The New Review March 1937

The power of the human soul being limited the more intense the action of the sensitive part the less so is that of the spiritual. [...] For while it unveils the secret of the Montessori method it also unveils the secret of all true education : `The humility and patience of the mistress ; the stress laid on things rather than words ; the surrounding atmosphere of sense objects as the beginning of psychic life ; the silence and recollecedness of the little children ; the freedom to perfect itself permitted to the infant mind ; t [...] Rural India needs what J. Maritain says is the need of the world : the infusion of authentic humanism into the temporal and cultural order a transformation which 'involves changes both in the internal and the external regime of human life changes that must be effected in the heart of man and the body politic changes that have to do though in different ways with the visible social order and wi [...] He has become the slave of the soil and of custom of the heat and of the rain of money and money-lenders the victim of land-laws and landlords of a hundred agencies that have cramped his initiative shrivelled up his individuality and isolated him in misery and despair. [...] Nothing short of an upheaval will give the countryside back its soul ; the rallying cry should be not 'man back to the land' but 'the land back to man' ; India must be given back to the Indian and the countryside to the peasant ; the property regime the method of cultivation the circumstances and agencies of agriculture must be turned upside down ; the land must not hold the peasant down