made up her teaching and explain how they form a single, coherent view
of education that is applicable to children of all ages and all cultures.

If I had to sum up the whole Montessori ideology in a single sentence, it
would be that it is a guide to achieving a positive attitude of mind in all
the circumstances of life. This principle pervades the whole Montessori
system, which its founder saw clearly as something that applied not
merely to nursery schools, but to the whole of education, from birth to
maturity.

Believing that a positive mindset means focusing all one's thoughts,
feelings, and actions on the positive, happy, and creative quality of life,
and concentrating on the development of everything that makes life more
enjoyable and happy, may seem like the empty aspirations of a mere
idealist. Montessori was certainly an idealist, but she was a thoroughly
practical one. She was very much interested in practical results, and lived
to see thousands of nursery schools translate her principles into an
everyday reality. As a qualified doctor, she approached the subject of
education from the point of view of a scientist and a researcher. She saw a
need to find practical ways of eliminating the feelings of scorn, hatred,
jealousy, inadequacy, and rejection that are so characteristic, not only in
much of our orthodox education but also, in consequence of that
education, in our relations with each other in general in the adult world.
She realized that it meant encouraging children instead of condemning
them, stimulating their good impulses instead of repressing the bad ones,
seeing the spark of good intentions and endeavors under a mountain of
wrongdoing, and believing in the ultimate triumph of good, creative
aspirations over lawlessness, vandalism, and destruction. She believed, in
short, that a good mental disposition is an indispensable requirement for a
happy, healthy, and efficient life.

Her idea was that by transforming the process of children's education she
could help to transform the attitudes of the adults whom they would later
become, and so those of society and the world at large. It was a
breathtakingly bold yet practical, all-encompassing, positive vision of the
potential of mankind on earth within a foreseeable future.

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