In case it is not obvious, whilst many of these quotations are consistent with Taking Children Seriously, many of them are not. Sometimes it is just interesting that that person said it, or it is interesting for some other reason.
“I was brimming over with interest and curiosity, but not for the sorts of things that were taught in class. In fact I was distantly perplexed by the fact that what was of greatest interest in life—things like music, theatre, politics, ideas in general—were not what schools were most concerned to teach you. The things they cared most about bore little relationship to anything else: they were just what you did at school, that’s all.”
– Bryan Magee, 2008, Growing Up in a War, Chapter 17
“It’s one of those things you can’t unsee once you see it: our massive moral blind spots regarding children.”
“Let it not be said of the scholars, they are brought up in the School of Tyrannus. […] The harsh, fierce, Orbilian way of treating the children, too commonly used in the school, is a dreadful curse of God upon our miserable offspring…
– Cotton Mather, 1710, Bonifacius: Essays To Do Good, p. 112 in the 1967 facsimile edition
“It is boasted now and then of a schoolmaster, that such and such a brave man had his education under him. There is nothing said, how many that might have been brave men, have been destroyed by him. How many brave wits, have been dispirited, confounded, murdered, by his barbarous way of managing them. […] Don’t by fierce cruelties fair hopes undo.”
– Cotton Mather, 1710, Bonifacius: Essays To Do Good, p. 112 in the 1967 facsimile edition
“In Sweden, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Ellen Key (1909) wrote an influential book: The Century of the Child. She argued (within the eugenics movement) for women’s responsibility to ensure a healthy generation of children. At the end of the twentieth century an acerbic commentator noted that what we got was not the century of the child but a century of the child professional (Stafseng 1993)—that is, the child as adult project. I think it is our duty and our task to help make the twenty-first century more like the century of the child. None of us knows what this would look like—nor did Ellen Key. A start is the rights of the child. My view is that these can derive a solid theoretical foundation in the sociology of childhood (Mayall 2002).”
– Berry Mayall, 2005, in Children Taken Seriously: In Theory, Policy and Practice, Chapter 5: The Social Condition of UK Childhoods: Children’s Understandings and Their Implications
“Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion.”
– Menander, c. 300 BC, Adelphoi
“Even within a ‘normal’, ‘happy’ family, young children may suffer traumas that leave scars for life. They are also all liable to punishments that the law has long ago deemed ‘cruel and unusual’ when applied to the full-grown. No man or woman in our society now may legally be subjected to the deliberate infliction of physical pain, deprivation of food or sleep, incarceration in dark or confined spaces, or being locked out of shelter at night. All these things are regularly happening to children everywhere without intervention by the adult world.”
– Rosalind Miles, 1994, The Children We Deserve: Love And Hate In The Making Of The Family, Introduction, p. 7
“Children are the subject of more outrageous despotism than the most abused of the small nations.”
– May 14, 1922, The Minneapolis Tribune
“In many ways, we cherish childhood, but we don’t take children seriously.”
– Jana Mohr Lone, 2021,Seen and Not Heard: Why children’s voices matter, Introduction, p. 3
“[A]geism and its unexamined beliefs about children impede our ability to hear what they have to say.”
– Jana Mohr Lone, 2021,Seen and Not Heard: Why children’s voices matter, Introduction, p. 3
“[C]hildhood is seen as valuable not in itself, but predominantly as a means to becoming an adult.”
– Jana Mohr Lone, 2021,Seen and Not Heard: Why children’s voices matter, Introduction, p. 3
“[O]ur attitudes toward children are often patronizing and condescending. Despite the importance we attach to the development of respect for others, we seem to place little emphasis on respect for children themselves.”
– Jana Mohr Lone, 2021,Seen and Not Heard: Why children’s voices matter, Introduction, p. 3
“We know only too well this sorry spectacle. In a classroom a bustling teacher is busy pouring knowledge into the heads of his charges. To succeed in his task he must keep his pupils immobile and attentive even by force, making generous use of rewards and punishments in order to keep his condemned listeners in the proper frame of mind.
But rewards and punishments, to speak frankly, are the desk of the soul, that is, a means of enslaving a child’s spirit, and better suited to provoke than to prevent deformities.
Actually, rewards and punishments are employed to compel children to conform to the laws of the world rather than to those of God. And these laws are practically always laid down for them by an adult invested with unlimited authority.
Too often a teacher commands because he is strong and expects a child to obey because he is weak. Instead of acting in this way, an adult should show himself to a child as a loving and enlightened guide assisting him along the way…”
– Maria Montessori, 1948, 1967, The Discovery of the Child, p. 13
(This book is Montessori’s substantial revision of her 1906/1912 book, The Montessori Method.)
“One of the most remarkable camouflages is the hypocrisy with which an adult treats a child. An adult sacrifices a child’s needs to his own, but he refuses to recognise the fact, since this would be intolerable. He persuades himself that he is … acting for the future good of the child. When the child defends himself, the adult does not advert to what is really happening but judges whatever the child does to save himself as disobedience and the result of evil tendencies. The feeble voice of truth and justice within the adult grows weak and is replaced by the false conviction that one is acting prudently, according to one’s right and duty, and so forth. The heart is hardened.”
– Maria Montessori, 1979, The Secret of Childhood, p. 176
“In later life, unless we join the army or a large religious community, we hardly ever need to think of ourselves as one of a group of thirty. It is, on the other hand, extremely valuable to be able to do things by yourself, even to be comfortable alone, without company. It is possible that too much group consciousness too soon may result in adults who cannot be alone.”
– Maire Mullarney, 1983, Anything School Can Do, You can Do Better, p. 14
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations M’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/