Listing of AMI 'Communications' 

Contents

To Our Readers
Mary Hayes

The Need for Universal Accord so that Man May Be Morally Trained to Defend Humanity
Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori and the Nobel Peace Prize
Maria Jervolino
Camillo Grazzini

Chiaroscuro
Renilde Montessori

Pictures from the Paris Congress

Gala Dinner Address - International Montessori Congress, Paris 2001
André Roberfroid

On the Subject of Subjects
Part 1: ‘Cultural Subjects’ in the Children’s House
Baiba Krumins and Camillo Grazzini

Creativity
Jean Miller

Announcement - Educateurs sans Frontières

Lost Diplomas

Question & Answer
Computers in the Classroom

Introducing the New Members of the Pedagogical & Sponsoring Committees

Announcements

Membership fees in 2002

 Listing of AMI 'Communications' 

Highlights from 'Communications 2001/4'

Maria Montessori and the Nobel Peace Prize

The last issue of Communications of this year mixes in a variety of topics, whose focus is mainly on Peace and peace-related aspects of Education. The article ‘Maria Montessori and the Nobel Peace Prize’ provides an insight into the arguments used by the people who supported Montessori’s candidature. In line with the regulations of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, allowing supporting papers to be disclosed when fifty years have passed, we quote from Maria Jervolino’s letter to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament:

‘As a Member of the Italian Parliament, I am honoured to propose once again the name of Dr. Maria Montessori for the conferment of the Nobel Peace Prize 1951.

Dr. Maria Montessori is universally known for her contribution to the cause of peace and the brotherhood of nations, to which she has dedicated the best years of her long and active life, laying the foundations of a true science of peace by means of an innovated form of education.

The enclosed memorandum bears witness to the value of this contribution and the influence it has had and still has in many countries of the world, of which Dr. Montessori’s books—translated into many languages—are also a clear documentation.’

The article is followed by Camillo Grazzini’s personal thoughts on the conferment of the Nobel Peace Prize. He considers the fact that Maria Montessori was never awarded the Prize “A Lost Opportunity”. He concludes his reflections by stating “...with or without a Nobel Prize for Peace, Maria Montessori remains great for her exceptional and positive notion of peace. In her preface to Education and Peace she wrote: ‘The question of peace cannot be discussed properly from a merely negative point of view, as politics ordinarily regards it, in the narrow sense of avoiding war and resolving conflicts between nations without recourse to violence. Inherent in the very meaning of the word peace is the positive notion of constructive social reform.”

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“The Need for Universal Accord so that Man May Be Morally Trained to Defend Humanity” points to the need to bring about a unanimous moral agreement among all men in the pursuit of one of the goals of education. This article, included in Education and Peace currently published by ABC-Clio Press, Oxford, U.K., was one of the lectures on the subject of Peace that Dr. Maria Montessori delivered during the Sixth International Montessori Congress, held in Copenhagen in 1937.

From the article...“When we speak of peace, we do not mean a partial truce between separate nations, but a permanent way of life for all mankind. This goal cannot be attained through the signing of treaties by individual nations. The problem for us does not lie in political action to save one nation or another; our efforts must be devoted, rather, to solving a psychological problem involving all mankind, and as a consequence acquiring a clear conception of the kind of morality necessary to defend humanity as a whole. For today it is not just one nation that is threatened with destruction, but all mankind from one end of the earth to the other, with all its various peoples at different stages of civilisation”.

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Chiaroscuro

From the reports on and reactions to the Paris Congress we quote...This issue of Communications also amply reflects and celebrates the sentiments, talks and addresses given at the 24th International Montessori Congress 2001. Renilde Montessori’s sketchings in ‘Chiaroscuro’ outline the strength of her convictions in respect of the motto Education as an Aid to Life.

“When we speak of ‘Education as an Aid to Life’ it is commonly assumed that, from the point of view of educators, it is merely the lives of those being educated that are under consideration - our children, our pupils, our students - the mandate being ostensibly to ensure that they, as individuals, will achieve an optimum quality of life.

However, this is a narrow view - poor, dark and dismal; a tunnel leading nowhere for a human being educated solely for his own good, oblivious of the context of his interdependencies, unaware of the web of life and his place within it, cannot be said to have received a sound education.

Education as an Aid to Life, if it is to have any meaning, must encompass the phenomena of life itself. From this perspective, it is the educators’ task to allow the child’s innate complicity with his environment to flourish. This is becoming more and more difficult for the child’s spiritual environment is becoming sedulously impoverished.

It is imperative that the educator ....prepare environments where children will be able to develop in accordance with the inner directives that are part of their human condition....Human beings...have been very good at envisaging and systematically constructing adequate environments to suit their endeavours.

Man is a learning animal. In the child, the need to learn is a powerful, passionate drive, for that which the child learns is the prime matter for his self-construction.”

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Gala Dinner Address - International Montessori Congress, Paris 2001

Also included in this issue is the gala dinner address by Mr. André Roberfroid, Executive Director for Programme and Strategic Planning of UNICEF, on the evening of July 4. In his speech he highlighted UNICEF’s main missions, stressing the link between these and education. He was inspired by the Montessori approach to children and their rights.

Some of the points he stressed were:

• Put Children First: that is in every decision we make (individually, family, community, government, companies, etc.) think about the implications for the child and consider that the best interest of the child is to be the guiding and decisive condition.

• Listen to Children: you propagate it and I understand that it is the base of your philosophy. We must make it the philosophy for everybody. It must not be the privilege of Montessori, it must be everybody’s view.

• Educate Every Child.

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Creativity

Elementary Trainer Jean Miller writes on creativity, stretching the ‘limited’ definition of that word. “In Montessori we do not think of creativity as something that belongs only to the arts or only to a particular process such as ‘creative writing’. Rather, creativity is a part of everything.

Children are in the process of creating themselves as individuals, as members of a social group, and as members of their culture. Education is a part of that process. It should enhance the process of becoming and belonging rather than working against it. This is why the ‘method’ that Dr. Montessori discovered and promoted was not meant simply for academic learning. Rather, its purpose is to support life itself. That is, it is to support and enhance the children in the process of becoming or creating themselves.”

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Camillo Grazzini and Baiba Krumins co-authored “On the Subject of Subjects”, a two-part article on cultural subjects. Part I gives a thorough and enlightening approach to the role and place of culture in the Casa dei Bambini. From the article...

“...Mario Montessori is referring to a different dimension of the word: culture as meaning a wide-ranging knowledge which is not limited to knowing how to write, to read, to count. The limits to this further exploration are not set by the number of different fields of learning or knowledge, but by the psychology of the age which requires exploration involving the hands, the senses and language rooted in a concrete context, as well as exactness.

Art, music, geography, botany, zoology, history, physics, all lend themselves, or have aspects which lend themselves, to this kind of exploration. Even language and maths are explored well beyond the basics indicated above. In this way, the child of six who leaves the Children’s House to enter the Elementary is, says Maria Montessori, ‘an individual who has already acquired the basis of culture, and is anxious to build on it, to learn and penetrate deeper into any matter of interest’ (To Educate the Human Potential).”

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