Message from AMI’s President

January 2004

The local hullabaloo of the festive season and its amazing hype, however deafening, could in no measure drown out the persistent onslaught of dire information about political catastrophes occurring around the world, endlessly conveyed with inexorable lack of emotion.

One wishes that an ambassador from a peaceable planet, spiritually as well as technologically advanced, would travel to earth and tell us to either stop with the savagery, or else... But then, if we heeded the ominous 'or else', we would be coerced into being good following the guidance of a leader. The opportunity for finding out whether mankind will ever become adequate to fulfil its human potential for benevolence would go to waste, and that would be regrettable.

In Maria Montessori's inaugural address to the second international course held in Rome in 1914 she describes the extraordinarily enthusiastic reception that awaited her in the United States the year before. This inspired a particularly poignant statement:

It would be inconceivable to think that this acknowledgement represented homage to a single person, or even the simple, immediate and limited interest in a small contribution to a field of study. Evidently the prodigious interest evinced did not apply either to the person or to her work directly, but represented a wider and deeper movement, which exists at this moment throughout the world, in the civilisations of the East as well as of the West, and which accounts for the enthusiasm of masses of people, as though they found themselves on the eve of a great redemption.
[...]
This grandiose movement, of which , perhaps, we are not today completely conscious, but which, in the future, will probably form part of the greatest history of redemption, is a movement in favour of the soul of the child.

What ever happened to the grandiose movement in favour of the soul of the child? Why did its splendour dwindle to become a precariously flickering light in the 90 years that followed? Paradoxically, rhetoric around the child and its education escalated. And yet the child remained the forgotten citizen; or rather, its soul, its spirit, its immense potential was, and to a great extent continues to be, disregarded.

However, there is hope. If in 1913 Maria Montessori's scientific pedagogy engendered a vision of redemption, it would seem that an underground stream of existential common sense runs through the human condition, there to be tapped when survival is threatened. The universal demand for peace becomes increasingly pressing and discourse is rife, variegated and cacophonous.

Perhaps the mounting clamour signifies an immediacy in humanity's collective unconscious to attain a state of awareness where peace as utopia will transmute to become peace as a natural state of being. Perhaps a deliberate study of the child's pristine human essence may light the way.

The redemption of humanity by studying the child seems an enthralling undertaking, worthy of being pursued in concert with zest, vim and vigour. It may contribute to the wholesome furtherance of life on our lovely earth.

Renilde Montessori
President
ASSOCIATION MONTESSORI INTERNATIONALE