Therefore it is important to acknowledge this reality, it is important to understand very well what has been this discovery and it is also very important to know who is a child during his development. So, after the discovery we need the "knowledge of the child". For educating, it is necessary to make the discovery, to understand in depth who is a child and how life operates inside the child so that we can support and collaborate with the hormè, "the divine energy for every evolution." (2)

The knowledge of the child is the profound and precise knowledge of the laws of life because life is what brings development and growth and, if we wish to be educators, we must serve life, we must become persons who use their love and knowledge for offering the right "aid" to the child's life.

But what is life? In Montessori's vision this phenomenon is always in the perspective of the Evolution that started with the Big Bang and, in its continuous change and development, goes towards its cosmic destiny.

This revelation comes from the children, it is contained in their special mind and we can observe it when children can act freely in the right environment. This means an environment prepared for responding to the child's vital needs and where we can observe the child without prejudices." (4) In this situation the "interior forces of the child" will manifest. (5) These extraordinary potentialities must be acknowledged and respected otherwise there is a disorder in the natural process of development and abnormal manifestations appear. These pathologies have been interpreted in the past as the consequences of the human nature's wrongs while they are the expression of the external obstacles to natural development and they can disappear only when the environment allows the return to order through the respect of natural laws.

Montessori's discovery has been confirmed during all the past century in every place where children are given the right developmental environment. We can resume this discovery briefly:

How is it that, after so many years from this discovery we still do not accept it and do not change our educational method? One difficulty to understand is the size of children at birth and their incapacity to move and talk because this situation prevents us from becoming aware of their great potential. Another difficulty is our belief that it is our presence and our actions that can produce the human characteristics in children: we, the adults, have been, and still are, at the centre of the educational process. But after Montessori's discovery we know very well that the miracle of development is a miracle of Life that not only produces life but takes such a great care of it so that the cosmic plan can be carried out.

When entering the world children have inside some basic, special gifts from life, which are physical and psychological survival kits: the recognition of these gifts is at the base of the child's discovery.

Evolution, with Anthropogenesis, reaches a very special moment: human beings are given the freedom of living and using every habitat because they are the only ones who are given the power to transform any environment according to their own needs and desires.

Human beings have to adapt themselves to all kinds of conditions and circumstances in the environment…and they evolve continuously along the course of the history of civilization. They, therefore, must possess a quick-acting power of adaptation which substitutes for heredity in the psychic field.

"The basic mechanism of this adaptation is simple and plain; the children incarnate in themselves the environment around them and construct human beings adapted to live in those surroundings. This is what makes children the vehicle that transports mankind through the evolution of civilization. But this power of adaptation does not belong to the adult." (8)

In order to realize this adaptation children live an initial period of psycho-embryonic construction that is found only in human beings: the apparently helpless newborns are psychic embryos undergoing the most extraordinary period of their development. This period continues, outside of the womb, what started at conception. After the internal pregnancy there is an external pregnancy during which the human psychic characteristics must be acquired.

"Man's gestation is not as brief as the one in his mother's womb. The child goes through another kind of gestation in the outside world, incarnating a mind whose seeds are latent within them. The child's work of incarnation or psychic gestation is completely different from the labours of the adult human. And if this delicate and precious period of life is not helped the seeds of life will become sterile, and it will no longer be possible for the human being to carry out the great works that life has summoned to perform". (9)

As this external pregnancy is completely in the hands of parents it is necessary to help them to be prepared for their parenthood because this is the most important work for human development. Parents have usually love and good intentions but lack specific knowledge and we have to help them acquire it before children are born. Parents are the most important 'psychic environment' for children, but they also prepare the physical environment where deviations are made possible.

In the prepared environment Montessori discovered the extraordinary phychic manifestations of the children. They revealed to her "a personality entirely different from the one previously taken into consideration, with traits exactly the opposite of those attributed to them by others. With their passionate love for order and work, children gave evidence of intellectual powers that were vastly superior to what they were presumed to be." (10)

What Montessori has discovered can guide us in our work and transform every educator, adult/teacher into a servant of life!

Let me tell you briefly the great mistakes that we easily make at the beginning of life and in the first 2-3 years, the period Montessori calls "external pregnancy": separation from the mother after birth, no breastfeeding, pacifiers and, as soon as possible, the wrong use of good technology such as television and computers! While a powerful part of humanity pushes parents and adults along the wrong road for children we can rely on Montessori's discovery and continue to meditate and reflect about the profound and vast reality of thought and solutions that we can find in her work so that we can come to understand it better and we can become able to offer her precious work to the contemporary world as the most needed gift.

All educators need to know life in order to serve it, to offer life the right environment where it can develop at the best. The knowledge of life we have acquired with scientific research in many fields talks of the immense human potential children have at birth but this knowledge talks also of the fact that we use only a minimum amount of it. We cannot avoid asking ourselves how is it that life gives us one hundred billion of neurons while we use only 2-4% of it. How is it that there is such a waste of this "richness more precious than gold, the very spirit of the human being"? (11)

There is another important point to consider. Children are our fathers, the constructors of human beings but they do this very special work during the first 2-3 years after birth. "After 3 years children have already laid down the foundation of their personality". (12) Montessori told us this already fifty years ago and this same message we continue to receive from psychoanalysis, psychology and all researches in related fields.

So these very first years "open a new horizon and reveal the laws of psychic construction" (13), which have been ignored until Montessori's discovery and are still massively ignored! We have to focus on these first years of life because we wish to share with you, the persons who came to this congress, the long experience of our work with prospective parents, newborns, and children under three.

We, the Assistants to Infancy, are everyday witnesses of the children's miraculous development in our daily work. We can testify what can happen when children are given "aid to their life"! We know, by direct experience, that Montessori's work is, at moment, the only scientific help to be given to the developing life in order to allow the human potential to bloom. We, with the parents and all adults of good will, can be "the nurses of a hospital as big as the world!" (14)

But there is a necessary clarification to be done: Montessori education as aid to life is not "a modern education that consists in leaving the children free to do what they want. It is a universal ideal for the liberation of humanity. It is pedagogy guided by psychology: psycho-pedagogy." (15) While we "give aid to life", while we follow this fundamental principle of education our first teacher is the child or, better said, the vital drive that, guided by the cosmic laws, wants to realize the children's ontogenesis, their personal evolution. (16)

Let me finish this talk with some thoughts from the book "Education and Peace". These thoughts were really impressive for the deep analysis of the educational situation when they were written, but are even more impressive for the relevance they have today for us:
"Education today remains still within the limits determined by a civilization already surpassed, an education antiscientific and contrary to today's needs." "The sudden and fantastic evolution started in the last century has produced very different conditions for our life." (17)
This makes it necessary to take education into serious consideration and we must give it all the economical and psychic resources so that it can become, finally, education as aid to life.

The people responsible for education, politicians and parents, cannot be justified any longer. We must listen to the clear voice of Montessori, wake up, and produce a society of human beings who have been helped to realize their great potential. Human beings are a "richness" and we must do every effort "to avoid the loss of human energies, intelligence and creative minds." (18) We, as human beings, are called to "accomplish a mission in the universe".

So let us start our work

"Let us fuse our intent and proceed all together with songs on our lips and the single goal of creating conditions which will enable our children to grow into what a human being in the eyes of God is supposed to be." (19)

Thank you for listening.