Happy Friday, everyone.
This week I’d like to share a new talk with you, linked here and contextualized and embedded below, on our mission to elevate human development.
Montessori’s vision of childhood is astonishing in two ways.
First, that she thinks so highly of children, believing them to be capable of so much intelligence, virtue, and agency. Children can be characteristically diligent, centered, purposeful, astute, courteous.
Second, that she thinks these capabilities are universally present in children. It is not only exceptional children. It is something like 99% of children, children across cultures and social classes, across genetic temperaments and natural talents.
The rare child that seems independent and wise beyond her years is actually normal. She’s not a saint or a genius or an anomaly of personality. She is simply developmentally healthy. She has achieved something that, though unusual, is possible to virtually all children.
“Normality”, Montessori wrote, “is marvelous and beautiful. Normal children have characteristics which are not common: they work with engaged interest, exactness and peace, happiness, social sentiment, etc…” Along the same lines, she wrote elsewhere that “the normal child is one who is precociously intelligent, who has learned to overcome himself and to live in peace, and who prefers a disciplined task to futile idleness.”
These traits are “not common”, and will likely be seen as “precocious”, but in fact they are “normal”—they are healthy, and they can and should be common.
Below is a talk I gave on what the normal childhood looks like across the years of a developing life—on what it looks like to grow up normal: a normal infant, a normal toddler, a normal child, a normal adolescent. It is a portrait of how amazing growing up can be, and a paean to believing that all childhoods can be like this.
Normal development is a rare and wonderful thing. To make it less rare, we need to be able to appreciate its wonder. Our business as a whole, and each of our work individually, is predicated on fully, precisely appreciating human normalcy across a lifespan.
Please do take note that this is a followup, a part 2, to a talk I gave and shared about six months ago, on the rare and wonderful phenomenon of a normal adult. If you’re interested in part 2 on normal development, I strongly recommend starting with part 1 on normal adults if you haven’t yet seen it.
Have a great weekend,
Matt Bateman
Board of Directors, Higher Ground Education
Brilliance is normal. I love this pure view of the child--human kind. I look forward to listening to the rest!