Demystifying Rudolf Steiner Education
A Personal Journey
By Rosie Simpson, Principal of Taikura Rudolf Steiner School, Hastings.
To print a printer-friendly version of this article click here.
Rudolf Steiner lived one hundred years ago. One might expect that the approach to education that he initiated then would be outdated now and yet worldwide there are 880 Rudolf Steiner Schools in 55 countries; eleven of these are in New Zealand. These figures do not include the hundreds of Kindergartens, Early Childhood Centres and Special Schools. New initiatives are appearing everywhere, especially in Asian and Eastern European countries. Steiner’s ideas not only have currency in the modern world, but they are accessible to all races, cultures and religions. A school in Egypt has a mosque at its centre, a school in Thailand will embrace Buddhism; in India Hinduism, in the West, Christianity. Each school is autonomous, but there are common threads that make them instantly recognisable.
The most fundamental is reverence for the human spirit and the spirit that lives in nature. This manifests in a curriculum where the evolution of human consciousness through cultural epochs is mirrored in the development of the child from dreamy at-oneness with the world at the age of 7, to the isolating individualism of the twenty-first century experienced by the adolescent.
The approach to teaching is another of these threads, especially in the years from 7 to 14. All subjects, as far as possible, are brought in an artistic way – the arts are the medium through which thinking is cultivated – through drama, movement, dance, music, singing, poetry, painting, modelling, drawing. What could be dry and conceptual is brought to life in a creative way.
A third thread which characterises this education and the one I have chosen to talk about is the role of the class teacher, who ideally accompanies a class for its first seven or eight years.
This has been my journey for the past seven and a half years. A journey in which I have accompanied a class of thirty children from the age of seven, an age of wide-eyed innocence and wonder through to the age of fourteen, worldly wise teenagers pushing at boundaries and needing challenge at every level. It is an extraordinary task to take on. The responsibility is huge. Parents truly entrust their child to a Steiner School teacher, knowing that this person will be a major influence not only in their formative years but also a lifelong influence. They must trust both the integrity of the teacher and that the teacher will be able to change with their children, to go through a formative process, where each year a shift is required in both the inner orientation and the outer practice. What a nine year old needs is quite different from what a seven year old needs … and so on, right through until puberty and beyond.
There is no room for complacency. No possibility of becoming “stale”, specialising in one age group and repeating the curriculum year after year. Instead we are given a gift, a rare and wonderful gift. The privilege of really coming to know a human being … (well, up to 30 human beings!) I do not have just one year to try to do this and then hand them on to someone else. I have time. Time to establish relationships – in which the children can learn to trust and feel that they are understood. Problems have to be worked with. If we are on this journey together for the long haul, I cannot decide that a child is too difficult to deal with and thank God we will be parting ways within a year. I need to find the right way of working with them and they need to know that I care, that I am interested in them and who they are. I am an ally in their unfolding. I see their pain, their joy.
They have the possibility to reveal more of their individuality, to establish their dignity because they are not beset with the repeated anxiety of: “Will this new teacher see who I am, what my gifts are, what my needs are?” It means that once the rhythms and routines are established and the social relationships tuned we can get on with learning; behaviour management is not a major issue.
Time allows the children to get to know each other, their strengths and weaknesses.
They learn to accept difference and work with it.
They celebrate each other’s achievements in a genuine, heartfelt way.
They see that I talk with their parents, that they walk this journey of their education also. This partnership with parents builds in strength over the years and enables a full understanding of the children.
Time and continuity over the years allow us to build cohesion and strive for excellence together. We are able to deepen and extend, to build upon what has gone before knowing that all have covered the same ground. Each morning we play music together. We have done this since Class One where we began with simple wooden flutes. Now seven years later the class is able to play Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, all four movements, written for a recorder ensemble. And they all play. Everyone is a musician. And they know that it is good. Something is achieved that will have an enduring resonance in their souls.
Steiner gave a wonderful and wise curriculum. It is based on the picture of child development as a process of incarnation. We may grow ‘up’ in our physical bodies, but we grow ‘down’ from the spiritual world. We are spiritual beings on an earthly journey: “The Dressed Angel” rather than “The Naked Ape”. How do we make this journey and not become dis-spirited, removed from the spirit? As we take hold of our body, the physical instrument that will give home and expression to our spirit and soul life, we leave behind our spiritual home. The Waldorf curriculum is sensitive to the unfolding of faculties as the child matures, upholding the integrity and sanctity of childhood - allowing children to be children, cultivating the sense of wonder and a sense for the goodness, the beauty and the truth in the world.
If I reflect on what I have learnt through my years together with this class, there are two things that stand out, without which I could not have taught or stayed the journey. The first is a sense of wonder. The ability to wonder is a diminishing faculty in today’s world. It is borne of the feeling that something great, perhaps mysterious, stands behind what we perceive through our senses. We live in an age in which the intellect is king and the heart is yet to be understood as an organ of perception in which anything trivial can be described as “awesome”; where the word “whatever” drops from children’s lips with an uninvolved cynicism. Cultivating a sense of wonder, giving the opportunity for wonder, prepares the ground for healthy, properly child-like learning, for imagination to grow.
“The man without wonder is but a pair of spectacles behind which there are no eyes” – so said Thomas Carlyle.
If as teachers we do not wonder, how can we expect children to keep alive their openness and receptivity? Which is more important - what we teach or who we are as individuals? Can I ask them to be learners if I am not a learner myself? They need to see that I am also on a path of self development, that I have learnt something fresh and exciting for myself when I have prepared these lessons, that I have enthusiasm for what I teach.
Enthusiasm is the second thing. Preaching to children about morals or the values they ought to have will not change the way that they are, but perhaps my wonder and enthusiasm will. The Greek ‘en-theo’ means ‘to be filled with a god’. If they recognise the divine spark that comes through my enthusiasm perhaps they will not become dispirited. With enthusiasm we warm and carry each other. It is infectious, it is enlivening, it is powerful.
“Wonder” and “Enthusiasm”. If we give these to our children we give real gifts – these are the fibres of the kete in which I pass on my teaching and from which they draw their learning.
©Rosie Simpson – June 2004
|
