Maria Montessori and the Nobel Peace Prize

The last issue of Communications of this year mixes in a variety of topics, whose focus is mainly on Peace and peace-related aspects of Education. The article ‘Maria Montessori and the Nobel Peace Prize’ provides an insight into the arguments used by the people who supported Montessori’s candidature. In line with the regulations of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, allowing supporting papers to be disclosed when fifty years have passed, we quote from Maria Jervolino’s letter to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament:

‘As a Member of the Italian Parliament, I am honoured to propose once again the name of Dr. Maria Montessori for the conferment of the Nobel Peace Prize 1951.

Dr. Maria Montessori is universally known for her contribution to the cause of peace and the brotherhood of nations, to which she has dedicated the best years of her long and active life, laying the foundations of a true science of peace by means of an innovated form of education.

The enclosed memorandum bears witness to the value of this contribution and the influence it has had and still has in many countries of the world, of which Dr. Montessori’s books—translated into many languages—are also a clear documentation.’

The article is followed by Camillo Grazzini’s personal thoughts on the conferment of the Nobel Peace Prize. He considers the fact that Maria Montessori was never awarded the Prize “A Lost Opportunity”. He concludes his reflections by stating “...with or without a Nobel Prize for Peace, Maria Montessori remains great for her exceptional and positive notion of peace. In her preface to Education and Peace she wrote: ‘The question of peace cannot be discussed properly from a merely negative point of view, as politics ordinarily regards it, in the narrow sense of avoiding war and resolving conflicts between nations without recourse to violence. Inherent in the very meaning of the word peace is the positive notion of constructive social reform.”