It took me a long time to learn, as a classroom teacher, that on the days when I came to class just bursting with some great teaching idea, good things rarely happened. The children, with their great quickness and keenness of perception, would sense that there was something “funny,” wrong, about me. Instead of being a forty-year-old human being in a room full of ten-year-old human beings, I was now a “scientist” in a room full of laboratory animals. . . . In no time at all they fell back into their old defensive and evasive strategies, began to give me sneaky looks, to ask for hints, to say “I don’t get it.” I could see them growing stupid in front of my eyes.
— How Children Fail
•
All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words — Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple — or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves — and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.
