Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

Whereas, on the contrary, the survival of types and of customs and sentiments peculiar to separate races, is the expression of local conditions that are inferior both in morality and in civil progress. As for the innumerable paracentral errors which form to-day a large proportion of individual varieties, they are due directly to the imperfection of the environment, which does not permit of the natural development of human life, and consequently interferes through a wide range of methods and degrees with the development of ideal normality.

Hence, the extreme eccentric errors are the consequence of diseases and far-reaching social imperfections which lead to genuine deviations from the normal, including pathological and degenerate malformations, and associated with them the lowest forms of individual degradation, both intellectual and moral.

All the paracentral errors and malformations are a physical burden which retards the perfectionment of man. Admitting that hybridism will eventually result in complete beauty, it will be greatly delayed in its attainment through the accumulation of errors that surround the characteristics of race. They form a heavy ballast, if the phrase may be permitted, that impedes the progress of its ascension.

Consequently, the long awaited social progress which is gradually bringing about the "brotherhood of man" is not in itself sufficient for the attainment of the ideal mean.

There are certain errors that must more or less necessarily be encountered along the pathway of humanity; and that act either directly or indirectly upon posterity, deforming and destroying its resistance to life; and it is these that must be taken under consideration, because they delay the normal progress of human society.

They are conscious and well recognised errors; hence up to a certain point the active agency of man may combat them and succeed little by little in mitigating them and overcoming their disastrous influence upon biological humanity.

There are, in general, two influences developing and promoting that improvement which leads toward the medial man: in proportion as the real and practical intermarriage of races approaches its realisation, social errors diminish; and as the brotherhood of humanity is promoted, it leads to social reforms by which the "sins of the world" are little by little overcome.

But these may also be actively combated; and in this direction education has a task of inestimable importance to civilisation. We ought to know not only the thought of our century, which is the luminous torch in the light of which we advance along the path of progress; but also the moral needs of our time, and the errors which may be conquered through our conscious agency.

To know "the faults of our century," which are destined to be conquered in the coming century, and to make preparation for the victory—such is our moral mission. The ethical movement of human society has continued to advance from conquest to conquest, and in looking backward the more civilised part of mankind have been horrified at the conditions that have been outgrown and have called them "barbarous."

Thus, for example, slavery was an unsurmountable obstacle to progress, and had to be crushed out by civilisation; the license to kill is also a form of barbarism which to-day we are boasting of having just outgrown—or, at least, of having reached the final limit of its duration. In early times it was not only permissible to kill, but in many of its forms murder was considered honourable, as, for instance, in wars and in duels; it was also one form of justice to kill for vengeance, either social or individual; the condemnation to death of a criminal, the murder of an adulterous wife, the murder of anyone who has attacked the honour of the family, all this seemed just in the past. Lastly, murder was committed for pure diversion, as in the auto-da-fè and in the games of the circus.