One of the four aspects of spirituality that I highlighted in Chapter 2 was that “spirituality summons us to the highest human virtues, such as love, caring, generosity, responsibility for our actions, forgiveness, compassion, and openness to one another. It leads us to sharing rather than accumulating, to cooperation rather than competition, and to peace rather than violence.”

Certainly the classroom community is a fertile environment for cultivation virtues. I do not mean studying them in the abstract, such as devoting one week to honesty and the next week to truthfulness. I mean acquiring virtues in the daily give and take of the classroom community. “It is only in the community that man’s potentialities can be realized,” Montessori observed. Like Dewey, she believed that, “Morals are connected with actualities of existence, not with ideals… The facts upon which [morals] depend are those which arise out of active connections of human beings with one another.

With that being said, this prayer was taught by one of Gandhi’s nephews. The children here at Country Meadows say it daily:

I offer you peace;

I offer you love;

I offer you friendship;

I hear your cry;

I see your beauty;

I feel your pain;

My wisdom flows from my spirit within;

I salute that spirit in you;

Let us work together for peace;