A Peace Pedagogy

We are publishing remarks given during a roundtable on “Children, Youth, and Our Shared Future” at the Saturday Free School’s symposium on Henry Winston on November 12, 2024.

I want to share about my journey to teaching, the purpose of education, and the importance of peace.

I grew up in West Philly and as a child attended a Montessori program in Alexander Wilson Elementary School. That school was closed during budget cuts by the district in 2013, it was bought by the University of the Sciences and demolished, and the schoolyard where we used to play was turned into university dorms.

My mother became curious about Montessori seeing my classroom and talking to my teachers, became a teacher herself, and started her own school. She is to this day my first and greatest teacher.

I went to college thinking: my grandmother was a teacher, my mother is a teacher, what else will I do with an English degree but teach? But I was not ready, and did not want to teach. I worked a number of odd jobs until I took a job as a nanny. Working with that child, I watched him grow from wearing diapers to reading books. At the same time, I was reading and being transformed myself as a student in the Saturday Free School. I fell in love with the discovery the child makes of the world, the pursuit of truth that we make unendingly from cradle to grave, and matured into a man capable of shouldering the responsibility we have to the child. When that job ended four years later, my mother encouraged me to apply to a Montessori school in South Philly, and I did, and it was the best decision I could have made.

I now teach children there from 18 months to 6 years old—from the 1 and a half year old toddler moving just beyond infancy, to the 3 year old developing language and the ability to focus needed for all subsequent learning, to that special age of 6 when the child begins to ask deep questions of society and their place in it.

Maria Montessori, the developer of the Montessori method, was born in Italy in 1870. She studied the child and the phases of child development as a scientist, through observation and practice, and sought to establish universal laws of child development until her death in 1952. The purpose grounding her study was her deep belief in the great capacities of the child, in the importance of developing the child as a spiritually conscious and morally motivated member of society, and of the child as the foundation stone of civilization.

Montessori writes in her book Citizen of the World: “The children, who live a life more pure than ours, are divine workers; without pretensions, without pride, they accomplish humanity’s magnum opus: the construction of man. And those who assist in this great work are enriched by the children’s spiritual values and are elevated. The superiority and condescension evinced by adults towards the child crumble and, instead, a sense of humility emerges, the same sense that is evoked in him who succeeds in tearing the veil that hides the secrets of creation.”

She goes on to say, “The question is to bring about a radical change in the way we view human relations, endeavouring to influence men’s consciousness by giving them new ideals, fighting indifference and incomprehension; to awaken in man’s spirit a sense of gratitude towards other men. This can also be done with children. In fact, these endeavours should begin with the children, giving them the opportunity to reflect on the social value of work, on the beauty of labour carried out by others, whereby the common effort enriches the life of all.”

She expresses the universal need of a peace pedagogy for our children and the children of the world, of an education that has science as its foundation and a moral imperative as its animating engine. This peace pedagogy cultivates in them a love for humanity that concretizes science and makes it real.

Montessori writes: “Children should be made to realize that all great achievements in culture and in the arts, all sciences and industries that have brought benefit to humanity, are due to the work of men who often struggled in obscurity and under conditions of great hardship; men driven by a profound passion, by an inner fire, to create with their research, with their work, new benefits not only for the people who lived in their times, but also for those of the future. We must convey to the children the nobility of this altruism.” When I read this, I think of the unselfish life work of Henry Winston. 

Montessori writes, “We find ourselves at a moment in time in which spiritual life is neglected and materialism is extolled as a virtue; in which the physical prowess of human beings has surpassed that of nature and in which we glimpse the horror of universal destruction. Because of this, we proclaim that the development of creative energies, of the higher characteristics of human beings, is one of the most urgent needs of our social life.” When I read this, I think of King, who said we must move from a thing-oriented society to a people-oriented society.

She writes: “An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.” This is what we pursue in the Free School.

Perhaps no one has expressed this great responsibility as beautifully as Du Bois in his essay “The Immortal Child.” He says: “…we may teach frankly that this world is not perfection, but development: that the object of education is manhood and womanhood, clear reason, individual talent and genius and the spirit of service and sacrifice, and not simply a frantic effort to avoid change in present institutions; that industry is for man and not man for industry and that while we must have workers to work, the prime object of our training is not the work but the worker—not the maintenance of present industrial caste but the development of human intelligence by which drudgery may be lessened and beauty widened.”

He goes on to write: “A world guilty of this last and mightiest war has no right to enjoy or create until it has made the future safe from another Arkansas or Rheims. To this there is but one patent way, proved and inescapable, Education, and that not for me or for you but for the Immortal Child. And that child is of all races and all colors. All children are the children of all and not of individuals and families and races. The whole generation must be trained and guided and out of it as out of a huge reservoir must be lifted all genius, talent, and intelligence to serve all the world.”

I want to end by speaking on children and the need for peace. When I’m at school, and I look around the quiet, dark nap room at the children sleeping, see them at the park laughing and running and playing, or in the classroom comforting another student who has fallen and is crying, I cannot help but think of the children of Gaza, and the Israeli bombs that snuff out their life and potential. I read just yesterday of Israeli snipers killing doctors at al-Shifa hospital as they tried to reach new born babies in their incubators.

When I think of them my heart swells with pain and feels that it will burst or twist apart. And I know I must love not only the children in my classroom, but the children of Gaza as well. The children of the world are my children. And as a teacher, I cannot stand neutral on the question of war and peace. Peace is the birthright of all children, and the prerequisite of all education. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to cultivate in my classroom a peace ethic and a love ethic, to demonstrate a moral uprightness and a will to creatively resolve conflict, to fight for peace on a world scale, and against the war agenda of my own government. 

On peace, Montessori writes: “We must take man himself, take him with patience and confidence, across all the planes of education. We must put everything before him, the school, culture, religion, the world itself. We must help him to develop within himself that which will make him capable of understanding. It is not merely words, it is a labour of education. This will be a preparation for peace—for peace cannot exist without justice and without men endowed with a strong personality and a strong conscience.”

She says, “Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.”

What we need to develop for our children and youth is a peace pedagogy, a pedagogy that sees the task of the teacher as that of the scientist deeply in love with the potential of the child, who takes up the work of nurturing the child in their development into consciousness, equipped and eager to take on the construction of a beautiful “world house.”