. Typically, for such spaces functions on the quotients are just constants, while a nontrivial ring of functions, which remembers the structure of the equivalence relation, can be defined using a noncommutative algebra of coordinates, analogous to the non- commuting variables of quantum mechanics."
"It turns out that noncommutative geometry is a very good framework for theories of (modified) gravity coupled to matter. The main idea behind gravity and particle physics models based on noncommutative geometry is that "all forces become gravity" on an noncommutative space. In other words, it is only from the point of view of a slice of the geometry consisting of an ordinary spacetime manifold that we see a difference between gravity and the other forces, while from the point of view of the overall (noncommutative) geometry they are all seen together as gravity. As we will see, the main construction is not unlike the idea of "extra dimensions" many people are familiar with from string theory, except for the fact that the extra dimensions in these models are not only small, but also noncommutative, while the extended dimensions of spacetime maintain their commutative nature."
"Violence, bullying, and intimidation exist and are practiced on a daily basis within the mathematical community, and there is a widespread "culture of cruelty" among its practitioners ..."
"The general discourse of scientists about science is marred by beliefs of the Ancient Greeks in the kalos kai agathos: that which is beautiful must also be good, and conversely. This leads inevitably to portraits of scientists as cartoonish heroes: the more profound and significant the science, ... In fact what is truly heroic about science is the fact that it does uncover beautiful truths about the universe despite the ugliness and brutality of the human beings involved."
"Matilde Marcolli describes how she came to mathematics influenced by her parents’ involvement in Italian contemporary art. The abstract art of her father and the conceptual art of her mother, together with atonal twentieth-century music, share with mathematics an appreciation of abstract structures. Her own art includes painting, where surrealism allows her to express contrasts inherent in the practice of mathematical research and to explore the inner world of patient, difficult, and painful hard work and also the bullying and “culture of cruelty” within the mathematics community. ... Besides painting, Marcolli is also a writer in many forms, including science fiction, short stories, poetry, and a theater play."