Education demands, then, only this: the utilization of the inner powers of the child for his own instruction.

An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.

We must clearly understand that when we give the child freedom and independence, we are giving freedom to a worker already braced for action, who cannot live without working and being active.

Great tact and delicacy is necessary for the care of the mind of a child from three to six years, and an adult can have very little of it.

Supposing I said there was a planet without schools or teachers, where study was unknown, and yet the inhabitants -- doing nothing but live and walk about -- came to know all things, to carry in their minds the whole of learning; would you not think I was romancing? Well, just this, which seems so fanciful as to be nothing but the invention of a fertile imagination, is a reality. It is the child's way of learning.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.