ABSTRACT
The accumulated experience the authors have had since the publication of the Italian version has repeatedly proved to them that in their classes of little children, numbering forty and even fifty, the discipline is much better than in ordinary schools. To obtain such discipline it is quite useless to count on reprimands or spoken exhortations. Such means might perhaps at the beginning have an appearance of efficacy: but very soon, the instant that real discipline appears, all of this falls miserably to the earth, an illusion confronted with reality, 'night gives way to day'. A similar error is that which they repeat so frequently when they fancy that the desire of the student is to possess a piece of information. They aid him to grasp intellectually this detached piece of knowledge, and, preventing by this means his self-development, they make him wretched. To have learned something is for the child only a point of departure.
