By Henry Barnes
Excerpted from the website of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America
When children relate what they learn to their own experience, they are interested and alive, and what they learn becomes their own. Waldorf schools are designed to foster this kind of learning.
Waldorf Education has its roots in the spiritual-scientific research of the Austrian scientist and thinker Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). According to Steiner's philosophy, a human is a threefold being of spirit, soul, and body whose capacities unfold in three developmental stages on the path to adulthood: early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence.
In April of 1919, Rudolf Steiner visited the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. The German nation, defeated in war, was teetering on the brink of economic, social, and political chaos. Steiner spoke to the workers about the need for social renewal, for a new way of organizing society and its political and cultural life.
Emil Molt, the owner of the factory, asked Steiner if he would undertake to establish and lead a school for the children of the employees of the company. Steiner agreed but set four conditions, each of which went against common practice of the day: 1) that the school be open to all children; 2) that it be coeducational; 3) that it be a unified twelve-year school; 4) that the teachers, those individuals actually in contact with the children, have primary control of the school, with a minimum interference from the state or from economic sources. Steiner's conditions were radical for the day, but Molt gladly agreed to them. On September 7,1919, the independent Waldorf School (Die Freie Waldorfschule) opened its doors.
Today there are more than 800 Waldorf schools in over 40 countries. In North America there are over 150 schools affiliated with the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, and several public schools using Waldorf methods to enrich their teaching. There are also over 50 full-time Waldorf teacher-training institutes around the world; of these eight are in the United States and one in Canada. No two schools are identical; each is administratively independent. Nevertheless, a visitor would recognize many characteristics common to them all.
Infants and young children are entirely given over to their physical surroundings; they absorb the world primarily through their senses and respond in the most active mode of knowing: imitation. Imitation is the power to identify oneself with one's immediate environment through one's active will. Everything--anger, love, joy, hate, intelligence, stupidity--speaks to the infant through the tone of voice, the physical touch, bodily gesture, light, darkness, color, harmony, and disharmony. These influences are absorbed by the still malleable physical organism and affect the body for a lifetime.
Those concerned with the young child--parents, caregivers, nursery, and kindergarten teachers--have a responsibility to create an environment that is worthy of the child's unquestioning imitation. The environment should offer the child plenty of opportunity for meaningful imitation and for creative play. This supports the child in the central activity of these early years: the development of the physical organism. Drawing the child's energies away from this fundamental task to meet premature intellectual demands robs the child of the health and vitality he or she will need in later life. In the end, it weakens the very powers of judgment and practical intelligence the teacher wants to encourage.
In the nursery-kindergarten, children play at cooking, they dress up and become mothers and fathers, kings and queens; they sing, paint, and color. Through songs and poems they learn to enjoy language; they learn to play together, hear stories, see puppet shows, bake bread, make soup, model beeswax, and build houses out of boxes, sheets, and boards. To become fully engaged in such work is the child's best preparation for life. It builds powers of concentration, interest, and a lifelong love of learning.
When children are ready to leave kindergarten and enter first grade, they are eager to explore the whole world of experience for the second time. Before, they identified with it and imitated it; now, at a more conscious level, they are ready to know it again, by means of the imagination--that extraordinary power of human cognition--that allows us to "see" a picture, "hear" a story, and "divine" meanings within appearances.
During the elementary school years, the educator's task is to transform all that the child needs to know about the world into the language of the imagination, a language that is as accurate and as responsible to reality as intellectual analysis is in the adult. The wealth of an earlier, less intellectual age--folk tales, legends, and mythologies, which speak truth in parables and pictures--becomes the teacher's inexhaustible treasure house. When seen through the lens of the imagination, nature, the world of numbers, mathematics, geometrical form, and the practical work of the world are food and drink to the soul of the child. The four arithmetical operations can, for instance, be introduced as characters in a drama to be acted out with temperamental gusto by first graders. Whatever speaks to the imagination and is truly felt stirs and activates the feelings and is remembered and learned. The elementary years are the time for educating the "feeling intelligence."
It is only after the physiological changes at puberty, which mark the virtual completion of the second great developmental phase, that imaginative learning undergoes a metamorphosis to emerge as the rational, abstract power of the intellect.
Revised for this publication, this article by Henry Barnes, former Chairman of the Board, Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, originally appeared in the October, 1991 issue of Educational Leadership Magazine.
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excerpted from waldorfanswers.com
Anthroposophy is a human oriented spiritual philosophy that reflects and speaks to the basic deep spiritual questions of humanity, to our basic artistic needs, to the need to relate to the world out of a scientific attitude of mind, and to the need to develop a relation to the world in complete freedom and based on completely individual judgments and decisions.
A more detailed description would possibly point to four basic aspects and levels of anthroposophy:
1. Anthroposophy is a spiritual philosophy, mainly developed by Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It is born out of a philosophy of freedom, living at the core of anthroposophy.
2. It is a path of knowledge or spiritual research, developed on the basis of European idealistic philosophy, rooted in the philosophies of Aristotle, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas. It is primarily defined by its method of research, and secondly by the possible knowledge or experiences this leads to.
From this perspective, anthroposophy can also be called spiritual science. As such, it is an effort to develop not only natural scientific, but also a spiritual scientific research on the basis of the idealistic tradition, in the spirit of the historical strivings, that have led to the development of modern science.
On this basis, anthroposophy strives to bridge the clefts that have developed since the Middle Ages between the sciences, the arts and the religious strivings of man as the three main areas of human culture, and build the foundation for a synthesis of them for the future.
The central organization for the cultivation of this in connection with anthroposophy is a School of Spiritual Science, having a center at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.
3. Anthroposophy also is an impulse to nurture the life of the soul in the individual and in human society, meaning among other things to nurture the respect for and interest in other people on a purely human basis independently of their origin and views.
The main organization for this is the Anthroposophical Society, which exists in a world wide form, as national Anthroposophical Societies, and as groups formed on the basis of subject.
4. While rooted in a philosophy of freedom, developed as a method of spiritual research and an impulse to nurture a purely human interest in other people, it also has possible practical implications and as such lives as applied or practical anthroposophy in various "daughter movements" of anthroposophy.
The most developed of these daughter movements of anthroposophy are biodynamic farming, Waldorf schools (see the Association of Waldorf Schools in North America), anthroposophical curative education (the Camphill Association of North America) and anthroposophical medicine.
The main organization originally built for the cooperation between anthroposophical organizations, institutions and companies is the civil association General Anthroposophical Society, having a center in Dornach, Switzerland. The corresponding organization in the U.S. is the Council of Anthroposophical Organizations.
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