Reflections on Spirituality

Part 1: The Philosophy

By Aline D. Wolf

Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series by Aline Wolf, looking at spirituality in a Montessori education context.

Maria Montessori was 50 or more years ahead of other educators. Since the 1960’s, traditional educators have quietly adopted many of her ideas. Innovations such as child-sized furniture, mixed age groups and manipulative materials are now found in many kinds of classrooms, although Montessori is rarely cited as their originator. (A few years ago the New York Times had a front page article on the importance of the environment for toddlers and the importance of speaking frequently to children in the first year of their lives. This was page one news but Montessori had espoused it in The Absorbent Mind almost 50 years ago.)

Now that other educators are using many Montessori ideas and techniques, we must ask ourselves today, “How are we different?” “What do we offer that is special?” “What is our sense of Mission in this new millennium?”

Every time I ask myself these questions I come up with only one answer. I believe that the greatest gift Montessorians can offer to children today is spiritual nurturing. It is the beautiful coating that enhances all of Montessori’s educational work and it truly should be the mission of every Montessori teacher in order to bring about a more peaceful world. The importance of such a mission is confirmed by the eminent psychologist, Abraham Maslow, who articulated the basic needs of human beings. He wrote, “An education that leaves untouched the entire region of transcendental thought, is an education that has nothing important to say about the meaning of human life.”

We live today in a world of violence, deception, injustice, prejudice and crass materialism where children are valued for what they can consume. Thirty thousand ads are aimed at children every day in the United States. By the time an American has reached 20 years of age he will have seen one million commercials on TV. What useless information for children to absorb! What a waste of their time! A little girl watching three or four hours of television per day does not hear that she is unique; a little boy does not hear that he can make a difference in the world. The message repeated over and over is that he or she can attain significance only by having what everyone else has—a particular hamburger, a particular soda, jeans or sneakers. This advertising is dictating very questionable values to our children. To nurture their spirits in today’s world, it is imperative that we teach our elementary students how to analyze advertising and how to resist its powerful messages.

And so, I believe, that nurturing the spirit is a most necessary mission in today’s materialistic world and it can be the identifying mark of Montessori in the world of education. It is the most sacred ultimatum that we have from our founder, Maria Montessori, who believed that it was possible to create a “better world” by nurturing the spirit of each child in our care. For this unique approach she was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Listen to what Montessori tells us herself in her writings: In The Absorbent Mind, she says, “If education is always to be conceived as a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man’s future. For what is the use of transmitting knowledge, if the individual’s total development lags behind?…The child is endowed with unknown powers, which can guide us to a radiant future. If what we really want is a new world, then education must take as its aim the development of these hidden possibilities.”

In Peace and Education she wrote, “If education recognizes the intrinsic value of the child’s personality and provides an environment suited to spiritual growth, we have the revelation of an entirely new child, whose astonishing characteristics can eventually contribute to the betterment of the world.”

When you hear or read these words today, do you skip over them lightly as if they were an impractical fantasy that is no longer viable? Or do you read them as the most important goal of Montessori’s life work that is yet to have its greatest impact?

There are several reasons why spiritual nurturing has not reached its potential in the Montessori movement.

Heads of schools often find it difficult to write about the spiritual aspect of Montessori in a mission statement or in a school brochure. Nurturing the spirit cannot be demonstrated to parents the same way that the Cylinder Block or Moveable Alphabet can be used to illustrate hands-on activities.

Another reason that the spiritual dimension of Montessori’s work has been downplayed is that it is not clearly differentiated from teaching a specific religion. The majority of the Montessori schools throughout the world are non-sectarian. As such, their student bodies and staff reflect the religious diversity of the local population. Even in Pennsylvania, where I live, we have had in our classrooms Baha’is, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, Catholics, Protestants and Unitarians. We all know that religion is the prerogative of the parents. Because of the sensitivity of parents to any kind of sectarian influence, many teachers go out of their way to refrain from any activities that might be interpreted as religious. Although nurturing the spirit is totally different from teaching a specific religion, the distinction is not always obvious.

In order to free our future teachers from this hesitation we must distinguish clearly between these two efforts and make this distinction clear to parents. Here are some of the differences between religion and spirituality.

Spirituality is a basic human energy that gives meaning to our lives. The practice of a particular religion is the way that many people choose to give voice to their spirituality. In other words, you and I both have the same basic spirituality but you may express it in one way and I in another. The word “religion” refers to a set of beliefs and a code of behavior that are accepted by a large group of people and expressed in their prayers, dogmas and rituals. Throughout history, religions have given comfort, support and moral teachings to many people but they have also divided one people from another—often resulting in intolerance and tragedy. We see this in many of the troubled places today—Northern Ireland: Protestants and Catholics, Iraq: Sunnis and Shiites, India and Pakistan: Hindu and Muslims, and Bosnia is divided by three different religions: Christian, Muslim and Orthodox. In contrast to this, spirituality, by its very nature, calls us to the unity of all people. It emphasizes how we are all made from the same basic energy.

After a great deal of thought, I have concluded that to keep peace in a world of so many different religions, we need a spiritual dimension that can transcend religious boundaries. I like to call this Cosmic Spirituality. It is not a smorgasbord of many religions but a new emphasis on the spiritual values that are common to most religions.

Another difference comes to mind in regard to the universal questions about the creation and meaning of life, the questions that we all ponder: “Where did we come from?” “Why are we here?” and “What happens after death?” Many religions offer specific answers to these questions. Spirituality, on the other hand, honors the questions themselves and encourages us to ponder them personally. Teachers in non-sectarian classrooms are sometimes at a loss if a child asks, “Who made the world?” or “What happens to people when they die?” Some respond, “You should ask your parents about that?” or “We’ll talk about that another day;” which never comes. But spiritually aware teachers can say, “That’s a wonderful question. People have been thinking about that question for thousands of years. I’m glad you are thinking about it, too.” In other words, they can honor the question.

All religions have a starting point in recorded history. Spirituality, however, was a human characteristic from the dawn of civilization. The oldest anthropological ruins in the world give evidence of people gathering for spiritual purposes. In contrast, “The major religions known to us today came into being in a time span of about forty-five hundred years (from 3000 years before the Common Era to 1500 years in the Common Era). Actually formal religion is a very recent visitor to Planet earth. It has been around for only about 5% of humanity’s spiritual journey which began to unfold about seventy thousand years ago.”

As such, spirituality is a much older and more basic human element than religion. It does not oppose or belittle religion. Rather it is like an underground stream that, I believe, can lift any religious practice to a higher level. When we view spirituality as a fundamental human energy that precedes by over 60,000 years the dividing of the world into different religions, we can see that its place in a non-sectarian classroom in no way violates the separation of church and state.

Let us explore the essence of the word “spirit” and its derivatives “spiritual” and “spirituality.” In my dictionary, I found that the word “spirit” is derived from the Latin word “spirare” which means “to breathe.” The first of its many definitions is “the breath of life: the animating or vital principle giving life to physical organisms.” This tells us of its ultimate importance but we need more than this definition to tell us how we can relate its essence to our daily experiences.

When I was writing Nurturing the Spirit I felt very inadequate. I consulted many authors who had pondered the word, “spirituality.” They described it in various ways: many saw it as our inner life; others as a feeling of awe and reverence that comes when contemplating the stars or climbing a high mountain; some regarded it as a feeling of being uplifted or transported beyond ordinary sensory experience. Many said spirituality gives us depth—a depth that enables us to see that we are called to a greater purpose than self-service or self-satisfaction. And still others described it as “the life force within us, or our deepest most fundamental nature.” “Spiritual literacy,” one author said, “is the ability to read the signs written in the texts of our own experiences.” All of these descriptions are part of spirituality.

From my own reading and reflecting I have come to believe that spirituality refers to an awareness of our sacred connection with all of life and to the oneness of all things.

It has a great deal to do with the universe. Not with the universe as a static entity but with the universe that is constantly evolving.

Scientists now believe that we, and all other living species, are made from the same energy as the stars. Spirituality gives me a sense of my sacred relationship with all of life and of my role in the unfolding universe. This concept relates directly to Montessori’s Cosmic Education and is the framework for her elementary program.

It is very difficult to put spirituality into any one definition. So rather than giving you a definition I would like you to reflect, to take this word “spirit” and wrestle with it, feel what it means to you and to your vocation as a teacher or trainer. In writing Nurturing the Spirit, I never felt that I had the last word on spirituality. My purpose was to open the subject for new discussion in Montessori gatherings—in seminars, retreats, in-service and, most importantly, in teacher training.

What does it mean to nurture the spirit in a Montessori classroom?

The essence of nurturing the spirit in the classroom is helping children to know that what they do matters. It is giving them some time for silence and reflection, cultivating their sense of awe and wonder, helping them to reverence nature and to care for the earth, to appreciate the unity of all things and all people and to encourage them in the virtues of tolerance, forgiveness, peacefulness, compassion, generosity, love and service to others.

You can’t accomplish all this in regularly scheduled lessons. You can’t say, “Every Tuesday at 10 o’clock we are going to nurture our spirits.” Simply giving a few lessons on peace or care of the earth will not be sufficient. Rather, it must proceed from the inner essence of each guide or each teacher. In his biography of Maria Montessori, E.M. Standing, who had worked with her for almost thirty years, wrote; “One of the reasons why Dr. Montessori’s lectures had such a widespread appeal was that she never treated educational problems on a purely technical or utilitarian level. Her appeal was always to the spirit.

“This recognition,” he continues, “of the impor-tance of spiritual values formed an ever-present background to all her lectures. So even when Montessori was dealing with a subject like arithmetic or grammar, the spiritual element was never absent. We do not mean that she preached in the narrow sense of the word by proclaiming her own particular religious views. We mean rather that she saw in every school subject an activity of the human spirit, and therefore treated it with a corresponding dignity and breadth.”

In a very real sense the spiritual dimension permeated all of Montessori’s work. I think that she never wrote a book, or even a chapter, entitled “Spiritual Activities for the Classroom” because she didn’t see spiritual nurturing as a separate category. It was inherent in everything she did. None of her classroom activities are specifically labeled as spiritual and yet many of her exer-cises and techniques are grounded in a way of life that tran-scends the ordinary.

End part 1.

Next: Five elements of spirituality in the Montessori classroom

This article is adapted from a speech delivered by Aline D. Wolf to the International Association of Montessori Educators Nov. 10, 2005.