Drawn from my three-year immersion for the film Let the Child Be the Guide, my research, and my Montessori teacher training (AMI), this quote is an excerpt from a thematic selection I compiled to remove the primary obstacle to education: our adult prejudices. This post presents one of the themes from this collection, designed to transform, step by step, our gaze upon the child.
“We have been profoundly moved by the discovery of a terrible and very real conflict. […] This conflict sets the adult against the child, the strong against the weak and, we must add, the blind against the clear-sighted. […] Yet both the adult and the child are ignorant of their own nature.” — Maria Montessori, Education and Peace
“This blind struggle between the strong and the weak results in reality in the production of a weakened, ineffectual, enslaved, stunted, inharmonious man — in short, a diminished being.” — Maria Montessori, cit. in E.M. Standing, Maria Montessori: Her Life and Her Work