I. Introductory Remarks
Madame, the President of the Montessori Association of France,
Madame, the director of the Maria Montessori Institute of Higher Studies
Ladies and Gentlemen, members of the organising committee of the 24th International Montessori Congress,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
I feel very much honoured to be invited to participate in this august congress as one of the speakers. I thank you sincerely for this honour. Let us now turn to the subject.
II. Transforming values into action: Children in Difficult Circumstances, the Tip of the Iceberg
Throughout the world in our times, humanity is facing immense challenges to insure dignity and peace for its members. Various forms of violence and suffering, which millions of children are experiencing, eloquently illustrate these universal challenges. I believe that these children – particularly street children – only represent the visible elements of a planetary crisis of civilisation.
As one speaker yesterday emphasised, a pedagogical method only means anything if it enables educators, including parents, to aid life. But life can only be helped if human beings are in good condition to receive the education offered. In speaking of the Montessori pedagogical method, therefore, it would be quite normal for us to have in mind, only children in a totally normal shape and living circumstances.
However, throughout the world hundreds of millions of children are trying to survive in difficult conditions. Consequently, in the minds of such children, any sort of organised education holds no meaning for them. Fortunately, even in the face of an extremely difficult situation, the child’s vital forces always remain intact thanks to his resilience. Naturally, such a child empowered by resilience, would rather manage to find his own survival strategies than receive teachings provided by others in an organised format, especially if these apprenticeships are - as it often happens - unsuited to his vital and urgent needs. This is the case for the children that I wish to speak about first.
III. Who Are These Children And What Are The Unfavourable Conditions Of Life We Are Referring To?
These children are persons declared by the law to be minors and who exist either in an insufficient human environment or none at all. I am referring to abandoned or lost children, orphans, child soldiers, mutilated or handicapped children, children exploited by work, children who have suffered various forms of abuse by adults, and street children. For discussion purposes, I will refer mostly to the street children because, in a number of countries they are considered to be actually or potentially dangerous for society and are assassinated. Often ignoble acts are practised on them.
It is through my professional activities during almost two decades at UNESCO (1) in the field of children and education worldwide that I discovered, with emotion, this tragedy of children abandoned to the street. Until then, children were for me, as for most urban populations, merely an ordinary part of the city landscapes where I travelled for work.
This discovery, and the indignation it provoked in me, has continued to stimulate my reflections and have played a decisive role in my will to act concretely within specific programs for these children.
IV. Street Children: Is This A New Or An Old Urban Phenomenon?
Although the phenomenon of street children existed to some extent in reality and can be found in literature of the period preceding the industrial revolution in the West, it is certainly not new. It has probably existed since cities began to appear at least five thousand years ago (2), in various forms and varying degrees of seriousness, and with varying means of control. In the nineteenth century, as a concrete manifestation of social exclusion and children's distress (caused by humans), this phenomenon was already visible and dramatic. However, it was limited to large cities in industrialised Europe countries and some large urban centres of America. Since then, it has not stopped developing in all large urban centres worldwide. During the last decades of the twentieth century, this phenomenon has increased as it spread in the Southern countries in a particularly spectacular way and in the Eastern European so-called transition countries, which suffer from serious economic, social, political and cultural problems. In 1994, according to the United Nations, 140 million children lived from the streets or in the streets. The International Labour Office states that 250 million children in the world are currently exploited at work.
Today the street children phenomenon, as a sign of a universal crisis of civilisation, shows a large potential for planetary growth during the coming decades, and even centuries. Three findings justify this statement:
The first finding is that this phenomenon is developing independently from various people's specific histories, cultures and levels of power.
The second finding is that relatively rapidly most people working in this field abandon any questioning of the real causes. This situation prevents any opportunities to curtail the growth of the problem within a foreseeable future.
The third finding - even more surprising than the first two - is the particularly astonishing speed with which this phenomenon has developed in the regions where it appeared most recently, such as Africa or Lebanon for example (3).
V. Public Attitudes and Reactions
Certainly for some people living in large cities, the street children phenomenon provokes moral shocks. However, until now it has not yet mobilised all the wisdom and will necessary, either among the general population or, specifically, among national public authorities of countries most affected, to the point that they have actually enacted adequate measures to combat it. Besides, those countries most affected are often the ones least equipped with material resources and appropriate human competencies to deal with it. In places where politicians and public administrators become aware of the gravity of the street children phenomenon, they become indignant and express their worries; however, often the methods and solutions proposed or applied in many countries more closely resemble repressive forms than ones designed to normal personality and dignity. As the feeling of public danger grows when it perceives this phenomenon, the more the public reacts by physical or symbolic, legal or illegal violence against these children. Those who can afford it create very costly individual or collective forms of protection or defence.
Thus, behind protective devices, the public becomes almost indifferent to the phenomenon. Then, often the door is left open to various forms of exploitation and brutality towards these children in certain countries, sometimes to the point of their physical elimination, organized and carried out by people, difficult to identify, acting on their own, privately or in the name of various organisations, sometimes even occult ones. The atrocities have reached extreme levels, even to the point of forcibly removing organs in medical clinics so they can be transplanted into ill people. Then the children are abandoned, living or dead, in the streets.
VI. Evident Causes, Simple Solutions
In cities throughout the world, this problem is generally considered as having an evident cause, the child's inadaptation to society, family irresponsibility, family disorder, unhappy or poorly organized divorces and poverty, the absence or lack of respect for children's rights, economic crises, etc. As a result, the solutions adopted are also evident and simple.
Either the solutions are state-originated with regulations, which are often repressive; or they are private, severe and humanitarian. In fact the most common state-based solutions consist of depriving the children of the required opportunities to cause further damage, by placing them in institutions specialized in reforming or separating them from society, which are located either in the city or in more isolated rural areas. In these institutions, the so-called delinquent children receive a specific form of social rehabilitation as education. The state approach is structured within a defined action framework, by laws and administrative regulations aimed at the immediate treatment or at reducing the effects of poverty, etc.
On the other hand, the private solutions institutions, secular or religious, take the form of boarding facilities, non-formal education and relatively liberal welcoming or listening centers, more or less based on strict discipline, following the principles mentioned above, which form the basic principles of these institutions, etc. By their nature, when they are not ephemeral, these general solutions remain insufficient in view of the scope of the problem. Even in the more serious crises, when non-governmental organisations provide humanitarian urgent relief work, which is often praise worthy, these interventions cannot treat the wide range of the fundamental questions posed by the phenomenon of children in difficult circumstances.
Moreover, the lack of precision for the concept of exclusion itself makes it difficult to search for solutions. In fact, today the notion of exclusion [end of quotes not in text] functions as a trap for reflection as well as for practical and political action when faced with the threat of social dissociation. This imprecision is a way of remaining satisfied with corrective, reparative, assistance-based measures, however necessary they are to help the most deprived public. Nevertheless, it does not get to the core of the problem, where the fate of those who will become the excluded (at the levels where work-place strategies, employment policies, social protection choices, etc.) are decided (4). The concept of exclusion often overshadows the concept of responsibility. For example, on one hand, is the fact that family difficulties are considered to be among the most profound and most evident causes of the street children phenomenon, and on the other hand, are the Governments’ incapacities to propose social measures in favor of families so as to solve this problem. This illustrates the insufficiency of the conceptual analyses in this domain.
However, since in the second half of the last century, the fact we must admit that in western democracies, there was rapid progress deriving from institutional traditions and social assistance policies - notably the “maisons de la providence” and the hospices of the preceding centuries. For example, more humane solutions, related to the child and his biological family in crisis, were adopted. Now, before any other solution is envisaged, considerable attempts are made to maintain the child in a difficult situation with his own family if he can be reconciled with it, or, if this solution is impossible, the child is offered either a recomposed familial environment or a substitution. (5)
However, in this regard, one of the most important problems worldwide - whatever the child's family culture - is that the family, which, in all human communities and in all social classes, was generally considered to be the natural and ideal institution to protect the child, has undergone serious transformations which increase the risk of psychological and physical crises for the child. In the same way, like the child in difficult situations, today's family is also demanding to be defended, supported and protected against its own crises and its own destabilizing factors. To that end, the family demands specific social policies and various institutional means and scientific research in order to objectively understand the transformations it is undergoing, as well as legal legitimacy for its new and multiple faces (6).
Likewise, the role of poverty in social exclusion is far from having been clarified sufficiently. For a long time, whether perceived to be relative or absolute, poverty has been considered solely as an individual's fault and a natural reality, because it has always existed in all human societies (7). However, it is increasingly becoming clear today that it is a collective phenomenon, a social fact, and even a socio-economic practice, one, which paradoxically creates economic wealth at the same time as it creates social exclusion of the individual human being. Until now poverty was seen as an inevitable practice within a totally liberal conception of the economy, even regarded as a necessity for an economy's dynamism, especially in the richest societies. As a result, it was believed that if one is poor, it is due to carelessness, for example, by having too many children without taking into consideration one's own material resources; or else due to laziness. Within this school of thought, the negative effects of the macro-economic setting mattered little in previous times compared to those found today in relation with the globalisation of economies and trade of financial products with no barriers. Contrarily to the usual statements about individual responsibility and poverty, especially those related to the 1:1 ratio between the high number of children in a family and its level of misery, it no longer necessary to tell any well-informed observer that in most cases, poverty is what influences a high procreation level.
The elimination of the true causes of exclusion does not necessarily appear to be the goal of social and economic policies, because they have always considered their own objectives as having priority. Thus they cannot avoid being biased; nor can they avoid having the weight of the social institutions, whether public or private, thrown onto them, as well as the traditions of legal and administrative practices justified by specific ideologies. Above all, economic and social policies depend on constraints imposed by two circumstantial, habitual, and even natural objectives; both are a priority in decision-making, especially political decision-making: the conquest and the conservation of power.
As a result, first of all, any measure taken by a politician, an administrator or a decision-make against social exclusion, would be considered as to whether it favors the conquest or conservation of political power, public (the State) or private (the entrepreneur). The social measures addressed towards families, poverty, the child and his education...are also influenced by whatever the ultimate policy objectives require.
Private and non-profit humanitarian institutions can only undertake actions, which repair; they cannot undertake actions, which transform the factors and the processes that produce social exclusion.
Thus, the factors generally held to be responsible for the problem, poorly resist the analysis, which aims to prove they are actually the fundamental causes.
VII. The Need To Identify The Roots Causes
Therefore, if most solutions being considered, or already in place, are considered to be ineffective in eliminating the problem or at least in preventing it from becoming worse, what remains to be done? The answer to this question depends upon whether there is a genuine interest given to the real causes of the problem, above and beyond those responsibilities, which have been attributed automatically:
(a) to the personal characteristics of the child involved (anti-social character of a congenital or social origin...),
(b) to his family (incompetence, irresponsibility or effects of dislocation...),
(c) to poverty considered solely as resulting from laziness or from some ontological and personal limitations, or still yet
(d) to certain economic factors independent of everyone's will, such as the law of the market, under-development, insufficient growth rate, financial crises, measures of structural economic adjustment, etc. The effective causes should not be sought in the world without human beings. it is within human consciousness that the horrors are produced before they become externalized onto the children.
Therefore, it appears that all these factors, which have been rapidly stated as the guilty ones, could well be only the visible parts of the problem's profound causes.
VIII . Where Did This Crisis Of Values Come From? And Anyway, What Is A Value?
It goes without saying that we do not need a course in moral philosophy here. But I will simply say a few words on the notion of values, with the hope that they will help clarify my remarks.
According to Tzetan TODOROV (8), the notion of values only entered the horizon of western man with the arrival of modernity, starting with the Renaissance. Until that period, facts and values were not separated; values were inscribed within the universe's structure itself, whether it was the natural cosmos of the pagan Greeks of the world - as the Christian creation. The birth of sciences is the time when values appeared as separate entities, because they (the values) designate outside the field applied to them (the sciences). Sciences seek to understand the world, to tell the truth, and not to produce values; they are indifferent to good and evil.
But beginning in the Renaissance, laws, moral principles, values could no longer be attributed to a natural or divine justification. Men themselves had to provide their origin. In hierarchic place of the cosmos, two heterogeneous entities appeared: indifferent nature and human values, or being and the necessity [devoir -être] or still again life, which is a giving of nature and existence as a specific accomplishment of life. From this mutation of thought, the Modern Man, who has renounced deducing values from things themselves, now has to admit the plurality of positions pertaining to all value-related questions.
Hence, what is the origin of values? Is it the will as Hobbs has stated, declaring that it is authority and not truth that makes law? (Leviathan, XXVI). If this is so, then that is the same as saying that if certain values win out over others, it is because their authors have a stronger will. This is obviously a radically unacceptable position. Hence, there is the need to return to the Greeks' wisdom or to the Christian faith, and then to learning how to compromise between two tendencies. Thus the debates about the origin of values are nothing other than ones about choices between good and evil, or still yet, the search for attributing meaning to behavior and human action in general.
In his book, The Philosophy of Values, Jean-Paul Resweber (9) clearly summarizes the theoretical and practical stakes pertaining to the notion of values, or in other words, the philosophical stakes and the economic stakes. Within each field, there are intellectual struggles to provide thought and reflection about the meaning of the human being and his universe.
IX. Street children: a natural phenomenon? Or a specific axiological problem?
As I have just said, to understand the phenomenon more fully and in the hope of finding radical solutions, we need to move beyond the categories of economics, law, the family or the personality of the child in difficult circumstances and also beyond the habitual analyses of national contexts. In this regard, I am referring to the areas of morals and ethics as the primordial places from which the judgments of facts emanate, decisions are made and the will to act against intolerable social occur. On one hand, the determining causes of exclusion are found in the domain of a fundamental value or values of societies as well as at the level of the individual personality where these values (or principles) allow the construction, through education, of each person who is a member of society. Also the true causes could well find their roots in the history of the great doctrines, which have influenced man; history and social practices, at first in Europe and then throughout the world, at least from the Renaissance onwards. And in each society, the way the human being is constructed is necessarily based on a coherent world vision that education as an aid to life is supposed to provide.
X. Morality And Ethics
Here the role of philosophy is essential for the following reason. Any individual and deliberate action based on positive values in society, whether political, economic or social, is the expression of a personal conviction. Although the veracity of this conviction may naturally be limited by subjective factors, it is still the expression of a will - the will to live, to ensure the continuation of life and to let live. It is the expression of a faith in the evolution and improvement of man and life. We become attached to life and to the need for its improvement by the value we see in it. Action as such, is it not necessarily rooted in a primordial value and guided by the requirements of responsibilities, constituting what one could call the Law, universal and immutable, which would justify it and provide legitimacy? (10). If this were the case, how could one guarantee that the Law is right, that it is not a false Law or even that it is only one particular vision of the world? How can one be sure that the Law does not include ingredients that exclude and negate the value and dignity of the man already entirely incarnated in the child? How can we assure that the hopes, which this value provide as a right are themselves good for each person as well as his community, his nation and for humanity in general and what could be the case for all periods of time, for all men and for all women? (11).
For example, the civilisation based on reason and the idea of infinite material progress produced by Europe and put at the service of individual happiness for several centuries now, first in Europe, and then recuperated by all the people of the globe. Since it is glaring today that this civilisation is creating unhappiness for children in the world, would it not be useful for humanity to pause for a moment in its pursuit of infinite material progress in order to ask the age-old questions about the significance of human life? How can life be organized and lived in the most satisfactory way possible for each individual, while at the same time insuring human dignity and the right to a decent life for all people deprived of any strength? Under the power of individual happiness which seems henceforth to impose itself as the ultimate reference for organizing contemporary societies and as the motor of their functioning, the idea of a concrete man, who is inevitably social, and his untouchable value, sacred, as well as the idea of the obligation for human beings to live together; are these ideas lost forever?
These humanist and vital questions asked by the Ancients under all skies – the holders of oral traditions as well the authors of philosophical writings from all times – do these questions lack meaning today? Has the search for the common good been replaced forever by that of individual happiness and the free justification of the means? by the ends without a after-thought? Must we definitively admit that evil is necessary and inevitable in politics and that this necessity is worth justification and legitimating? (12)
XI. The Role Of Education
The tools and habits of behaviour with regards to the founding principles of societies, principles which direct the way the latter function, were not given to human beings by nature. Hence, the role of education - as an instrument to be used at the service of life first of all and existence afterwards - is essential for the welfare of individuals in all societies, communities and families. And the welfare of individuals is the guaranty of the continuity of the human species. In the search for solutions to the problem of social exclusion in general – and to that of exclusion of street children in particular – education should therefore come before all other social practices such as politics, law, social measures and even the installation and maintenance of social peace. For it happens sometimes that peace also reveals itself to be misleading. In fact, throughout universal history, and often to our ear, hasn't peace been obtained by obedience and submission to injustice or to tyranny, that these forms belong to despotic, oligarchic, aristocratic or democratic powers?
It appears to me that it would be somewhat worthwhile, within education, to give life and energy once again to certain natural principles, which enable the recognition and the respect of the dignity of the human being in all the nations of the world. To this end, it is essential to train minds against exclusion and for social insertion within the framework of coherent systems of principles of reference for human action because, through this, it is peace that is at stake. And there will never be peace without justice. And justice cannot exist without people who believe in justice. A society can only be just if it is made up of a majority of men who have become just, through education. In this respect, I believe that the vision and action of Maria Montessori provides us with firm reasons to have hope.
NOTES
(1) United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Since 1984 the author has worked for this organisation.
(2) See Lewis Mumford's book, La Cite à travers l'histoire (The City throughout History) , Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1964: The origin of cities in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Iran, the Indus valley, and ancient Greece, more specifically the ancient cities like Our, Nippur, Ourouk, Thebes, Heliopolis, Assour, Niniveh, or Babylon. For information about the exploitation and misery of children in 19th century Euope, see: Charles Dickens, Nickleby or (The Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby), 1839; The Old Curiosity Shop, 1840, Barnaby Rudge 1841; David Copperfield 1849 - 1850 (theme of childhood); Bleak House, (false values), Hard Times, 1854; Great Expectations, 1861; Our Mutual Friend, (denunciation of capitalism), 1864-65; La Petite Dorritt (criticism of the foundations of the profit civilisation).
Victor Hugo, The Legend of Centuries; Les Miserables. History of economic and social events, the industrialisation of Europe and the situation of disadvantaged children.
(3)If the street children phenomenon is assimilated to juvenile delinquency or to child and youth criminality, probably for intellectual comfort, it has existed in Africa also, since the dawn of colonial cities. However the phenomenon of street children is clearly different from juvenile criminality. The latter is not forcibly linked to social exclusion because in all human groups criminality, like suicide (see Durkheim), is an unpredictable social fact. The rate of prevalence varies between lower and higher limits depending on the range and acceleration of social changes during certain periods of people's evolution, whereas the growth of social exclusion among children does not seem to have predictably higher limits anywhere in the world.
(4) Robert Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale. Une chronique du salariat. (Metamorphoses of the social question. Chronicle of salaried workers). Editions Fayard, Paris, 1995.
(Commentaireses en formes et dynamiques de l'exclusion dans les sociétés contemporaines: injustice et discrimination, International Colloquium, 23 - 26 June 1997, UNESCO Headquarters. Unpublished document). Later, when the main concepts are analysed, we will return to the work of Robert Castel.
(5) a) For example, regarding the preservation of the child's psychological, physical and economic interests, article 375 of the French Civil Code specifies the priority of maintaining the child within the family. Edict 1183 of Civil Procedure's code stipulates that the parents should be heard and stresses the importance for the children's judge to be able to obtain their agreement for any measures necessary to protect the child. (...) Since 1970, parental responsibility, keeping the child in his natural surroundings is a concern of social workers. Through concertation and work on the circumstances (difficult), interventions to re-establish conditions necessary for the child's health, security and education, avoiding prolonged ruptures and disqualifying the parents appear to take priority over child placement considered as repair and substitution.
Jean-Paul Mugnier, L'identité virtuelle: Les jeux de l'offre et de la demande dans le champ social (Virtual Identity: the games of supply and demand in the social field), ESC Editeur, Paris, 1993, pp. 19-20.
(b) Concerning the changes family systems are undergoing worldwide, consult the book published for the International Year of the Family by the International Council of Women, Familles en mutation, dans une societe en mutation (Families in mutation in a society in mutation), UNESCO Editions, Paris, 1993.
(6) (p. 6) Nevertheless, although the traditional family is undergoing crises in modernity, although it is decomposing and recomposing in various forms, the fact has to be considered that the resulting couple's instability only slightly affects the forces of permanence and family continuity. [VSB: Where does quote end?] For example, this can be seen in the transmission of values (whatever the family values). In principle, everyone belongs to a family and starts a family, Durkheim stresses. To learn more about the complexity of family reality and its status in the modern world, see the collective work published under the direction of Francois Singly, La famille: Etat des savoirs, (The family: the State of Knowledge) Ed. de la Decouverte, Paris, 1991.
(7) Poverty (absolute or relative) - as well as wealth, its inseparable companion, as defined by the Dictionnaire historique de la langue francaise (Historic Dictionary of the French Language) - does not appear to be an historically dated phenomenon, nor a geographically localized one. It belongs to all places, to all times and there is a tendency to consider it inevitable. Considering theories which make the poor guilty, the (anonymous) work of Pastor Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), Essay on the Population Principle remains the highest reference: In the 18th Century...a natural relationship was thought to exist between population and subsistence. The first would rise to the level allowed by the second. Most often this level is one of misery, sometimes linked to life-style habits. The pessimism implied by these ideas is masked by the faith in economic and social progress and in reason. (...) That the poor blame himself and be prudent in Encyclopaedia Universalis, article: Malthusianism and Neo-Malthusianism
(8) Tzvetan Todorov, Les valeurs, unité ou pluralité? (Values, singular or plurality?) in Le Monde, Quelles valeurs pour demain? (What values for tomorrow?), Le Monde Forum, Editions du Seuil, Paris, October 1988.
(9) Jean-Paul Resweber, La philosophie des valeurs (The Philosophy of Values), Presse Universitaire de France, Paris, 1987.
Kant, Emmanuel, Foundation of a Metaphysics of Manners, 1785;
Criticism of Practical Reason, 1788.
(10) Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, 1819. The Foundation of Morality, 1841.
(11) de La Boetie, Etienne, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Editions Payot, Paris, last publication, 1993.
(12) Nietzche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886.
Aphonse Tay joined UNESCO in 1984 as a Program Specialist in the UNESCO/UNICEF cooperative program for the Survival, Protection and Education of Young Children. Since 1990, he has been managing a worldwide program for the Education of Children Living in Difficult Circumstances in the Education Sector of UNESCO. Mr. Tay has published various articles in Human Sciences, Education and Culture journals, including the UNESCO Courrier and the Program book: Working with Street Children, 1995, UNECO, BICE.
