Céline Alvarez

“If human babies came into the world with a fully matured intelligence as other mammals do, they would be born a finished product.”
― Céline Alvarez, The Natural Laws of Children: Why Children Thrive When We Understand How Their Brains Are Wired

“What children need and want is not some new pedagogical method, but the world that already exists. They want to play in nature, plant things, be with animals, participate in the upkeep of their environment. They want to assimilate the culture and knowledge acquired by humanity in the countless generations preceding them, and they want to do this in a living way that is not sequentially programmed. They want to learn to speak, count, read, write, to discover geography and the mysteries of the universe, to learn music, mathematical code, biology, history, all about dinosaurs, and so on. And if we take the trouble to present the whole reality to our children in conditions that make sense to them, we will be very surprised at how quickly they leave their toys aside when they distract them from their real task: studying the real world that they were just born into, understanding it, becoming specialists in it.”
― Céline Alvarez, The Natural Laws of Children: Why Children Thrive When We Understand How Their Brains Are Wired