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.
“It is a fundamental error to believe that the will of the child must be destroyed so that he obeys — that is, accepts and carries out what another has decided. If we applied this reasoning to intellectual education, it would amount to saying that it is necessary to destroy the child’s intelligence in order to teach him our culture. […] The result is a kind of acquired disease of the will: timidity.” — Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind