Earth

“Let us give the children a vision of the universe,”
Wrote Maria Montessori in To Educate the Human Potential.
“The universe is an imposing reality and the answer to all questions.” Montessori observed firsthand children’s eagerness to understand themselves, their world, and their place in it. It was her hope that Cosmic Education would allow children to grow into responsible sons and daughters of the great human family with the understanding, ethics and self-knowledge needed to transform the world.
The Greek word cosmic, means "order and harmony" in the world, and on a more broad level, the universe. Cosmic Education is not itself “the curriculum” or a set of facts but rather a decompartmentalized way of presenting stories that opens up lines of inquiry which roughly correspond to traditional elementary academic subjects.
“The purpose is not to create walking encyclopedias of knowledge… The ‘stuff’ the students learn is almost incidental to the enrichment of the context they gain for understanding themselves and their place in the universe.”
Cosmic Education launches youngsters into society practiced in thinking about who they are, as individuals, as part of the human species, as citizens of a nation, of members of a planetary ecology, and so on. Ultimately, it introduces the possibility that humanity might have a “cosmic” task, a meaningful purpose beyond consumption and procreation.
“Cosmic Education is intended to help each of us search for our cosmic task as a species and as individuals. To do this, we must understand ourselves in context. It is only against the background of our place in the universe, our relationships with other living organisms, and our understanding of human unity within cultural diversity, that we can attempt to answer the question, ‘Who am I?’”
The Nature of Cosmic Education
Cosmic Education is about telling the origin, story of everything from the universe itself to human society today.
It is simply the