Spontaneous Activity in Education by Maria Montessori (best historical biographies txt) 📕

It is a fact that science has inaugurated "works of sanitation" as its practical contribution to the fight against mortality; towns have been opened out, water has been laid on, houses have been built for the poor, and labor has been protected. All the environment tends to ameliorate the "conditions of life" of the population. No works of charity, no expression of love or of pity, has ever been able to do so much. Science has shown us that those works which were called "charitable," and were looked upon merely as a moral virtue, represented the first step, although a restricted and insufficient one, towards the real salvation of the health of humanity. It was that which had to be done in order to fight against death. But, in order to reach the goal, such work should be universal, and should constitute a "reformation" of society. Then it becomes "social progress," when there will be no benefactors or benefited, but merely humanity which has increased its own well-being. This principle: All men are brothers; let them love and help one another, and let not the right hand know what the left hand doeth, will have been translated into practise.

In sentimental times, poverty was a stimulus to which the rich man reacted. The poor did not really tend to educate the rich man's feelings. If, in those times, the poor man had said, "Give me necessities, or thou shalt die," the rich man would have been indignant. He was very far from realizing that the poor man was his brother, with whom he shared his rights, as well as the danger of death.

To-day science has put things on a different footing. It has "realized" that charity benefits both rich and poor, and has constituted a principle of civilization that which formerly was a "moral principle" entrusted to sentiment.

In the case of morals, too, hygiene has penetrated, and has given individual rules of life. It is through hygiene that debauchery has become less common, that those epicurean feasts which were celebrated in ancient times are replaced to-day by hygienic meals, the value of which consists in the wise proportion between the needs of the body and the food which is prepared. Wine and alcohol are rejected by the rich more than by the poor. We eat in order to keep ourselves in good health, and therefore without excess and without poison. This is what the ancient morality preached when it fought against the vice of gluttony and proclaimed fasting and abstinence to be virtues. No one in those times could have imagined that the day would come when millionaires would voluntarily substitute lemonade for wine, and that great banquets would disappear entirely, leaving only the accounts of them as a "curiosity" of the past. Nay, more: none of these modern ascetics are proud of their virtue, they seem to respond with simplicity to the gospel precept:

"When ye fast, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance ... but anoint thine head, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which seeth in secret."

If one of the ancient preachers could talk to these ascetics, he would also be much edified by their conversation. What has become of those pleasantries which formed "life" and "delight" and "gaiety" in the time of Marguerite of Valois? The tales of Boccaccio could not now be discussed in English society, or in any modern aristocratic society even of much lower social rank than that which surrounded Marguerite of Valois. Nowadays people are afraid of uttering an incorrect word, even of hinting at the most innocent functions of the body, or of naming those parts of their clothing which come in contact with the skin. They only talk about elevated things, and only those people who instruct us are looked upon as brilliant conversationalists; those who, in speaking of their travels, tell us about the customs of the people, or who, speaking of politics, tell us of the current situation. Excessive laughter, jokes, and violent gestures are not permitted. Every one keeps his limbs quiet, even avoiding those vivacious and inoffensive gestures which are the natural accompaniment of conversation; the tone of voice is so modulated as to be scarcely audible. The ancient preacher would say, "These people have carried out St. Paul's exhortation to an exaggerated degree: 'But fornication and all uncleanness, let it not once be named among you, as becometh saints; neither filthiness nor foolish talking nor jesting which are not convenient.'"

And among these evolutions of manners we find that it is once more hygiene which, making itself the guide of fashion, has by degrees simplified clothes, done away with pomatum and rouge, abolished crinolines, modified stays and shoes, caused long-trained dresses to disappear from the streets, and has introduced uniformity in clothing. If a man who lived in ancient times were to appear among us, he would ask: "Why are the people doing penance? I see men without any ornaments and with their hair cut short; and women who, with an edifying renunciation of vanity, go along the street without wigs and without patches on their faces, with their hair simply knotted up; I see countesses dressed in inexpensive costumes, in simple, dark, monastic dresses, almost like those of the poor. The carriages are dark, like funeral cars, and the servants wear mourning livery. Carnival no longer enlivens the streets. Every one goes about silently and gravely."

Who could ever have persuaded the people of old times, who used to preach against excessive vanity, that such a picture as this does not represent a time of penance, but ordinary daily life?

These modern people, on their side, are far from thinking that they are condemned to a life of suffering; on the contrary, they look back with horror on the society of the past; they would never go back to those days when men were enslaved by grand dresses and by rouge, poisoning themselves with debauchery and dying of infectious diseases. They have freed themselves from a great many useless bonds and have realized a higher enjoyment of life. All the comfort which makes life so delicious to-day would have been an incomprehensible secret to the nobility of past centuries. It is the secret of life.

Possibly, at one time, monks and those who were living in the world thought of each other in a similar way. Those who had renounced the bondage of the world and all its vanities possessed a secret of life which was full of hitherto unknown delights, and they looked with horror upon the so-called pleasure of their century; while those unconscious men who were slaves from the tops of their be-wigged heads to their feet compressed in narrow boots, called the ways of death "life and enjoyment."

Positive science has made yet another contribution penetrating directly into the sphere of morality. By statistic methods of sociology the social problems of immorality and crime have been opened up, and external facts have been studied; and criminal anthropology has revealed the "inferior types" who by hereditary taint are those who have a predisposition to all the moral infection of their surroundings. Morel's theories concerning degeneration and the resulting theories of Lombroso concerning criminals have undoubtedly brought light into this chaos, wherein opinion as to human goodness and wickedness was divided. Forms of "degeneration" are chiefly rooted in the nervous system, and all the abnormal personalities produced thereby "deviate" from the ordinary type. They have a different intelligence and different morality. False perceptions, false reasoning, illusions, anomalies of the will such as impulses, irresolutions, and crazes, the deficient moral sense on which the abnormal intelligence builds up systematic delusions, which are interpreted as philosophical principles, place these persons in a category apart as extra-social beings.

The general nervous weakness and the wandering intelligence which preclude an interest in work make of these persons individuals incapable of production, who therefore try to live upon the productions of others. This fundamental fact, which tends to unite a dislike of productive labor with impulses towards rapine, causes them to make use of all those surrounding causes which prepare the external means for crime. These men are "bad." But if we observe more closely we see that it is not wickedness with which we have to deal but morbid conditions and social errors. If such be the case, these bad men, who from no fault of their own were born in these unhappy conditions, and who are driven to perdition by society, are really "victims." Their whole history, when closely investigated, reveals this fact. They are hunted and neglected from babyhood. Incapable of making themselves beloved owing to mental deficiency, volitive disorders, to the anomaly of the affections and also to lack of physical attraction, they pass from maternal persecution to that of the school, and finally to that of society, bringing on themselves every kind of punishment.

The first picture which Morel drew of these "dead ones of the race" was an impressive one. According to his original theory, containing a synthesis which, if not very exact, yet sums up the phenomenon with comprehensive clearness, when a cause of degeneration acts upon a man, he may have defective children, whose deficiency increases in the two or three following generations, until it is extinguished in the final sterility of exceedingly debased individuals. According to Morel, madmen, criminals, epileptics and idiots form the sad series in this extinction of man. The man who dies leaving strong descendants, does not really die, but is renewed in them, youth succeeding to age. It is only the degenerate who dies, for his kind is "extinguished," the few miserable generations whom he produces represent a "living agony." This "dying species," which lives among the healthy, exhibiting its weakness, its delusions, its convulsions, irritability and egoism, is finally driven into those tombs of the living, lunatic asylums and prisons.

What a living picture, and what a warning to man! One "fault" may be a mortal one to him, for, like the Biblical curse, it transmits itself to generations, and leads to eternal perdition.

How terrible it is to think of punishment falling on the innocent head of a child! and how evident it is that our present life is not everything, but that it has a continuation, when we shall reap the true rewards or the true punishments of our existence. The choice lies to a great extent in our own hands. Shall we have a beautiful, healthy, prolific son, or a deformed, unhealthy, barren son, incapable of loving and understanding us? The hygiene of generation is the most important part of moral hygiene. If the salvation of the individual life can only be obtained by caring for the hygienic life of the whole of humanity, it is only by rigorously following the laws of health and the laws of life that the salvation of the species can be obtained. Alcoholism, all poisons, overwork, constitutional maladies, dissipation of nervous force, vice, and idleness, are all causes of degeneration. It was science which went on preaching these things for the salvation of mankind, and by these means propagating virtue. But above all, it inculcated the great principle of "pardon," which hitherto had been one of the mysteries of religious morality.

A few years ago, no one, however pitiful and generous, could have looked upon the delinquent with the same justice and pity as science has done. It has pointed out that we are all responsible for this victim of social causes, that we must all accuse ourselves of the sins committed by the inferior individual, and exert ourselves for his regeneration by all the means in our power. It was only the saints who had an intuition of