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.
“Children have, especially in their earliest years, an intimate sensitivity, a spiritual necessity, which misdirected education or repressions can cause to vanish, replacing it with a slavery of the senses toward every object. […] This manifests itself in the delicate act of free choice, which a teacher, ill-prepared for observation, would crush before it had taken form, as an elephant might crush a flower bud opening in a meadow.” — Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind