Educating for Right-Action and Love:

Extending and Expanding the Montessori Vision

“…a vast and exhilarating landscape of profound insights”

Book Cover of Educating for Right-Action and Love: Extending and Expanding the Montessori Vision by Philip Snow Gang

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Educating for Right-Action and Love

In his new book, Dr. Philip Snow Gang integrates decades of experience in holistic and Montessori education with Eastern thought in an essential dialogue for seekers everywhere. It is an exploration of the roots and responses to his driving question:

What contexts and processes in education might liberate teachers and learners so that they become catalysts for the new human — one whose integral relationship with Gaia is bound by right-action and love?

In what reads like a love letter to the Universe, Gang’s work is equal parts memoir, practical experience, mysticism, and deep science.

Guided and inspired by Maria Montessori’s educational philosophy, Gang has dedicated his life to creating environments that free students and teachers from conditioning and invite them to express their unique voices. In its essence the book explores integrative learning.

Seamlessly embracing the vision of Maria Montessori, including rare glimpses into spiritual revelations gleaned during her years in India, Gang also explores his own 30-year journey teaching adults at the graduate level, addressing the nature of “Montessori for adults.”

We each have the potential to be catalysts for change. If transformation is your calling, this book is for you.

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Educating for Right-Action and Love is both Phil Gang’s magnum opus and legacy. Part autobiographical and part the outcome of almost 50 years of studying and working with Montessori blended into one story, makes this book compelling reading, full of “juicy peaches.” Phil’s phenomenal knowledge of all aspects of Montessori combines well with his love and knowledge of the universe, his awareness of peace as an inner process and the sense of gratitude and wonder towards the environment. Especially today, with the world at a crossroads between self-destruction and drastic change in the treatment of the environment, this book makes essential reading.

Carolina Montessori,

Montessori author and historian

About Philip Snow Gang

Philip Snow Gang, Ph.D. is Founder of The Institute for Educational Studies (TIES) and its graduate programs in Integrative Learning and Montessori Integrative Learning. He is a pioneer in the field of integrative, systemic and transformative approaches to education. He is the author of Rethinking Education, co-author of Conscious Education: The Bridge to Freedom, and developer of the mobile mind-mapping simulation Our Planet, Our Home.

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Endorsements

Philip Snow Gang, a ground-breaking educator, interlaces his story with that of Maria Montessori. Educating for Right Action and Love is about creating, in Montessori’s words, “a new human,” one holistically integrated into the world rather than foolishly attempting to dominate it. As the author tells us how “cosmic education” can happen in the minds and hearts of children, he also narrates a love story that memorializes his departed wife, Marsha, and her own deep insights on education. By describing his life-long effort to become a new human, Gang brings rich possibilities and glimmers of light to a dark time when anthropocentric humans have begun to realize that they have turned themselves into a questionable species.

-John Briggs, Ph.D.
Author of Fire in the Crucible: Understanding the Process of Creative Genius, Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness, and Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness.

Madam Montessori was a pioneer who altered the whole vision of education with a holistic approach that integrated Science, Philosophy, Psychology and Religion. The methods she evolved were informed by this new spirit of education which she enunciated. In this book Dr. Gang has extended that vision, spirit and approach to address contemporary problems facing modern society and shown that these require a fundamental transformation of human consciousness which such education can undertake. This book shows how education can create a new global mind and a society with peace, justice and happiness for all.

-P. Krishna, Ph.D.
Author of A Jewel on a Silver Platter: Remembering Krishnamurti
Member of Krishnamurti Foundation India and the Theosophical Society
Lecturer on education, science, and spirituality

Using his own life as a portal, Dr. Gang guides us into a vast and exhilarating landscape of profound insights, each one revealing yet another that inspires and moves us to deeper love and alignment with the whole. Montessorians will be gobsmacked with how this book reveals whole new layers of Montessori’s work, particularly during the years in India. She stuns us even now. (How the heck did she come up with all of this back in the 1930s and ‘40s?) This book will have a prominent place on my reference shelf where I can regularly revisit the quotes, ideas, and more for many years to come.

-Jennifer Morgan, President, Deeptime Network
Author, Born With a Bang: The Universe Tells Our Cosmic Story,
From Lava to Life: The Universe Tells Our Earth Story
and Mammals Who Morph: The Universe Tells Our Evolution Story

The greatest teachers are co-learners. They are questioners, and they sometimes defiantly challenge convention in their search for truth. They teach not only with words, but by the example of their lives. Phil Gang gives us the gift of such a life well-lived, but also teaches us the art of the deeper, well-asked questions that define our better natures. His lifetime of living the questions has opened a portal to freedom beyond the conditioning that restrains us as human beings. Education for Right-Action and Love is by turns poetic and personal, then visionary and universal. It combines the warmth and intimacy of a memoir with a powerful roadmap for connecting us to Gaia and Cosmos. This is the rich and culture-changing teaching deeply needed in education and life today. Phil writes about his life as “exploring a river of influences and confluences” and of envisioning “the Great River” on a cosmic scale. Jump in. Be swept away by its stream of wisdom, compassion, and transformation.

-Lauren de Boer, M.A.
Essayist, poet, and composer specializing in nature, spirit, and the human imagination.

This book’s narrative invites readers to glimpse into a beautiful tapestry, embedded with pearls of wisdom and diamonds of inspiration. It weaves together the legacy of remarkable educators with the writer’s exceptional life journey, illustrating the genesis of the essence of holistic teaching and transformative learning. Read closely to unearth a treasure – a blueprint for integrative curricula, pedagogy, processes, and contexts — all ingredients for the core principles of the education of the future.

-Nimrod Sheinman, B.Sc., N.D.
Founder, Israel’s Center for Mind-Body Medicine
Founder, the International Soul of Education Initiative

The wisdom enfolded in this book is a golden chariot that will not only carry you across the cosmos, it will deliver you to the door of your true home in the Universe. May it inspire you, as the TIES program inspired me, to seek and embody your soul’s burning question as a sacred offering to The Great Work of our times.

-Edveeje Fairchild, M.Ed.
Founding Chief Operations Officer of TreeSisters,
Founder of A Woman’s Nature School

Dr. Gang’s book, Educating for Right Action and Love is magical, profound and endearing. He combines his biography with the history of the Montessori movement, his own educational insights and so much more. Using the metaphor of a river, he invites the reader to follow the course of the development of his heart as well as his thought. With many references to Montessori’s works, Eastern thought as well as dynamic ecological, Gaia thinkers, his book is like taking a course in life. He proposes more than a few things worth thinking about.

-Mary Ellen Maunz M.Ed.
Author of Nurturing Your Child’s Inner Life,
Director of Montessori Training at Age of Montessori

Educating for Right-Action and Love is Gang’s response to important questions inspired by and tethered to three great women in his life, Ruth Gloria, Marsha Snow Morgan, and Maria Montessori. Through this great work, educators have an opportunity to learn how to create environments that support freedom of choice in an atmosphere where learners and educators mutually embrace right-action and love. This work is an important contribution to all educators and to the field of holistic education.

-Josette Luvmour, Ph.D.
Adjunct Faculty, Antioch University
Author of Growing Together: Parenting as a Path to Well-being, Wisdom and Joy

Written by Montessori family friend and historian Philip Gang, this book weaves a tapestry of story that integrates the author’s life journey as seeker and teacher with Maria Montessori’s spiritual legacy. This is an essential work for educators, as well as anyone wishing to understand integrative learning as key to the betterment of oneself, and humanity.

-Delila Olsson, M.Ed.
Montessori School Director

Philip Snow Gang has woven the remarkable adventures of his life into a readable map for the future of educational thinking. He puts Dr. Maria Montessori into a context that utilizes the wisdom of those who have come before and after her time. He uses his intelligence, experiences and reflective capacities to invite us to deepen our understanding of the human task before us and accept it with Love.

-Mary Raudonis Loew
Montessori Teacher Trainer and Consultant

Philip Snow Gang’s personal and professional journey reflect a life-long devotion to Montessori’s vision for a new education that leads to the emergence of a new human. Emerging through Gang’s practical experiences, research, and reflections, this book provides a deep comprehension of Cosmic Education for children and adults. Dr. Gang shares his journey through a historical context that includes communications and references to those who were close to Maria Montessori. Reading this book will accelerate your spiritual preparation as an educator and help you understand why it is necessary for humanity to connect to the Cosmos as a way into lifelong transformation.

-Claudia Langlois, M.Ed.
President – Canadian Association of Montessori Teachers

A stunningly beautiful book from a Montessori-education pioneer…part memoir, part science book, part 21st century Universe story. But mostly, this is a living story of how the Montessori approach to education might hasten the evolution of what author Phil Gang calls the “new humans” – future generations with radically different ideas about the meaning of the human experiment. This book could not have come at a better time.

-Terry O’Keefe
Business Writer

I am struck by how poetically the book weaves together these mind-boggling concepts about nature and universe, yet does so in a way that is grounded in sensorial detail, gratitude and love which makes it accessible in a way that simple facts would not.

-Rachael Jaimeson, MFA
Poet and Mindfulness Educator

A hero’s journey
offering deep insight and gratitude
in poetic form
to the Universe and Gaia
with Montessori’s cosmic vision felt and understood;
guiding humanity
to transform, inspire, integrate, educate
for Right-Action and Love.

-Betsy Coe, Ph.D,
Director of Houston Montessori Center
Montessori pioneer of adolescent programs

I read Educating for Right-Action and Love with awe, the poetry of the words, which comes from the depths of life itself.

-Shubha Narayan
Co-Director, Nova Montessori School

While reading, Educating for Right-Action and Love, I was acutely aware of the deep listening one experiences in that timeless place of attention when one is not separate from the word. As travelers wave to each other, never to meet again, I noticed how the words disappeared and the perfume of that meeting and the deep essence of those words remained with me, in my heart, in my soul and in my actions. We were no longer strangers, we were one.

-Pauline Matsis
Co-Founder and Co-Director, Nova Montessori School

Phil Gang has created a deeply transformative communion with the divine by incarnating spirit and spiritual approaches in the word.

-John Fowler, Ph.D.
Developer of the Time Line of Light

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