"More than ever, peace remains to be made. More than ever, perhaps, in the coming decades, it will be a matter of survival for humanity. More than ever, it will be made in the minds of men. For peace, as Maria Montessori clearly understood, is not just non-war. It's not just a matter of diplomacy, armies and cease-fires. All too often, people who win wars lose the peace that follows, because the values needed to win wars - simplification, obedience to orders, clear distinction between friend and foe, etc- have nothing to do with the values of peace. - have nothing in common with the values needed to build a lasting peace - the ability to admit and understand complexity, the capacity to cooperate with others, a critical mind, a sense of compromise, an acute perception of the world's simultaneous unity and diversity. Peace is a science, an art, a culture. For Maria Montessori, peace can be learned. In building peace, there is no such thing as a small thing or a small scale: what takes place between women and men, between children and adults, between children themselves, at the level of the family, the class, the neighborhood, can be found at the level of relations between nations. Tolerance, the ability to recognize that the other is at once similar to me and worthy of the same consideration, and at the same time radically different and worthy of the same respect, is an issue at the level of inter-individual relations as well as relations between civilizations and religions. There is no small scale for learning harmony, and no small scale for learning tolerance.
Sixty years ago, Maria Montessori wrote: "The child has a power that we do not have: that of building man himself".
