137th birth anniversary of Dr. Maria Montessori

Sr. Lourdes Paiva

EDUCATION: August 31 is of great significance for all Montessorians throughout the world who in this our Centenary year celebrate the 137th Birth Anniversary of its founder Dr. Maria Montessori.

She is universally acknowledged for the most fundamental contribution made in the “”Discovery of the true Child”.

This contribution has become a crucial need of our troubled and disturbed times. Dr. Montessori discovered and uncovered the fundamental greatness of the Child, Spiritually, Morally and Socially.

She discovered how indispensable for a genuine regeneration of human life is the contribution the child can make to it and the foundation which only the child, “the true builder of man” can and must lay for it.

She strongly and passionately pleaded that it be recognised so that the problem could be tackled and solved through a more consciously assisted change and developed of man himself.

She says that the child assumes an importance, for by nature he possesses unique powers of development. The child rises in front of us as a true leader of mankind along the road of genuine human progress and evolution.

With regard to the child’s human development, we Montessorians, as educators, are called to the humble and shared conscious dignity of a helper, of an assistant, of a Follower of the Child. Instead we fatally obstruct the children in their heroic efforts to develop themselves as they are meant to.

Let us then remember the words Dr. Maria Montessori once wrote on a photograph of Mahathma Gandhi, as quoted also on the First Day Cover of the postage stamp issued by the Government of India in honour of her Birth Centenary in 1970; “Non violence towards the child is the basis and the path of education as a help to life.” These were not mere words. She gave direction and shape to a practical path (i.e. a method) which helps us implement them.

She provided us with the scientific and human means to do so. Her words summarise the lesson she learned from the child who revealed to her the new man whom he can help build if respect and assistance were given to that greatness and to those powers. They are her legacy to us and to the world which our training courses offer to all those who come to join them.

They express both a message and a work of love, of the will to serve the good which “the giver of all that is good and perfect” holds out to man, so that, under the leadership of man it may grow in love and realise it ever more fully.

Nowhere do we find love as strongly and as purely concentrated, and alive, as around the child and in the child. In him, therefore, we have, so very close to us, both a master of love and a magnet of love and a source of love ever renewed, a promise of love ever capable of fulfilment and therefore of hope ever ready to sustain us. Let us follow the child and serve him. Let us help him lead us along the path of love which is also that of peace.

To honour this Great Woman who took the light of the Child into her hands and with humility promised to follow only that, let us join with her sacred vision for our children, her passion for peace in our world, and her recognition that there is no higher purpose than patient service to children.

With deep gratitude for the life and work of Dr. Maria Montessori, we, of the Good Shepherd Maria Montessori Training Centre will celebrate a Thanksgiving Service on Friday August 31, at 3.00 p.m. at St. Bridget’s Convent Chapel. The celebrant is Rev. Fr. Shelton Perera, Parish Priest Fatima Church, Maradana.