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 deepest discouragement is that which arises from the conviction of ‘powerlessness.’ […] If the adult persuades the child that powerlessness resides in him, a nebula that clouds his ideas settles within him; there follows a timidity, a kind of apathy and a terror that subsequently become constitutive of his personality; all these things together constitute those ‘inner obstacles’ that psychoanalysis calls the ‘inferiority complex.'” — Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood