Maria Montessori Quotes
No social problem is as universal as the oppression of the child ... No slave was ever so much the property of his master as the child is of his parent ... Never were the rights of man ever so disregarded as in the case of the child.
Montessori, Maria. The Secret of Childhood. Translated by M. Joseph Costelloe, Fides Publishers, 1966, p. 116.
The coal miners’ strike had been going for 5 months. The major issue was the right to union recognition. The mine owners refused to do that and decided to take the strike. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a settlement where the miners won more money but no union recognition. The great appeal and significance of this speech is that it stressed the young children who started working in the mines at ages 8 or 9 by working on the “breakers” where they broke up large chunks of coal into smaller chunks. The children never saw daylight and never had a chance for education much less a childhood. At the time, and well into the 20th century the Republican Party was adamantly opposed to any legislation regulating child labor and when two decades later public opinion finally forced Congress to pass Child Labor legislation, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional and it took a Constitutional Amendment. See {32240}, {642469}, and {36885}.
This quotation is interesting for two reasons. First it is a good example of the twisted logic of some of the Slavery apologists who claimed that the Negro slave was better off than the free wage earner. The second reason is that it illustrates the norms of the treatment of the working man before the Civil War. The union movement would change the situation for the free laborer over the next century and then holidays and worker rights became normalized in American society. See {641290} for another of his absurd arguments.
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for the philosophy of education that bears her name, and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, where she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
