Customer Reviews

Peaceful Children. Peaceful World: The Challenge of Maria Montessori

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Aline Wolf's little book, beautifully illustrated, is particularly suitable reading for teachers doing peace education in their classrooms. While I do not yet own this book (it was loaned me by a fellow teacher), I plan to purchase my own copy and also buy copies for other teachers.

Peace education requires a little reflection on the part of the teacher. I hope the teacher who wrote the negative review of this book will re-read it and give the contents some thought, especially since he/she is a Montessori guide. The ideas in the book are a definite part of the Montessori philosophy.

I thank Aline Wolf for her thoughtful work.

Aline Wolf has done a marvelous job clarifying and editing these powerful words of Maria Montessori. Taken from Montessori's book Peace and Education, Wolf has liberated brilliant thinking on creating a peaceful future from a withering source. Any Montessori teacher knows what it is like to read one of those Indian printed booklets on irregular paper, in tiny font. Add to this the awkwardness of the fact that many of Montessori's words were spoken aloud in Italian, then translated into English a half century or more ago, and you see how inaccessible her teachings are. This book is a an easy read, with no more than five or six lines of text per page, set against black and white illustrations by Joe Servello. It would make an excellent addition to an upper elementary classroom. Beginning with the sentence, " Upon peace the very life of the world depends, perhaps even the progress or decay of our entire civilization.", Wolf places images of soldiers in agony and children bereft, the machinery and and the destruction of war in contrast with this call for peace. The book illustrates, heartbreakingly, the fragility of little children, and why we must, we simply must, nurture and educate them for peace. More on this topic: Children of the Universe: Cosmic Education in the Montessori Elementary Classroom

I recently found this book mysteriously placed on my desk. I am a teacher and am immensely bothered by this book. It proposes that it is a book of peaceful education, but relates public education to producing mindless, automatons of society, proposes that using machinery causes idleness and avarice, and the picture following the previous ideas, in this picture book, is of children in Nazi uniforms with a nazi flag in the background. I HIGHLY encourage people to reconsider the use of this book to teach peaceful education. This is not an accurate representation of Montessori principles, or peace education.