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.
“Whoever today claims that the child must pay attention to things that displease him in order to grow accustomed to the necessities of life is doing much the same. Except that, in the case of psychic nourishment, hunger is absent […]. It is not in this way that a strong mind will be formed, ready for the difficult eventualities of life. The child who ate the cold food and went hungry in the evening was the one whose poorly developed body was weaker in the face of environmental infections.” — Maria Montessori, The Montessori Method