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
“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
Return to alphabetical index of Quotations pages
Taking Children Seriously, ‘Quotations M’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/quotations/