Half a Century with Montessori: An Interview with AMS 2005 Living Legacy Celma Pinho Perry

Montessori Life, Summer 2004

At the AMS national conference in the spring of 2004, it was announced that Celma Pinho Perry would be honored as the Society's 2005 Living Legacy. The Living Legacy is an honor bestowed by the American Montessori Society Scholarship Committee on an individual whose exemplary achievements have had significant impact within the AMS community. AMS wishes to thank the 2004 Living Legacy, Bretta Weiss Wolff, for her help with this interview.

Q: How did you become involved in Montessori education?

A: It was at "La Solitude," in Grandbourg, a suburb of Paris, that I met Mme. Lubienska de Lenval, who was then publishing a book, Le Silence a L Ombre de la Parole, while directing an outstanding educational program for girls 3 to 16 years old. With her I discovered The Child.

What is your family background?

I am Brazilian by birth. I come from a military family-my father was an Army doctor-so we moved quite a bit, from the beautiful beaches and mountains of Rio to the simplicity of a small town in the central plains. My mother was a professional accountant (something rare in that time) as well as the perfect hostess, always attentive to my everyday needs. I had a house with trees to climb, a small basset hound, friends to play with in the garden and an outdoor child-size real stove where we "cooked" whatever we wanted.

We moved back to Rio when I was 6 years old; my mother wanted me in the best known school, Notre Dame de Sion. There I learned French. I loved Sion from day one, and my loving kindergarten teacher, Madre Conceição, would 20 years later become an assistant in the first Montessori school I directed.

We know that you started teenage years as a novitiate Sister in the Catholic Church. How did you come to enter religious life?

Between ages 14 and 18, I built a strong interest in contemplative life. If the highest level of life asks for full awareness of what we are, of full communion with the world, with God, I was going to do it as a contemplative Sister. When the invitation came with a scholarship to go to France, I felt I had to go. With beating heart, I told my mother what I wanted. In March of 1952, I left Rio on a transatlantic liner as the leader of a little group of three postulants, on our way to Paris. I didn't know it at the time, but I was heading into what would become the most beautiful and demanding 4 years of my life.

What was it like in Paris, working at a school by day and living the convent life by night?

My life took a new turn, from the austere convent-where conversation took place only twice a day for half an hour, intensive manual work making jams for sale, and many hours of prayer and study-to the daily life of a wonderful Children's House.

What made you return to Brazil 4 years later?

Going back to Brazil with a Montessori-Lubienska background and with the mission of starting a Children's House immediately at the Sion school in Sao Paulo (while concurrently completing my university work) was exactly the right thing to do for me at that time. Today as I look back, I proudly count all the difficulties that were surmounted-first with having the program accepted by my Superiors, the government agencies, the parents, and then, in a second phase, building the environment, and the constant preparation of new teachers.

Slowly the Sion school of Sao Paulo became one of the main centers of "new education" and was known as "Escola Experimental." Our fame spread quickly and I was asked to teach a course in pedagogy at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC).

How did you become the assistant of famed French educator Father Pierre Faure?

A student of Montessori and of Lenval, Father Pierre Faure came from France to Brazil to give courses in Sao Paulo, and I became his assistant and translator. For 7 years every summer I directed a demonstration class and accompanied Father Faure, becoming more and more sure of my own ideas and presentations through my work with him. In 1960, I was happy to do a first book, an adaptation of three books from Lubienska de Lenval called Educacao do homem consciente. Once when I was translating for Faure I added some personal ideas to his speech, and he caught them! "I did not say that," he told me as I apologized. He assured me by saying "I know now that you are thinking, building your own experiences."

In Brazil at that time, did you encounter obstacles to the teaching of Dr. Maria Montessori and other outspoken educators?

The political difficulties of a country as huge and complicated as Brazil became a daily worry for us educators and university folk. Avidly, we searched for justice, for openness to the poor, for how to share wealth, for how to build a life of human dignity for everyone. I was very involved with the staff of a Catholic paper, Brazil Urgente, which called for justice, land-sharing, a living wage for farm workers and for the poor. A big crisis was brewing.

In November 1963 I gave a lecture to the Montessori Teacher Preparation Course I had founded and directed in Sao Paulo. I told how education was about dialogue at its core, how we needed to share with each person all that we are, all that we have. Before I knew it, my Mother Superior was visited by a military General who was the father of one of my preschool students (I remember her being so passionate about becoming an educator herself someday). This General denounced my lecture as a Communist appeal, saying to my Superior that I must be stopped.