Elizabeth Clare Prophet On Montessori Philosophy and Education
The following is excerpted from the 1983 From The Heart interview with Elizabeth Clare Prophet.
It interests me that you have a Montessori school that goes all the way through high school—very unusual in America. How did you become involved with Montessori?
I had four children and I saw what was happening to them in the public schools. I said, "I didn't have these four children to turn them out to the animal farm." When my oldest son was two, I saw the problems that people are seeing today and the reasons why many Christians, Jews, and Moslems are forming private schools.
Can you describe the Montessori philosophy?
It's based on the individual and the belief that the individual has the potential to become one with God, and that given the correct environment and the understanding of "sensitive periods," with the equipment developed by Dr. Maria Montessori earlier in this century, the child will tune in to his own inner Self and his creative powers.
Between the ages of two and seven, he is exposed to mathematics, he's exposed to reading and writing. It has to do with the child's own individual development.
The teacher is considered to be the guardian of the classroom. And it's a very sacred process that is happening. The classroom is a carefully prepared environment—a laboratory of the soul—where each child is given the opportunity to advance according to his attunement with the inner cycles of Life. (You know, I believe that children are adults in a child's body.)
What is your view of the voucher system which is being proposed both at the state and federal level whereby a student would have the opportunity to choose either public school or private school, such as a Montessori system?
Education in America began with the private school system and when it became public and therefore the policies came under the control of the government instead of the parents, we lost the ingenuity and the individuality.
Then with the concept of humanism, certain textbooks were taken out of the schools—for instance, the McGuffey Readers, which have a rich moral content. These were replaced with the mechanistic Dick and Jane doing very simplistic things. And now we have textbooks with all kinds of monsters and witchcraft and satanic symbols and bad English and a lot of chaotic art.
I think this is very distracting to the child and certainly disturbing to the harmony of the psyche. And it's based on the world view that is very common: that the human being is a human animal that has evolved from lesser stages, rather than the individual being the issue of God, having the essence of the light of creation within himself.
Current educational philosophy seldom takes into consideration the fact that the inner evolution must go on in a parallel line with the development of the mental and emotional faculties.
Yes, I'm for the voucher system because I think parents should have the final word in educating their children and not be forced to submit to institutionalized 'values clarification', institutionalized sex education, and institutionalized rock music—against their free will.
Creationism vs. evolution—I would be interested in your views on this controversy.
I don't think that the public school is a place for the teaching of one brand of religious view of creation. I think that it should be the place where we deal with science—because that is why we are sending our children to a secular school.
I believe religion (and sex education for that matter) are the sole prerogative and responsibility of parents. And I believe parents should educate themselves for this sacred duty.
I think that the creation theory is based on a narrow fundamentalist view which archaeology seems to have disproved. On the one hand, paleontologists say there is fossil evidence of life going back five hundred million years, and geologists say that the earth is four billion years old; on the other, creationists tell us earth was created just ten thousand years ago and man five thousand.
Creationists deny prehistoric events I believe to be true—like the sinking of Atlantis about twelve thousand years ago. Then, too, the theory of evolution is not without problems. There are questions it has never answered. I don't have all the facts. I'm not about to referee the issue, but my personal opinion is that there are errors on both sides.
How so?
I think that the whole concept of when the earth began is speculative at best. Any eyewitnesses? I prefer to deal in the concept of cycles rather than in terms of precise numbers of years. I would say that it took seven cycles to create the earth, which the Bible metaphorically or poetically calls 'days'. Each of these cycles could have been a million years or more.
What impresses me is that there is a rhythm to creation. Perhaps the passage of time is actually meaningless because it could be said that time exists only in the mind of man.
There are also the persistent statements in ancient histories (like those of the Sumerians) to the effect that beings called "the gods" played a key role in mankind's physical evolution.
Several contemporary writers, as well as the movie Hangar 18, put forth the thesis that about half a million years ago extraterrestrial superscientists arrived in spaceships on planet Earth and began genetic engineering on Homo erectus to create a new species, Homo sapiens. Both creationists and evolutionists have yet to satisfactorily answer that theory.