Montessori's most recent biographer states that many of the ideas she either invented or used in a new way has become part of our education's common language of discourse about the subject of education, Among these ideas we find:

• Child-scaled furniture.
• The concept that children learn through play
• The idea of developmentally appropriate education materials.
• The "ungraded" class, which groups children by interest and ability rather by age, provides individually paced instruction, and gives each child freedom to proceed at his/her own rate.
• The idea of the child as different from adults, not just a smaller edition.
• The observation that infants are learning from birth onward, that age six is late to start thinking of a child's education and three is too early to begin schooling of the right kind.
• The importance of the environment in which learning is to take place.
• The significance of early stimulation for later learning and its implications for the education of the culturally impoverished child.
• The observation that children take a natural pleasure in learning to master their environment and that this mastery is the basis of the sense of competence necessary for independence.
• The judgment that real learning involves the ability to do things for oneself, not the passive reception of a body of knowledge.
• That the child benefits from learning materials that are intrinsically interesting, reality oriented, and designed to facilitate self-correcting and the refinement of sensory perceptions.
• That imposing immobility and silence hampers children's learning and that, given interesting work to do, children will establish their own order.
• The concept of "sensitive periods," phases of development appropriate to the learning of specific motor and cognitive skills.
• The right of every child to develop his or her own fullest potential and the idea that the school exists to implement that right.

The idea that the school must be part of the community and involve the parents if education is to be effective.