Happy Anniversary

Other Good Things

Dear Maria Montessori, It’s so hard to believe, but today marks the one hundred and eighth year since you opened the first Casa Dei Bambini, in Rome, Italy. So much has changed since that initial Children’s House, and yet, we would like to think, so much of your original insights, well, they remain exactly the same.

We can almost hear you speak these words that you so eloquently wrote in Education for a New World: “If education is to be reformed, it must be based upon the children.” This statement, and so many others, remain, to be sure, an inspiration to schools, children, and communities throughout the world. They remain a beacon-call to humanity itself. We must turn our attention towards children, learning from them, just how they constantly are aspiring to learn from the world.

Can you believe, if you really were to reflect upon your international appeal, just how far and widespread your vision actually reached? We know fame and notoriety were never your intention, but, needless to say, the world now knows your name. More importantly, you would exclaim, they know your method. When you established the Association Montessori Internationale to validate authentic Montessori education, the implementation of the method as you intended it to be learned, did you ever forecast just how successful a movement you would enable?

When we look at some of the photos from the original site, and then couple those images with how many Montessori schools have subsequently opened throughout the world in the wake of your observations into the nature of early childhood education, we’re absolutely starstruck. We recognize the significance of the date you chose to launch your vision upon the universe, and want to reassure you of the light it has shed: the light, and hope, that it continues to offer the world.

There are so many passages of your oeuvre that we cherish, that we unknowingly recite in our sleep, and that we think about in the most dire, as well as, hopeful of times. This particular quote, published in 1946, almost thirty-years after your first school, when the world was desperately trying to recover from the horrors of two World Wars, is particularly reflective, singularly optimistic, and in constant need of rediscovery.

“If education were to continue along the old lines of mere transmission of knowledge, the problem would be insoluble and there would be no hope for the world. Alone a scientific enquiry into human personality can lead us to salvation, and we have before us in the child a psychic entity, a social group of immense size, a veritable world-power if rightly used.”

We love how magnificently, and not-so-dramatically, you set the stage. Carefully, but also rather boldly, you note the importance of what you perceive to be as a major and necessary cultural and historical shift towards rethinking the contours of the world within the context of childhood. Knowing the rhythms of your thought, we understand that the only way children can actually be “used”, is by their own motivations towards invention. And those, they are limitless.

You continue:

“If salvation and help are to come, it is from the child, for the child is the constructor of man, and so of society. The child is endowed with an inner power which can guide us to a more luminous future. Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.”

We’ve probably written you a thousand letters, each of a different tone, often with a different subject matter. There are so many questions that we want to ask: “How do you think we should do x? What do you think about y? Did you really mean z?” Then, we remember, more ardently each time, that the greatest lesson that you ever taught, was inspiring us to have the confidence and conviction to believe in the nature of our thought.

Thank you, Maria Montessori.