Pedagogical Anthropology, Maria Montessori [online e book reader TXT] 📗

These acts and phenomena, being directly related to creation and the eternity of the species, ought to be regarded by men as in the nature of a lofty religious culte, equally, for instance, with that which from the earliest prehistoric times placed the symbol of maternity, the mother and the child, side by side with the scythe, symbol of labour, in places of worship. We cannot admit that love, sung by the poets as a divine sentiment, is the moral exponent of unworthy and shameful acts. It is the error, the perversion of sexual life, the source of degeneration, of degradation and of the death of the species, that makes us keep silent, conceal and blush with shame.

In reality, all this ought to stir us, not to embarrassment and shame, but to a formidable rebellion, a sharp awakening of conscience, a redemption from a state of inferior civilisation.

It was a barbarous sovereign who, in the delusive hope that it would cure him of eczema, caused the throats of little children to be cut, so that he might immerse himself in the warm bath of their blood.

To-day anyone who would sacrifice the lives of children to allay the itching of his own skin, would be in our eyes a monster of criminality.

And yet almost equally criminal are the men of our time, lords, in a barbaric sense, of sexual life; and we silently acquiesce in customs which in the future centuries will perhaps be remembered as a monstrous barbarism.

The whole moral revival which awaits us, revolves around the struggle against the sexual sins. The emancipation of woman, the protection of maternity and of the child, are its most luminous exponents; but no less efficacious evidences of such progress are all the efforts directed against alcoholism and the other vices and diseases which are reflected in their unhappy consequences to posterity. There is just one side of the question that has hitherto been scarcely touched at all, and that is the chastity of man and his responsibility as a father; but even this has already come to be felt as an imperative necessity for progress. In place of reducing other human beings to slavery and prostituting them; instead of betraying them and shattering their lives by seduction and the desertion of their offspring, the man of the future will choose to become chaste. He will feel that otherwise he is dishonoured, morally lost. Man will not be willing to be so weak as to confess himself dragged down to degradation and crime because unable to conquer his own instincts; man who has nothing but victories on the credit side of his history, and who even succeeded in overcoming the greatest of all his irresistible instincts, that of self-preservation, in showing himself capable of going into combat and dying for the ideals of his fatherland.

Man is capable of every great heroism; it was man who found a means of conquering the formidable obstacles of his environment, establishing himself lord of the earth, and laying the foundations of civilisation. He will also teach himself to be chaste, within sufficiently narrow limits to guarantee the dignity of the human race and the health of the species; and in this way he will prescribe the ethics for the centuries of the near future: sexual morality. There are customs and virtues, lofty ethical doctrines that stand in direct accord with the conservation and the progress of life. Bodily cleanliness, temperance in drink, the conquest of personal instincts, human brotherhood in the full extent of the thought, the feeling, and the practice, chastity; all these are just so many forms of the defense of life, both of the individual and of the species. To-day, in hygiene, in pathology and in anthropology, science is showing us the truth through positive proofs, through experiments and statistics. But these virtues which are paths leading to life, are simply being reconfirmed by science; just as they are being little by little attained by civil progress, which prepares their practical elements; but they were always intuitively recognised by the human heart: nothing is older in the ethics of mankind than the principal of brotherhood, of victory over the instincts, of chastity. Only, these virtues, intuitively perceived, could not be universally practised, because universal practice demanded time for preparation. But they survived partly as affirmations of absolute virtue and partly as prophesies of a future age and were considered as constituting the highest good. Just as the æsthetic sense led to the recognition of normality at a time when this scientific concept was very far from being understood as it is to-day; in the same way the ethical and religious sense was able to feel intuitively and to separate from customs and from sentiments belonging to an evanescent form of transitory civilisation or from the temporary racial needs, those others that relate fundamentally to the biological preservation of the individual and the species and the practical attainment of human perfection. And while the medial intellectual man or the artistic genius combines wholly or in part the thoughts of his time, the medial moral or religious man sums up the guiding principles of life which everyone feels profoundly in the depth of his heart; and when he speaks to other men it seems as though he instilled new vigour into the very roots of their existence, and he is believed, when he speaks of a happier future toward which humanity is advancing. If the intellectual genius is almost a reader of contemporaneous thought as it vibrates around him, the religious genius interprets more or less completely and perfectly the universal and eternal spirit of life in humanity.

Accordingly, the medial men incarnate the beautiful, the true, and the good: in other words, the theories of positivism arrive at the selfsame goals as idealism, those of poetry, philosophy and art.

By following the path of observation, we reach a goal analogous to that sought along the path of intuition.

The theory of the medial man constructed fundamentally upon positive bases of measurements and facts, represents the limit[51] of perfection of the human individual associated with the limit of perfection of human society, which is formed in a two-fold way: a close association between all human beings, or the formation of a true social organism (complete hybridism in body; human brotherhood in sentiment), and the steadily progressive emancipation, of every individual member from anxiety concerning the defense of life, in order to enjoy the triumph of the development of life. All that was formerly included under defense will assume collective forms of a high order (repressive justice replaced by more varied forms of prevention: which have for their final goal a widespread education and a gradual amelioration of labour and social conditions); and in this reign of peace there will arise the possibility of developing all the forces of life (biological liberty).

In such a conception, the individual organism depends more and more upon the social organism: just as the cells depend upon the multicellular organism; and we may almost conceive of a new living entity, a super-organism made up of humanity, but in which every component part is allowed the maximum expansion of its personal activity emancipated from all the obstacles that have been successively overcome. This conception of biological liberty, in other words, the triumph of the free and peaceful development of life, through the long series of more or less bitter struggles and defenses of life, constitutes, in my opinion, the very essence of the new pedagogy. And the evolution of modern thought and of the social environment can alone prepare for its advent, perhaps at no distant day.

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