Montessori argues that education must focus on developing human values in individuals and achieving human harmony through order and discipline. She believes education should allow individuals to reach their full potential and prepare them to build a higher form of human society. Currently, education represses children and focuses only on their personal interests, but children possess their own characteristics and goals. When Montessori schools took children's personalities into account and provided an environment for spiritual growth, they revealed a different personality. True peace requires developing a new, better person and providing unlimited opportunities for human aspirations. Montessori sees potential for miracles in children who eagerly seek independence and opportunities to work with enthusiasm and love. Establishing lasting peace is the work of education through spiritual development

1. Excerpts from Education and Peace
Dr. Maria Montessori
1949
In honor of the United Nation’s
International Day of Peace
September 21, 2012

2. Education must be viewed
from the perspective of the
development of human
values in the individual.
Order and discipline must
be aimed at the attainment
of human harmony.

3. An extremely important social task lies before us: actuating
man’s value, allowing him to attain the maximum
development of his energies, truly preparing him to bring
about a different form of human society on a higher plane.

4. Heretofore the individual
has grown to adulthood
after being repressed,
isolated, and led to pursue
only his own personal
interests throughout
childhood and adolescence,
under the blind
domination of adults.

5. The child is not simply a miniature adult. He is first and
foremost the possessor of a life of his own that has certain
special characteristics and its own goal.

6. When we took the
personality of the child
into account and offered it
full scope to develop in our
schools -- where we
constructed an
environment that
answered the needs of his
spiritual development -- he
revealed to us a personality
entirely different from the
one we had previously
taken into consideration.

7. The school child who is
continually discouraged
and repressed comes to lack
confidence in himself. He
suffers from a sense of
panic that goes by the
name of timidity, a lack
of self-assurance that in
the adult takes the form of
frustration and
submissiveness and the
inability to resist what is
morally wrong.

8. The child has not been able
to measure and test his
own creative energies; he
has not been able to
establish the sort of inner
order whose primary
consequence is a confident
an inviolable sense of
discipline.

9. The most rewarded and
most encouraged virtue
has been besting his
classmates and coming
out on top, triumphantly
passing examinations at
the end of every year of his
life of perpetual,
monotonous slavery. Men
educated in this manner
have not been prepared to
seek truth and to make it
an intimate part of their
lives, nor to be charitable
and cooperative.

10. A strong man cannot stand a split within his consciousness,
much less act in two exactly opposite ways. Men allow
themselves to be passive and are blown this way and that like
dead leaves.

11. It would seem to be so obvious a statement as to be naive, but it
is perfectly plain that two things are needed for peace in the
world: a new man, a better man; and then an environment
that will set no limits on a man’s boundless aspirations.

12. Laws and treaties are not enough; what is required is a new
world, full of miracles.

13. The child seems to work
miracles when we realize
how eagerly he seeks
independence and the
opportunity to work, and
he possesses great treasures
of enthusiasm and love.

14. Peace is a goal that can be
attained only through
common accord, and the
means to achieve this peace
are twofold: first, an
immediate effort to resolve
conflicts without recourse
to violence, and second, a
long term effort to
establish lasting peace
among men.

15. Preventing conflicts is the work of politics; establishing peace
is the work of education.

16. An education capable of
saving humanity is no
small undertaking; it
involves the spiritual
development of man, the
enhancement of his value
as an individual, and the
preparation of young
people to understand the
times in which they live.

17. The child is capable of
developing and giving us
tangible proof of the
possibility of a better
humanity.
We have seen children
totally change as their
sense of order, discipline,
and self-control develops
within them as a
manifestation of their total
freedom.

18. The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind.

19. Montessori
education for peace
September 21, 2012