Pedagogical Anthropology

by Maria Montessori

Our civic morality seems to have attained its extreme altitude in having sanctioned the inviolability of human life; and the present-day struggle against the death penalty, against war, against revolutions, against uxoricide, in the case of adultery, and against duelling, shows us the triumph of a new and loftier conception of humanity in the upward progress of man.

The intermixture of races and the intermingling of national interests, have aroused a sort of collective sentiment actually existing as a normal form of conscience, namely, "human solidarity."

But we are still in a state of complete barbarity, still sunk in the most profound unconsciousness, all of us partners in the same great sin that threatens the overthrow of so-called civilised humanity; namely, barbarity toward the species.

We are ignorant, we are almost strangers, in regard to our responsibility toward those who are destined to issue from us as the continuation of humanity downward through the centuries; those who form the ultimate scope of our biological existence, inasmuch as each one of us is merely a connecting link between certain portions of past and future life. We are all so engrossed with the progress of our environment and of the ideas embodied in it, that we have not yet turned our attention inward toward ourselves: toward life.

This solidarity which we recognise as existing among men at the present moment, ought to be extended to the men of the future. And since the species is closely bound up in the individual who is destined to reproduce it, this gives us at once the basis for a code of individual moral conduct, such as would assure to everyone the integrity of the fruit of his own reproduction. Sexual immorality which is the stigma of the barbarity of our times, entails the most ignominious form of slavery; the slavery of women through prostitution. And emanating from this form of barbarity, the slavery has expanded and spread to all women, more or less oppressive, more or less conscious. The wife is a slave, for she has married in ignorance and has neither the knowledge nor the power to avoid being made the instrument for the birth of weakly, diseased or degenerate children; and still more deeply enslaved is the mother who cannot restrain her own son from degradations that she knows are the probable source of ruin of body and soul. We are all silently engaged in an enormous crime against the species and against humanity; and like accomplices we have made a tacit agreement not to speak of it. Indeed, the mysterious silence regarding sexual life is absolute; it is as though we feared to compromise ourselves in the sight of that great and powerful judge, our own posterity; we hide under an equal silence the good and the bad in relation to sexual life. This sort of terror goes by the name of shame and modesty. Such an excuse for silence certainly sounds like pure irony, coming as it does in the full midst of the orgy, at a time when we all know that every man is laden with his sins, and that we are all either accomplices or slaves in the common fault. It would seem that a race so modest as to blush at the mere mention of sexual life ought to be eminently chaste, and far removed from the age of foundling asylums and houses of ill fame; the age in which infanticide exists as proof of absolute impunity in regard to sexual crimes.

What we call shame and modesty, is in reality not shame or modesty in regard to sexual acts and phenomena, but only in regard to sins against them.

These acts and phenomena, being directly related to creation and the eternity of the species, ought to be regarded by men as in the nature of a lofty religious culte, equally, for instance, with that which from the earliest prehistoric times placed the symbol of maternity, the mother and the child, side by side with the scythe, symbol of labour, in places of worship. We cannot admit that love, sung by the poets as a divine sentiment, is the moral exponent of unworthy and shameful acts. It is the error, the perversion of sexual life, the source of degeneration, of degradation and of the death of the species, that makes us keep silent, conceal and blush with shame.

In reality, all this ought to stir us, not to embarrassment and shame, but to a formidable rebellion, a sharp awakening of conscience, a redemption from a state of inferior civilisation.

It was a barbarous sovereign who, in the delusive hope that it would cure him of eczema, caused the throats of little children to be cut, so that he might immerse himself in the warm bath of their blood.

To-day anyone who would sacrifice the lives of children to allay the itching of his own skin, would be in our eyes a monster of criminality.