A freedom fighter who set our children free

On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the O.B. Montessori Center, I am reprinting the speech my husband Max V. Soliven gave on its 32nd anniversary, when we first did the theater musical “A Woman Called Freedom.” Max, born September 4, a Virgo, has been OBMC Chairman of the Board until his death in 2006. A cast of 200 OBMC preschool, gradeschool and highschool students will stage “A Woman Called Freedom” on October 7, 2011. The morning, matinee and evening shows is being directed by Maricar Aragon Andrada, at the Maria Montessori Auditorium, at the Greenhills headquarters.

Great People of the 20th Century

A couple of months ago, I picked up a book which had just been published by the Editors of the world-famous “TIME” Magazine. It was entitled “Great People of the 20th Century.

It came as no surprise to me that, in the volume, just two pages after an illuminating treatise about “Mother Teresa,” described as the little nun who “found a hope that inspired the world,” came the story of Dr. Maria Montessori. In their subhead, the Editors asserted: “Finding young minds in chains and shackles, Maria Montessori found new ways to free them.”

The book revealed that as early as February 3, 1930, Maria Montessori had been TIME’s cover girl — now, what do you think of that! Let those American journalists tell it in their own words. They recounted that “the young woman who showed up at the new housing project in the slums of Rome one day in the early 1900s was supposed to be no more than a medical adviser for the children of the tenants. But as soon as she saw her little charges, she knew that she would have to be a good deal more than that. The 50 children were a bedraggled and obstreperous lot, ‘naughty because of mental starvation.’ There and then, physician, Maria Montessori decided to give them a whole new type of school.

The math prodigy and first female physician of Italy

Within a few short years, the article underscored, “the Montessori method became the talk of educators all over the world.”

The book recounted how this “daughter of a civil servant... was long used to causing talk. She had started out as a mathematical prodigy; later shocked her friends — and the chauvinistic male students who taunted her — by becoming the first woman ever to receive an M.D. from the University of Rome.” At the psychiatric clinic of the university, she threw herself into “the study of children with learning problems and started experimenting with new ways of educating them. From such beginnings, she developed a theory to apply to all children, and put it into effect for the first time at her little slum school in Rome.”

To Montessori, TIME pointed out, “the ordinary schoolroom, with its pupils, ‘nailed to their seats’ was the very opposite of what it should be.” Her own theory was premised on “liberty of the pupils in their spontaneous manifestations.” The teacher’s role, she believed, “was to release the children’s natural individuality, to arouse their interest with special games and devices and then to let them teach themselves.” This is the basis of the O.B. Montessori Center’s motto, inscribed on its school escutcheon, “Se ipsum facit.” It is the children who study here who, in a sense, “make themselves.”

A non-political revolution for the ‘forgotten citizen’

Over the years, Montessori carried what the magazine called “her children’s crusade far beyond her native land.” She stumped the nations of Europe, working and lecturing from 8 in the morning until 8 at night. The book also recounted how “in the 1930’s, her crusade began to slow. In Italy, (II Duce, the Dictator) Benito Mussolini closed her schools because of her anti-Fascist learnings. In the US educators became more and more absorbed with the equally radical ideas of Columbia’s John Dewey.” And here’s the rub: “Even some of her own followers betrayed her; they transformed their doctrine of guided freedom into a doctrine of unguided anarchy, and many educators turned away in disgust.”

Heartsick at this betrayal, but undaunted, Montessori — already old and in exile — battled on, preaching her true doctrine. In Barcelona, Spain, she had to be rescued during the Civil War, then went to India where, in a twist of adverse fate, she was imprisoned by the British as “an enemy alien” — what a sick joke on a courageous lady who had been one of the first opponents of Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s demented Nazi creed. Finally setting in the Netherlands, she established a new training center in which her work was later to be carried on by her son, Mario, after her death.

While she lived, wherever she went, her message was always the same: “You must fight for the rights of the child.” This injunction antedated by many decades, and was vindicated, by the United Nations’ decree on protecting The Rights of the Child. Hundreds of educators, touched by her fervor and inspired by her revolutionary system, took up that cry.

When she was dying at age 81 in 1952, her last words to her son Mario were: “What are you planning for the reform of the world?”

We honor freedom fighters all over our troubled planet. Here was one. We speak about War against Poverty when, alas, we should be talking instead about a War against Ignorance. Remember what the Bible said: “The truth shall make you free”? Only by teaching the poor how to uplift themselves, how to tear aside the barriers of ignorance and hopelessness, how to snatch off their blinders and take by diligence and initiative their rightful place in the sun, can poverty and despair be banished.

Dobbiamo Fare Un Mondo Novo - ‘A New World’

This was Maria Montessori’s shining gift to all children, rich or poor. She fought for the freedom of their minds, the liberation of their souls, the unshackling of their spirits. She helped inspire, and continues to inspire the creation of that fabled “brave new world” of which leaders sing in rapture and governments strive, though backsliding too often, to achieve. She stood for liberty and progress through hard work, imagination, and courage. This is why we’ve called her in this endeavor “A Woman Called Freedom.”

The Chinese have a saying, culled from their 5,000 years of history and civilization: “If a man wishes to become immortal, he must do one of three things: He must plant a tree, he must father a child, or he must write a book.” Maria Montessori went further than that. She planted the liberating germ of an idea which will benefit mankind for the next ten thousand years, give rise to millions of fertile fields and forests, and generate thoughts which can barely be contained in a thousand books. This is not hyperbole. It is a fact.

If you visit Rome, Milan, Florence, anywhere in Italy today, you will find Maria Montessori’s face on that nation’s 1,000 Lira note — the grateful Italian people have honored their heroine by immortalizing her on their most widely circulated currency bill. But her true monument is in the hearts of the men and women whom she guided, through her schools, on their first steps in life and towards the flowering of their most wonderful capabilities.

To her we say, “MABUHAY!” may the great endeavor you launched on wings of hope fly on — for the next hundred millennia!

Mother Teresa of Calcutta once said, “God has not called me to be successful. He has called me to be faithful.” This is the same fidelity to God’s command which powered Montessori’s labors in life, and guarantees her work will live on, long after she has gone to her heavenly reward.