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.
“The individual made artificially silent and motionless like a paralytic is not disciplined. Such an individual is annihilated, not disciplined. We call disciplined an individual who is master of himself and who can therefore make use of himself, or follow a rule of life. […] Every manifestation with a useful purpose, whatever it may be and in whatever form it presents itself, must be permitted; and the teacher must observe it: that is the essential point.” — Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method