This Sunday, September 20th, AMI-USA and the North American AMI affiliates are hosting an event to celebrate International Peace Day. This Zoom event will be held at 5:00 eastern time. It is not too late to register to build community and to view the documentary, “Montessori: Education for Peace.” We will hear directly from the creator, Angel Galmes. We hope you will join us; you can register for this Zoom event here.
In the spirit and honor of International Peace Day, we share these words from E. Mortimer Standing from an article, “Maria Montessori: World Peace through the Child”.
. . . We are on the eve of a new conception of education. It will not come at once, because new ideas take time to percolate into the general mind. But the time is inevitably coming when, in the light of these discoveries about childhood on the one hand, and under the urgency of preserving world peace on the other, we shall be obliged to broaden our aims and practices in education almost beyond recognition. We shall no longer think of education in terms of preparing individuals to take their own part successfully in the struggle for existence in adult society. It will no longer be largely a question of preparing Tommy to be a banker and Edith a nurse. It will be seen as the problem of how best to protect the “normal” growth of the whole human species so as to ensure “valorization of personality” (Standing, 1957) at every stage of development. This, as we shall see later, cannot be attained without the fullest development of the social instincts. We must see to it that each individual will grow up realizing his responsibility to humanity as a whole. The importance of this moral and social development will be seen to be a matter so urgent for the attainment of world peace that there will come a collective urge on the part of mankind to see that the means are provided through which the constructive energies in childhood and adolescence can be made operative. Excerpt from The NAMTA Journal • Vol. 20, No. 3 • Summer 1995