This is in a way a romantic age, and children respond to music, literature, poetry and drama. They can be drawn into an understanding of all of humanity through these studies, and into creations of their own as a way to explore and come to understand their own developing emotions as they pass from the stage of childhood to that of being adult. If the needs of the person are met in the first eighteen years of life, he will be ready to become an independent adult, both physically and mentally, by age twenty-four. It is not good for children when we, parents and teachers, push them into stages that they are not ready for. But neither is it good for us to hold children back when they are ready to operate independently.
Every unnecessary help is really a hindrance to development.
This is true at any age, from a child who is ready to wean himself from nursing, the young child who wants to pick out her own clothing in the morning, and the teenager who decides to study the electric guitar instead of the viola. I had always understood that Madame Montessori dispensed with discipline and I wondered how she managed a room full of children . . . On sending my little boy of three to spend his mornings in a Montessori school, I found that he quickly became a more disciplined human being . . . The pedagogical discoveries involved have required genius but the teachers who are to apply them do not require genius. They require only the right sort of training, together with a degree of sympathy and patience, which is by no means unusual.