Hi everyone,
Christmas is great, Independence Day is wonderful—but Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, by a long shot. It’s because it’s fundamentally about gratitude.
The act of gratitude is personal and elevating. To say “thank you” is a way to say “I value you”, and in so doing to link your values to the deeds and characters of those at the receiving end of your thanks. To appreciate is to love, and what and whom we love makes us who we are. I love and appreciate my family and the meal we made together. I love and appreciate the time and work together with my colleagues in creating something new in education. And I love and appreciate the world that makes all of this possible.
Thanksgiving is a day for individuals to come together and absorb our favorite parts of the people and things we care about most—to, by appreciating them, make them more deeply a part of ourselves. I’m proud to (and I hope you don’t mind that I) appreciate you all and thereby claim all of you as part of who I am.
I’d like to say that Montessori agreed with me about Thanksgiving. Unfortunately, as far as I know, she never wrote anything about Thanksgiving, neither the American version nor any other harvest celebration. I still think she’s on my side, though, because she did have a lot to say about giving thanks.
Indeed, her view was that a wide capacity for gratitude was one of the most essential social goals of education. As much as she wrote about the child’s freedom and dignity, as much as she lionized the child’s capacity to work and to achieve growth, she also valorized the child’s capacity to be grateful—and saw tremendous risk in any education that failed to impart this capacity.
“Beyond everything”, she wrote,
I should work to inspire a faith in the greatness of man, the greatness that has been proved by enormous progress. Make clear to them man's place in the world as the improver of the environment of nature, how he has always struggled on, despite being weighed down by so many moral defects. ... They do aspire for something fine, they have a faith in life; but each year that they live in the world they see these institutions of man to be so full of corruption that they attempt to disregard or destroy them.
For Montessori, inspired optimism about the future was not optional. Not the belief that everything will turn out okay or that everything is fine—it might not, and it isn’t—but deep belief that one can meaningfully participate in the human project of making things better. For her this meant first and foremost a capacity to see what has already been done to make things better—concretely, in the details and the people that make up one’s life.
But what she saw in her time, a trend that continues to this day, is rather a growing resignation and cynicism about the world, one that takes root in childhood and persists in adult culture.
There is no love in our hearts for the human beings from whom we have received, and are receiving so much, in bread and clothing, and numerous inventions for our benefit. … Perhaps we teach the child to thank God and pray to Him, but not to thank humanity, God’s prime agent in creation; we give no thought to the men and women who daily give their lives that we may live more richly.
She makes this point, repeatedly, in all of her major works—in the opening of The Discovery of the Child, The Absorbent Mind, and her 1946 London Lectures. It’s not always in the terminology of gratitude, exactly, but it is always in the spirit of appreciating all the good around us:
Look around at all we have small, great, or beautiful—whatever it is, it has been created by man. But while asking for more and more of these marvelous inventions, we never think of the man that created them. We do not consider him at all. Although we try to do everything we can to enhance our comfort, we do not consider the greatness of man, and we only consider his defects.
Underlying Montessori’s view are two points. One is what I said initially, above: that the act of gratitude does something important to one’s character. The second is more controversial: that the world human beings have made is already full of tremendous good.
It doesn’t make sense to insist on a pedagogy of gratitude if one thinks that the world is fundamentally corrupt, or that there is something fundamentally wrong with the human project. Montessori’s view is the opposite: despite what it may sometimes seem, we have gotten so much right, have made so much progress, that the main thing we need to do is simply to draw attention to that fact. It is “useless”, Montessori thought, “to try to achieve unity amongst men [by] inviting them to work for each other, since this has been happening for centuries… World unity is there already, it exists!” The goal should rather be to
bring about a radical change in the way we view human relations, endeavoring to influence men’s consciousness by giving them new ideals, fighting indifference and incomprehension; to awaken in man’s spirit a sense of gratitude towards other men.
She has in mind moral and especially material progress. She, after witnessing the worst horrors of the 20th century, implored us, as human beings and as educators of human potential, to not forget the material wonders of human civilization.
This is easier said than done. It is not easy to look out at the world today, which is full of decline and corruption, and to find moral value in material progress. In what way does the existence of (say) smartphones morally count against the injustices of the world? Montessori’s answer is that it does—that it at minimum symbolizes the sort of progress we are capable of, and at maximum instances a kind of cooperation and unity that is exactly what we need.
And this is the final connection with Thanksgiving. It makes sense to ground our ritual of spiritual gratitude in a meal. A meal is a very material thing, one that involves physical work, cooking and chemistry, supply chains and travel. To take the material and to make it compose something even more elevated, is perhaps the most deeply Montessori thing one could do.
I hope you all enjoyed yesterday as much as I did. Today, I’m reflecting on how grateful I am to be able to work with all of you—to do the very physical work of bringing schools and communities and people together, to write and to present and to guide, and to make it part of something that is as meaningful as it gets.
If, like me, you like to do some deep reading over your holiday weekend, I’ve written more about the relationship of human achievement and child development here:
https://montessorium.com/blog/human-achievement-and-human-development
Happy Thanksgiving weekend,
Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium
I may be 18 months late but I am grateful to you for writing this.
Myself, I started this year with gratitude and my year has been better for it. I wrote that "where sacred is the opposite of common, you may sacralise common moments by giving thanks. Sacralise every meal, every drink, every dance, and every conversation, by giving thanks. Both giving thanks to God and giving thanks to everyone around you. Remember, even when there is a contract, gratitude keeps the terms fresh."
And a quote from my favorite philosopher Roger Scruton: ""At the end of all our striving,” we rejoice in our being and offer thanks. It is then, eating a meal among those we love, dancing together at a wedding, sitting side by side with people silenced by music, that we recognize our peculiar sovereign position in the world."
I will be following your work on education and use it as an inspiration for my self-education project. Thank you.
://open.substack.com/pub/busyminds/p/on-gratitude-staying-awake-in-a-lulling?utm_source=direct&r=89l9f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web