Education as an Agent of Peace

n the aftermath of September 11 and in the current climate of heightened tension between nations, the need to realise a different kind of world is ever more necessary. On an earth whose inhabitants have the capability to destroy the planet many times over, educating new human beings who are educated for peace and live not only to maintain harmony, but who seek every opportunity and make every effort to promote the positive art of peacemaking, is not only a necessary goal but an essential component for the continued survival of our race. We must educate for peace versus educating for the avoidance of war. We must strive to create a positive climate for peace versus strategies for the diminishment of strife.

Montessori in the book Education and Peace, makes the following statement: ‘Peace is a goal that can be attained only through common accord, and the means to achieve this unity for peace are twofold: first, an immediate effort to resolve conflicts without recourse to violence—in other words, to prevent war—and second, a long-term effort to establish a lasting peace among men. Preventing conflicts is the work of politics; establishing peace is the work of education. We must convince the world of the need for a universal, collective effort to build the foundation for peace’(Montessori, 1949a, p.24). The central or core concern of any education should be the education for peace. …

Dr. Maria Montessori states, ‘This is education, understood as a help to life; an education from birth, which feeds a peaceful revolution and unites all in a common aim, attracting them as to a single centre. Mothers, fathers, politicians: all must combine in their respect and help for this delicate work of formation, which the little child carries on in the depth of a profound psychological mystery, under the tutelage of an inner guide. This is the bright new hope for mankind. Not reconstruction, but help for the constructive work that the human soul is called upon to do, and to bring to fruition; a work of formation which brings out the immense potentialities with which children, the sons of men, are endowed’ (Montessori, 1949b, p. 17).

… ‘Education, therefore, of little ones is important, especially from three to six years of age, because this is the embryonic period for the formation of character and of society, (just as the period from birth to three is that for forming the mind, and the prenatal period that for forming the body). What the child achieves between three and six does not depend on doctrine but on a divine directive which guides his spirit to construction. These are the germinal origins of human behaviour and they can only be evolved in the right surroundings of freedom and order’(Montessori, 1949a, p. 242-243).

How will education be an agent for peace? The evidence for this is revealed to the person who observes in a Montessori prepared environment for three-to-six year-old children. The primary environment is one that has, through observation and experiment, been specifically created and designed for the children in the social embryo phase of their development. It is a classroom that has not been arbitrarily constructed or based on some practitioner’s theory of the moment; instead it has evolved in response to the natural laws that guide the child between the ages of three and six.

…Mahatma Gandhi celebrated Montessori with the following words, in a letter to her dated November 19, 1931, ‘You have very truly remarked that if we are to reach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with children and if they will grow up in their natural innocence, we won’t have to struggle, we won’t have to pass fruitless idle resolutions, but we shall go from love to love and peace to peace, until at last all the corners of the world are covered with that peace and love for which, consciously or unconsciously, the whole world is hungering’(Ghandi, 1953).