Montessori Discipline
“I was often asked, ‘But how do you make these tinies behave so well? How do you teach them such discipline?’”
“Rewards and punishments are ... the worst enemies of the natural development of the child. The jockey gives sugar to his horse before the race, but applies spurs and the whip when there is lagging. Still, do any of these methods induce the animal to run as swiftly and as superbly as the horse of the plains?”
“I have myself, sometimes, been too severe with a child.”
Dr. Haim Ginott was mentor to the authors of the popular discipline book, ‘How to Talk so Kids Will Listen’.
“If the child is not yet master of his own actions, if he cannot obey even his own will, so much the less can he obey the will of someone else.”
“In our system we obviously have a different concept of discipline. The discipline that we are looking for is active. We do not believe that one is disciplined only when he is artificially made as silent as a mute and as motionless as a paralytic. Such a one is not disciplined but annihilated.”