"Normal"- Red flags?

While reading the Montessori, Spontaneous Learning piece, the eagerness to criticize and dismiss instigated by irritating sentences such as: "But when the child has failed we should know that he was not at that instant ready for the psychic association which we wished to provoke in him..." was immediately compounded and validated by the following phrase: "In dealing with normal children, we must await this spontaneous investigation of the surroundings, or, as I like to all it, this voluntary explosion of the exploring spirit."

First of all: "normal children." I jumped when I this, this is what I was waiting for. My proclivity to deconstruct, aided by my tendency to often invalidate myself by jumping too quickly to extremes--also aided, to a considerable degree, by my dislike of the Montessori school system (the preschool that I attended and worked at always found itself competing with nagging parents who switched over to the "other-side"; here we cut the hotdogs into eight legged octopi for the children and did not freak out if, on occasion, they picked their noses-- there, their integrity was vested in letting a kid wrangle with unpeeling a banana for the majority of their playtime), effected me in such a way as to wave the red flag, high. "Normal children." This phrase contradicts the foundation of Jacatot and Ranciere's educational philosophy, which first and foremost, mandated that everyone was equally intelligent. The pursuit, or conditioning of "normal" was irrelevant; true learning must start with facilitating the learner's obligation to understand and believe in the unlimited nature of their minds. "Normal" was certainly a red flag for me.

However, I forced myself to recognize the readiness with which I took to dismissing the whole of the Montessori philosophy with the admission of that one word, as rash--perhaps it was not incorrect, but it was not supported, yet. To what extent must we overlook the semantics of things? At what point do we negate the value of something by diluting it with criticism? Must we approach a text from a critical disposition--"guilty until proven innocent" as our maxim? How alert should we be to the perpetuation of narratives which counteract and invalidate the intention of the project?

Sadofsky argued that it was absolutely imperative to the sustainability of a participatory democracy that: "It [the school] needs to have a philosophy that is complete and congruent, one that gets translated into the institutional structure when you build up a school. A founding group of a school must measure everything they do, every decision that they make, against that ideal..."

Can we overlook phrases like "normal children"? Does it equally jeopardize or retard "progress" as contentious phrases like "developing nations," "backward philosophies," "dis-abilities"? Where will it end? To what extent must we be vigilant about the narratives that we implicitly perpetuate? To what degree to they inevitably become entangled with the character of a school: with the "psychic association" or "spontaneous learning" provoked in the student, and the teacher, and the community?