Operation Brotherhood Montessori Center @ 50 – Revolutionizing Education In 1966, Dr. Preciosa S. Soliven opened the first OB Montessori School in Manila. Her vision was to bring a new form of education that would liberate the spirit of the children. She successfully integrated the Asian context into the Western-based method while remaining true to the principles Dr. Maria Montessori. The Montessori education is characterized by an emphasis on independence, freedom with responsibility, and respect for the child’s natural, psychological, physical, and social development. Children learn through activities that involve exploration, manipulation, order, repetition, abstraction, and communication. The Montessori teacher’s role is to encourage children to use their senses to explore and manipulate materials in their immediate environment. Older children are taught to deal with abstract concepts based on their newly developed powers of reasoning, imagination, and creativity. Seipsum Facit Persona, Man makes himself is the school’s doctrine. OB Montessori Center’s vision is to educate the youth for the new world. The role of teachers is to unlock the human potential in every child. From 1966 to 1986, OB Montessori Center struggled to establish and make its mark in Philippine society. It brought a new dimension of learning, a new role to education as a key to the reform of society. After five decades of nurturing lives, OB Montessori Center has become the largest Montessori-based education system in the world, having touched the lives of more than 250,000 students from preschool to high school; having graduated over 25,000 students who have excelled in their fields – the humanities, sciences, business, politics, communications and sports. OB Montessori has gone beyond its academic programs in its five branches: Greenhills, Sta. Ana, Las Piñas, Fairview and Angeles. It has a 32 year old Child and Community Foundation that reaches out to 200 local communities around the country through its O.B. Pagsasarili preschools. It has a 16-hectare self-sufficiency farm in Alfonso, Cavite that promotes environmental awareness and has a 22 year old ecumenical shrine in Palan, Zambales that was conceived to symbolize the altar of the nation. As we celebrate 50 golden years of OB Montessori experience in the Philippines, we embark on a new commitment of educating our Filipino youth to develop a greater sense of social commitment, national pride and love of country. Vision and Mission Operation Brotherhood Montessori Center (OBMC) adheres faithfully to the educational method of the great Dr. Maria Montessori. In her method the center of education is Man, whose mental growth and development begins at birth. Guided by his “inner teacher”, he can construct himself into the New Man OBMC envisions this New Man as a citizen of the world, “able to exercise in freedom a self-disciplined will and judgment, unperverted by prejudice and undistorted by fear.” He “will no longer be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able to direct and to mold the future of mankind” as leaders of the nation and the world OBMC’s mission is to transform all students into self-developing individuals by establishing the right relationship between the child and the adult; providing them with a prepared environment suitable for learning and creativity; equipping them with the skills necessary to become independent yet disciplined, productive yet embodying the Montessori spirit of excellence; and developing in them a heart for others, committed to the ideals of peace, social justice, and the cause of the child, who is the future of mankind.