Although historiography on the life and works of Maria Montessori is extremely wide and diverse, historians have devoted little space to her political and intellectual efforts to achieve peace, as this was considered a secondary project of an intellectual whose primary goal was educating the youth. The Best Weapon for Peace. Maria Montessori, Education, and Children's Rights by Erica Moretti seeks to fill this gap by simultaneously examining Montessori's educational activism and her dedication to pacifism for the first time.
Thanks to an impressive use of sources, including private correspondence, leaflets, lecture notes, ministerial publications, governmental reports, and photographs, the volume, which is divided into six chapters with a broad introduction and conclusion, covers chronologically Montessori's life and her efforts to achieve peace. The author masterfully reconstructs, from the early twentieth century to Montessori's death, the economic, religious, aesthetic, and social contexts that she experienced, and which contributed to the birth of her educational projects and their entry into the contemporary international debate. Accompanied by a series of photographs, this study succeeds in tracing the trajectories both of Montessori's internationalist philosophy and of her commitment to social responsibility, and offers a lively exploration of discourses on peace, on humanitarianism, and on the prevention of war during the first half of the twentieth century.
The book begins by trying to trace the roots of Montessori's pacifist thought, during her early works in the first decade of the twentieth century, highlighting influences from Italian intellectuals. Starting with her commitment to disabled children, progressing to her involvement with young people in detention centres, her work in rural areas around Rome, and culminating in the establishment of the San Lorenzo Casa dei Bambini, those years played a pivotal role in shaping her perspective on nurturing children to be at peace with their body, mind, and surrounding environment.
The second chapter addresses Montessori's efforts to rescue children affected by the tragedy of the First World War through her pedagogy. After working with war-stricken children, she devised a supranational humanitarian association of educators – the White Cross, parallel to the Red Cross – aimed at caring for children in war zones. Unfortunately, the White Cross never came to life because it lacked the necessary support, but the study of nurseries in the occupied territories of Belgium and northern France and the debate with contemporary intellectuals and influential figures, including Pope Benedict XV, continuously encouraged Montessori to develop her methodology.
Seeking to realise her humanitarian project, she delivered a series of lectures in the United States, in which she presented the foundations of her pacifist philosophy. The content of these lectures constitutes the focus of the third chapter, probably making it, along with the last chapter, the most captivating parts of the book. In this section, Moretti analyses four unpublished lectures on the theme of peace given by Montessori in San Diego in the spring of 1917, when she was invited by the Women's Board of the city to give a course for elementary-level Montessorian educators. Moretti considers these lectures to be the theoretical foundation of Montessorian thought on global pacifism: children as agents of peace, giving rise to a new humanity capable of resisting the pressures of conflict and, in the end, preventing the outbreak of war altogether.
Continuing chronologically, the fourth chapter deals with the delicate relations between Montessori and the Fascist regime, when the pedagogist seemed to set aside her direct commitment to pacifism to collaborate with the regime in order to receive financial support. As the author explains, historiography for a long time considered Montessori a naive figure, incapable, at least at first, of realising the implications of having the Duce as the patron of her pedagogical vision. Moretti, on the contrary, argues that the pedagogist was a keen observer of politics, and only pragmatically accepted the funding of the regime, which was in turn interested in using Montessori's fame for its own gain (p. 126). Stifling her opposition to the regime for a while, when the conditions imposed by Mussolini became difficult to manage, Montessori left the country, moving to the Netherlands.
The fifth chapter analyses the conferences on peace that Montessori held between 1932 and 1939 in various European cities, stressing that in this period the pedagogist's promotion of peace shifted from the classroom alone to the political and social level, working for the first time towards the creation of specific public institutions.
Finally, the sixth chapter investigates the impact on her pacifist thought of Montessori's stay in India with her son Mario between 1939 and 1949, particularly focusing on the notion of cosmic education (p. 178). Invited by the president of the Theosophical Society, George Sidney Arundale, and his wife Rukmini Devi, a dancer and choreographer, she came into contact with theosophical principles in the cosmic vision of peace. During her stay, the dialogue with Indian intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas K. Gandhi helped to further develop her ideas on education, recognising that a comprehensive approach to child education was necessary to enhance knowledge in a holistic way, integrating all aspects of the individual in relation to every other living being on the planet.
Ultimately, the wealth of information and the meticulous use of sources are the strengths of Moretti's work, through which she succeeds in offering a detailed perspective on the interconnections between Montessori's education and her promotion of peace. The microhistorical approach is extremely effective in revealing the transnational distances crossed by Montessori and in providing a global perspective on her life, highlighting the social context within which Montessori's ideas and pedagogical methods originated. In doing so, the book also stands out as a contribution of considerable interest to the wider history of peace, managing both to enrich readers' understanding of Montessori herself and provide valuable insights into the connections between education and peace throughout global history.
