Researching an article on the Montessori educational method and its focus on peace (“Montessori, Peace, and Libertarianism“), I came across this fascinating piece, “Education as Peace” (posted here with permission of N.A.M.T.A.), by John Bremer in a 1985 issue of the N.A.M.T.A. Quarterly. Bremer discusses Montessori’s lament that we have no science of peace. As she wrote, “it is quite strange, in fact, that as yet there is no such thing as a science of peace, since the science of war appears to be highly advanced, at least regarding such concrete armaments and strategy ….” In Bremer’s moving and insightful article, he writes: “From my little knowledge of eastern thought, it appears quite possible for a discipline of peace to exist already, and I mean a discipline for a way of life and not an academic discipline.”
The entire article is well worth reading. It’s my growing view that libertarians can profit from Montessori’s educational insights, and that Montessorians searching for a science of peace can stop looking: this is what libertarianism is. Libertarianism recognizes the world of scarcity that we inhabit gives rise to conflict and war, and the solution is the adoption of civilized rules of cooperation and allocation of property rights—a libertarian private law society. If Montessori had been apprised of the insights of Austrian, free market economics and of anti-state, pro-peace liberalism, who knows—maybe she would have become a key advocate of libertarian views.
Skepticism of statism, individualism, and love of freedom permeates the Montessori perspective. It is worth quoting at length from Bremer’s piece:
Maria Montessori … knew that education, properly understood, is a disturbance of the universe as it is conventionally conceived and experienced. It places the power structure at risk since there is the strong possibility that it will be exposed for what it is—an imposition upon the sacred order of things, a distortion of what is natural, for the supposed benefit of those not willing or not able to learn. She also understood more clearly than any of her contemporaries that if the perversion of the natural order of things is to be maintained by the power establishment, then the soul must also be perverted because it is the one power, the one course of energy in the universe that is able to see and to show the corruption and perversion of the whole and to correct it. This perversion of the soul arrogated to itself, for obvious rhetorical advantage, the name of education. In reality, it is what was characterized earlier as a form of indoctrination, and it rests upon an imbalance, an inequality of power. [Keep reading…]
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