The discovery of the child / Maria Montessori ; translated by M. Joseph Costelloe.

Italian into English.

Bibliographical footnotes.

On the application of science to the school -- The history of methods: the history of the discovery of a scientific education for normal children ; Description of the conditions surrounding the first experiment: an account of its first propagation -- The teaching methods employed in children's houses : Physical growth ; The environment ; Practical observations ; Discipline and liberty ; The difficulty of discipline in schools ; Independence ; The more useless help is, the more the hinderance to the development of natural powers ; Rewards and punishments for our children ; Freedom to develop -- Nature in education : The place of nature in education ; Care for other ; Prejudices about the gardens ; Their favorite work ; Simplicity ; Our garden -- Education in movement : The red man and the white man ; Discipline and gymnastics ; Work and gymnastics ; Work ; Voices ; Talents ; Precision ; The sensitive age ; Analysis of movements ; Economy of movement ; Fastening frames ; Other means ; The line ; Concurrent exercises ; Immobility and silence ; Open roads ; The free life ; Reality ; The Arrangement of actions ; Gymnastics and games ; Freedom of choice -- The material for development : The isolation of a single quality in the material ; Fundamental qualities common to everything in the educational movement environment surrounding a child -- The Exercises : How a teacher should give a lesson: comparison with the older systems ; How to initiate a child into the exercises with the sensorial material - contrasts, identities, and graduations -- Visual and auditory distinctions : Material: solid insets and blocks ; Effort and muscular memory ; Color materials ; Sensorial knowledge of geometry ; Plane insets and geometrical shapes ; Exercises for distinguishing sounds ; Silence -- Generalizations on the training of the senses -- The teacher -- The technique of the lessons : The first period: initiations ; Second period: The lessons ; Practical applications - a guide to the use of the material ; The solid insets ; The guide to the child -- Observations on prejudices : The touchstone ; Mental order -- Elevation : Silence-materialized abstractions ; A comparison between the education of normal children and that of those who are mentally defective ; A comparison between our system of teaching normal children and experimental psychology ; The education of the senses leads to a sharpening of the senses through repeated exercises -- Written language : The old methods of teaching reading and writing -- The mechanism of writing : An analysis of the movements of a hand that is writing ; Direct preparation for writing ; An analysis of its various factors ; Intelligence freed from mechanisms ; Composition of words -- Reading : The exercise with classified cards ; Commands: the reading of sentences -- Speech : Defects of speech due to a lack of education -- Teaching how to count and an introduction to arithmetic -- Further developments in arithmetic -- Drawing and representative art -- Introduction to music -- Religious education -- Discipline in a children's house -- Conclusions and impressions -- The triumphal chariot -- Grades and sequence in the presentation of the material.

Montessori went beyond the conventions of the day to seek a new way of knowing and loving a child. In this book she describes the nature of the child and her method of working more fully with the child's urge to learn.