Educating Children
By Maria Montessori
(From speech delivered in California.)
What shall we say, then, when the question before us is that of educating children?
We know only too well the sorry spectacle of the teacher, who, in the ordinary school room, must pour certain cut and dried facts into the heads of the scholars. In order to succeed in this barren path she finds it necessary to discipline her pupils into immobility and to force their attention. Prizes and punishments are ever ready and efficient aids to the master who must force into a given attitude of mind and body those who are condemned to be his listeners.