to a new leaf...

I wanted to post this earlier in the week (as history was being made), but my computer was malfunctioning again... apparently, it's fixed for good now, so we'll see! My Montessori teacher read this during my training course, and I came across a copy of it the other day - it's almost too fitting!

Excerpts from a letter written by Maria Montessori in 1947 and sent to all governments:

My life has been spent in the research of truth. Through the study of children I have scrutinized human nature at its origin both in the East and the West and although it is forty years now since I began my work, childhood still seems to me an inexhaustible source of revelations and - let me say - of hope.

Childhood has shown me that all humanity is one. All children talk, no matter what their race or their circumstances or their family, more or less at the same age; they walk, change their teeth, etc. at certain fixed periods of their life. In other aspects, especially in that of the psyche, they are just as similar, just as susceptible.

Children are the constructors of men whom they build, taking from the environment language, religion, customs, and peculiarities not only of the race, not only of the nation, but even of a special district in which they develop. Childhood constructs what it finds. If the material is poor, the construction is also poor. As far as civilization is concerned the child is at the level of the food-gatherers. In order to build himself, he has to take by chance, whatever he finds in the environment.

The child is the forgotten citizen, and yet, if statesmen and educators once came to realize the terrific force that is childhood for good or for evil, I feel they would give it priority above everything else. All problems of humanity depend on man himself; if man is disregarded in his construction, the problems will never be solved. No child is a Bolshevist or a Fascist or a Democrat or a Republican; they all become what circumstances or the environment make them.

In our days when in spite of the terrible lessons of two world wars, the times ahead loom as dark as ever before, I feel strongly that another field has to be explored, besides those of economics and ideology. It is the study of MAN - not of adult man on whom every appeal is wasted. He, economically insecure, remains bewildered in the maelstrom of conflicting ideas and throws himself now on this side, now on that. Man must be cultivated from the beginning of life when the greatest powers of nature are at work. It is then that one can hope to plan for better international understanding.