Archive for category: Alumni News

By Philipp Reubke

Educators in Waldorf kindergartens know the phenomenon that the free play of a group of 3 – 6 year old children is subject to atmospheric fluctuations: occasionally there is calm, sometimes even a lack of initiative and then suddenly there is a warm urge to create and the atmosphere hums like a beehive, and sometimes there is great nervousness and aggressiveness.

Often, as an educator, I could not clearly determine the reasons for such mood swings, and the search for culprits and the denunciation of bullies did not seem to make any more sense to me than being angry about a thunderstorm outbreak during a hike.

But it was important for me to perceive the mood well, to hear the tone and then to harmonize what had become one-sided through non-verbal means: music, light, intervention in the spatial design, movement, etc.

In the way the Covid-19 crisis was managed by the respective leaders in different countries and at different levels of society, in the way we have all behaved since the beginning of the pandemic, one could also perceive a certain large-scale weather situation in which enormous tensions were occasionally built up and then erupted in storms of relationships in the family, in schools and institutions, within certain professional groups, and so on.

Some atmospheric phenomena that kept appearing were, for example:

• Encouraging sensible behavior by making people afraid of danger
• Losing sight of the overall context in light of the individual aspects of a dangerous situation
• Not listening to those who think differently and feel differently, or excluding them
• Allowing only one theory, only one form of analysis, only one form of interpretation of the situation
• Setting one ethical-moral value above all others
• Having the opinion that the only way to get out of the crisis is through a tight hierarchical organization.

These phenomena can be observed not only during the current pandemic, but also in other crises affecting society or individual organizations.

Some think that certain groups or individuals should be held responsible for this. However, educators know from daily experience that when a one-sided mood repeatedly occurs in free play or when a socially tense situation occurs at school, there is usually no single, isolated person responsible.

Direct intervention and admonishment of individuals can only limit the damage.

It is rather as the Swiss philosopher Michael Esfeld characterizes corona measures: “It is a trend that has formed out of contingent circumstances and which then drags more and more social actors along with it.”(1)

In order to harmonize the situation permanently, patience and perseverance are needed, as well as a threefold rhythm, which Waldorf teachers practice again and again:

• Firstly, they try to get as accurate a picture as possible of the phenomena and “perceive the trend”.
• Even if they personally would have the tendency to fall into anger, fear, or domination about it, they avoid this in the kindergarten and in the school and try in a second step to empathize with the children involved, to understand them, and also to feel their own pedagogical ideals once again with enthusiasm and warmth.
• In a third step, they then hope that after a meditative review of the situation from a certain distance, they will think, as educational artists, of a gesture, a look, a song, a story, a game, a movement, an activity in the following days that will have such an effect on the group of children that the mood and the social situation will be rebalanced.

There is thus a lot to be learned from educators about crisis management.

The even better news, however, is that if one reconsiders some of the essential features of Waldorf education in the light of the Coronavirus crisis, it turns out that they represent long-term, homeopathic, preventive measures against the psycho-social inflammatory side effects of crises in civilization.

Let us imagine that there is a crisis, but the great majority of those involved have grown up throughout their childhood and adolescence in an atmosphere that can be described by the following characteristics:

1. From kindergarten to high school, the driving forces for learning are interest and the relationship with educators, rather than fear of punishment or desire for reward.(2) This is practiced for hours in kindergarten through free, self-initiated play, deepened through listening to the descriptions of their beloved class teacher, and then strongly anchored during middle and high school though their interest in subjects related to their own existence and life.

If in all pedagogical institutions of the world “child development and school learning …. would develop in the trust-borne relationship of the child to the teachers, to the surrounding space, and in the perception of the world”, would we then still need coercive social measures (3), so that all fellow citizens would behave in a reasonable, meaningful way?

2. Already in kindergarten, cultural techniques are always practiced in connection with life, in connection with a larger context. For example, increasing vocabulary and grammatical syntax through stories, puppet theater, and the intensive use of language in communication during free play.

Even in the choice of toys, those that allow children to start from wholeness (plasticine, clay, dough, unspun wool) are preferable to those in which a wholeness is created by combining identical individual parts.

In school there is no chopped-up timetable, large subject connections can be deepened over a longer period of time, and even in arithmetic and in the understanding of the essence of number, a unity is assumed which is subsequently differentiated.(4)

If the majority of the population were accustomed from childhood to “going from the whole to the parts” (5), would we still lose sight of the complex social and ecological interrelationships beyond an acute, partial problem?

3. The importance of empathy and tolerance is not only preached, it is above all experienced and practiced daily. The young child constantly has the opportunity to have differentiated experiences with the body senses (“The sense of touch has the task of establishing a healthy mobile middle position between too strong and too weak impressibility, openness and limitation, sympathy and antipathy”. This is a preparation for “sympathetic interest arising from unthreatened self-confidence.” [6])

And in free play, the child practices cooperation and compromise every day, experiencing joy and increased possibilities of success, and also the pain of the consequences of one’s own bullying or shyness.

Because there are stable class communities in the school over the years, the teacher can work thoroughly with the children on social skills (7), placing a great emphasis on music and drama: here listening to one another, paying attention to one another, and including what is disruptive and surprising can be practiced especially well.

If our social skills and our willingness to listen were also physically and artistically rooted in us in this way, would we still want to hysterically exclude those who think differently?

4. For years, nature is intensively experienced as something that can be seen, smelled, tasted and touched, and to which everyone in kindergarten is allowed to express the most diverse theories: is it getting dark because the sun is now getting tired and going to sleep, or maybe because someone is sitting behind the mountain and pulling on the sun with a string?

If in school cognitive understanding is to be developed by systematic learning, this is prepared by detailed consideration of the phenomenon and never ends in a definition to be learned by heart, but in a characterization.

The teacher in the upper school is then also someone who sets the phenomenological intellectual framework in which the young people find terms and definitions themselves. If when we are confronted with new and unknown things, we always start from the phenomena in this way, wouldn’t that be a good contribution against dogmatism and the claim to one sole explanation of any scientific direction? (8)

5. In the course of the first fourteen years of life, the child has not been confronted with a moral-ethical value system, the principles of which have been learned intellectually, but has had the opportunity, through a multitude of stories and mythological-religious narratives, to sympathize with the good that is depicted there.

With the fairy tales, the descriptions from Hebrew, Germanic, Indian, Egyptian, Greek and other mythologies, with stories from Islam and Christianity, the child feels that devotion to and love of a divine world and the commitment to the good can have different forms, different weightings.

Children experience role models who help them to become morally and ethically independent.

If we had learned to mobilize our moral-ethical forces in this way ourselves, would we still be in danger of adhering to a value declared as absolute by scientific or political authorities?

6. From the cradle to high school graduation, through free play to artistic, athletic or scientific project work in the upper school, children and young people have experienced that cooperation and improvisation sometimes go through difficult phases, but that in the end everyone can increase their personal abilities through successful teamwork. In addition, the teachers were role models for successful cooperation in the organization of their own work; in the way the school is run, a team spirit prevails that gives room for individual initiative and at the same time allows all individuals to grow beyond themselves.

If we could manage to have “all [in a school] develop significant nonhierarchical forms of cooperation” and if we jointly practice “transparency and accountability (instead of personal and institutional power) (9) ,” wouldn’t that be the best preparation for a crisis situation? Wouldn’t we then instinctively feel that greater intelligence and dynamism is generated by forms of collaborative leadership than by solitary decision-making by a few whom we have made into big bosses?

We are all responsible, not only “the others”. We all have to learn, develop and change if we want to go more confidently through this crisis and those that will come. Waldorf education can provide important support in this process.

We could be motivated by the Coronavirus crisis to work to rediscover and implement this more creatively in our Waldorf schools and kindergartens, and to benefit an ever-increasing number of children in other institutions and contexts.

Philipp Reubke is a kindergarten teacher, Waldorf trainer, mentor and co-leader of the Pedagogical Section in Dornach. Until recently, Philipp was very active in IASWECE as coordinating group member and representative of the French Association.

This article originally appeared in the Goetheanum Newsletter.

(1) Michael Esfeld, ” Vaccination Passport – a Path to Freedom or to a Closed Society”. In: “Goetheanum N° 18/2021

(2) There are only three means of education: fear, ambition and love. We dispense with the first two … “cf. the Martin Carle, “Fear, Ambition and Love in the Classroom,” in: Erziehungskunst October 2019;
www.erziehungskunst.de/artikel/wer-erzieht-wen/furcht-ehrgeiz-und-liebe-im-klassenzimmer/

www.erziehungskunst.de/en/article/who-educates-whom/fear-ambition-and-love-in-the-classroom/

(3) cf : ” Essential Features of Waldorf Education “,
https://www.waldorf-international.org/wesentliche-merkmale-der-waldorfpaedagogik/

(4) Cf. Claus Peter Röh, Robert Thomas: “Unterricht gestalten”, Verlag am Goetheanum, 2015: “It is important that we start from the One as the divine primordial unity from which the following numbers are derived.” (S.71) „

(5) Op cit., p. 73

(6) Henning Köhler, “Von ängstlichen, traurigen und unruhigen Kindern”, Stuttgart 2019, Freies Geistesleben, p.93

(7) Valentin Wember develops this in detail in his introduction to a collection of Steiner quotes on “social capability,” Stratosverlag 2018.

(8) ” Absolute claims …tend to make one intolerant. With the claim to absolute truth a dogmatism effect arises.” Ulrich Kaiser, “The Narrator Rudolf Steiner”, Info 3 Verlag 2020, p. 60

(9) Essential Features of Waldorf Education, Section : The School Community. Living together. www.waldorfinternational.org/fileadmin/downloads/1605_Merkmale_IK_Arles.pdf