March 3 - 4, 2018
"What is our civilization?"
by Maria Montessori
The Child in the Family
Chapter 2 - The Newborn
I was recently invited to speak at the first
National Montessori Conference in Latvia March 3-4, 2018. It was a wonderful experience. Julia, the coordinator of the event, and her two colleagues had all attended the International Montessori Congress in Prague this summer and had seen my presentation on "The Cosmic Task of 0-3."
I had been contemplating
the idea for some time of doing a performance as Maria Montessori and
I decided to prepare it for this conference. I started by translating an
excerpt of the chapter titled “Il Neonato” from Il
Bambino in Famiglia.
This
book, the Child in the Family, is from a conference for parents that Montessori gave in Belgium in 1923. In the chapter on the newborn she asks: why is it that we are blind to the
suffering of a newborn child in coming into the world.
Transitions are difficult: when we have
to change something: we buy a new home and move into a new area, we change jobs
and have a new set of colleagues and a new boss, our father dies and we are at
a loss for even how to wrap our minds around his absence. All of these changes
require a growth on our part, a new sense of comfort, a new sense of ‘normal’ and
this takes some amount of time.
So the fact that we must ‘grow’ into
something new is not such a hard concept to understand. The newborn must come
to understand life outside the womb, and yet without the capacity to ‘understand’
anything. He ‘feels’ life, only sensations and emotions are possible. So one
can see how important it is that his sensorial experiences from the beginning
of life should be positive ones at all cost, and that he begins to build his
trust that life outside the womb is a positive place to be. 
Montessori says in this chapter that it
is the hardest transition of a person’s entire life and goes on to ask what do
we do to ease this adaptation?
“What
is civilization? … It is a progressive help that eases man's adaptation to his
environment. If this is so, who experiences a more sudden and radical change in
environment than the child who is being born?
And what kind of care has
civilization created to help the newborn … this person who must undergo the
most difficult adaptation, who passes suddenly from one existence to another,
in being born?”
No one appreciates the sensitivity of a
little body that has never before been handled, or his reactions to innumerable
physical impressions ... to every unfamiliar touch.
There is a strange void inside of us, a
blindness we have built into our spirit, a blindness we have built into our
civilization. It is something like the blind spot in the depths of the eye... a
blind spot in the depths of life.
I have studied the way people
care for the newborn all over the world, observing passionately the customs of
diverse cultures. What I have found is that they are lacking... I repeat, they
are lacking the necessary consciousness to receive with dignity the person who
is coming into the world."
I did a similar presentation to
the one in Prague at the International Montessori Congress in July 2017. The argument
I presented with this talk is the importance of learning to treat children with
dignity and respect from birth, because the capacity to respect all
life on earth, and therefore protect our planet from environmental destruction,
is not acquired all of a sudden in the adult phase, rather is incarnated in the
child who has embodied the direct experience of being respected. And how do we respect children at this
early stage of life?
We must understand their universal
developmental needs: the need to follow internal rhythms from birth, the need
to explore with the senses, the need to feel safe and secure and have a
consistent caregiver. I showed the conference attendees what this looks like in
Italy in a childcare center that has been fortunate to have the guidance of
Grazia Honegger Fresco for many years, a graduate of the first class of
students at Adele Costa Gnocchi’s Montessori Assistants to Infancy School in
Rome.
Riga is a beautiful city. The city was founded in 1201 and today the historical center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, rich in beautiful architecture. The Latvian
culture I experienced is warm hearted, and the people open minded and hard
working.
One remarkable thing was the breakfast proportions, they were unlike
anything I’d seen before, and when I asked a historian at the House of the Blackheads if
what I saw at my hotel was a normal breakfast, she explained that since Latvians had been
under occupation of foreign powers for many years they habitually eat very
large breakfasts in preparation for a long day of unknown strife - warfare, hard
labor, resistance - since they wouldn’t know when they might be able to stop
for another meal. It seemed logical to me!
Baiba
Krumins Grazzini gave a lecture and workshop on the child from 6-12 and Elina
Rautasalo talked about the child of 3-6. Both of these AMI trainers and
lecturers had deep connections with this part of the world: Baiba was born in
Riga and lived there until she was five years old and Elina is from just across
the water, in Finland. I was the only one without roots from that part of the
world but I bridged the gap with a Russian lullaby that my father used to sing
to me. From their years of Russian occupation, they too had been sung that
lullaby by their parents and we shared a moment of common ground in singing:
May there always be sunshine, May there
always be blue skies,
May there always be mama, May there
always be me
Pust' vsegda budet solntse, Pust' vsegda
budet nebo,
Pust' vsegda budet mama, Pust' vsegda
budu ya
Пусть всегда будет солнце, Пусть всегда будет
небо,
Пусть всегда будет мама, Пусть всегда буду
я
When saying good-bye after it was all over, I discovered the
most amazing coincidence. Julia, the organizer of the Riga conference, and I
had both been on a tour of the grounds of the Theosophical Society the day
after the 2009 Congress in Chennai concluded. We visited the Olcott Bungalow
where Maria and Mario had lived and had a Casa dei Bambini, as well as paying respects to Anne Besant’s
grave, but without actually meeting. When we looked at our photos from that
tour we found that we had pictures of each other! It is indeed a small world,
and an even smaller Montessori world. 
Over the years of European history and
geopolitics, Latvia has endured centuries of foreign rule: Swedish, Lavonian, Polish, German, Russian and Soviet.
2018 is the 100th anniversary of their independence after WWI and there has been a healing from these centuries of domination. Latvia, as an independent nation, is interacting with other nations now as a
partner rather than as a pawn.
The geo-politics of our Montessori ‘nation-state
identities’ is going through a healing time as well as seen by the keynote
presentation at the AMI annual conference in the United States February 2018. A
speech by the AMI/USA board president brought a standing applause, and below is an excerpt of this inspirational call for collaboration and understanding:
“The
Mission [of AMI] is based on the preservation of Dr. Maria Montessori's legacy.
We have worked hard to preserve this legacy and today we enjoy a reputation for
quality implementation and high standards. But we paid dearly for that.
We became
exclusive and critical, condemning those who thought differently. Our movement
has broken and broken, even among ourselves. Individual needs were raised above
the needs of the community. By defending the past, we put the present and the
future at risk, and we have created a chasm on one of which we stand today.
It has
developed a culture of " their " and " us ", a feeling that
is now alarmingly reflected in our policies. We started to measure others about
how " Montessori " they were.
We are
proud that our pedagogy lays the foundation for social cohesion, but we have
not been able to achieve cohesion in our own community.
We must
continue to open our minds and our hearts in the future. We have to put aside
our individual roles, Identity Cards, and badges. We must not be vested and
serve ourselves, but united in our service to children. We have to build
bridges over the breaks we created. We have to stand next to everyone who works
for social justice and on behalf of children. This is our legacy and our
mission.” AMI/USA board president Gretchen Hall
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