Peace on earth. It's the stuff of corny Christmas carols to most of the world's weary population, but not all. "Peace Through Education - Reality or Dream?" was the title of a lecture to Saturday's annual conference of the St Nicholas Montessori Society of Ireland. And the lecturer, Dr Feland Meadows, opted powerfully for "reality".

Dr Meadows, professor of education at Fort Valley State University in Georgia, USA, is a founder of the Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education and trains Montessori teachers. Speaking to Education and Living, he explained how the Montessori approach to education fosters children's natural tendency towards harmony. "Dr Montessori herself was very concerned by issues of war and peace. They affected her throughout her life - she lived through both world wars and she was persecuted by fascists in Europe in the Thirties, to the point of having her work destroyed."

Maria Montessori believed that, given access to the right environment, the child would act as "an instrument of peace", Meadows says. "She originally trained as a physician and her background was one of science. She observed children in a scientific manner, trying to establish information which would help us to understand them better. Rather than creating a method of education which she imposed on them, an approach emerged from her observations of their needs."

Early this century, Montessori set up her first casa di bambini in a poor area of Rome, where the parents asked her to come and help them with their younger children while they were at work. "The children had become what was described as somewhat `savage' because of the lack of supervision," Meadows explains. "Through their experience of the classroom environment the children quickly settled, or became `normalised'."

Behind this "normalising" idea lies the belief that children who are aggressive are not behaving "normally". "The first role of the Montessori teacher is to offer experiences which help the child back to their more normal tendency - to want to concentrate, learn, and have fun. Ideally, the home will subscribe to the same principles as the classroom, but it isn't essential.

"The children do things which are responsive to their own needs. Working with certain Montessori materials, they take on tasks which they find challenging and fun for themselves. At a later stage they work co-operatively in groups, but at no stage are they competing against one another. They become competent at skills appropriate to their own abilities and through this competency develop self-confidence. "As the children are all developing to their full potential and feel no sense of inadequacy, there is very little conflict. What problems arise are resolved by talking it out at a `peace table'. The children learn to respect themselves and the people and the environment around them."

According to Meadows, Montessori has often been "very badly misunderstood. A Montessori classroom is not about pushing children or academic achievement too early. It is about giving children an experience through which they quite naturally learn all sorts of things, and at their own individual pace.

"Our frame of reference as adults causes this misunderstanding. We have all grown up in a competitive system, so we don't realise that in fact children at Montessori school are not pushed, they choose to learn what they learn.

"All the outstanding 20th-century psychologists have demonstrated time and again the validity of the approach Dr Montessori discovered."

The first Montessori school in Ireland was set up in Waterford by Sisters of Mercy in 1920. In 1934, the first group of students to do a Montessori training course under the Dominicans at Sion Hill, Dublin, were presented with their diplomas by Montessori herself. However, despite the role of Catholic nuns in promoting the Montessori method, it was regarded with a certain amount of suspicion by the hierarchy.

"Holland is one of the few countries in the world where the education system is based on the Montessori approach," Meadows says. "Montessori is about teaching people to think for themselves, not about filling them with facts. To take it on board in its entirely would lead to a very radical change."

Which brings us back to world peace. "The experience of the child in a Montessori classroom is a transforming experience, and that is our hope for achieving peace through education - bringing about peace one child at a time."