(Jody Spanglet has taken classes through grades one through eight and grades five through eight at Charlottesville Waldorf School. She has been administrator of the Ashwood Waldorf School in Rockport Maine for the last five years. She came to Asheville to teach the Foundation study program and gave a public talk on Friday, April 15, 2011 at Azalea Mountain)
From my notes, paraphrase only!
The questions to be asked about any type of education are how it addresses the following:
What a human being is going through at each age of development.
What are the tools to respond to what they are going through?
How do we educate children for a future that we don’t know right now?
How do we help them develop capacities they will need.
Anthroposophy is the study of human wisdom. Rudolph Steiner developed not only Waldorf education, but biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine and other practical approaches to human life on earth.
The two key words about Waldorf education:
1. Holistic
2. Developmental
Waldorf education views the whole child: physical, soul and spirit. All subjects are integrated with other subjects.
As children grow they go through different stages of development, each year and in seven year cycles. Children have different needs at each stage of development. Would we give a child a pair of shoes and expect them to fit for the whole life of the child? Yet that is what often happens in public education.
In the first seven years, children take in life with their whole selves. Babies drink milk with their whole bodies. We must be careful what influences are around young children as they take it all in and remember it. What we do is give children what they can digest for themselves, not pre-digested concepts. In the first seven years, children are very acutely sensitive. They soak in every gesture. They imitate.
When is a child first grade ready, meaning ready to read? When they are School Ripe (translation of German word). Ripe physically, emotionally, mentally, socially. There are other qualitative signs, their receptivity, openness, and desire to take in new concepts.
Their limbs are elongated when a child is around seven years of age. They have a definition to their faces; they get their second set of teeth. They can create symmetry in drawn forms. Emotionally, they have a lot of feeling quickly. They play tricks, have secrets and can tell about their dreams. They have interactive play, friendships and can think of a person they are not with. They have memory, a library that was not there for them before. Their fantasy turns to imagination. They play with words. The kindergarten teacher gives verses for this. They are interested in their bodies and have their first sexual awareness and are aware of gender differences. Appropriate limits and behavior must be set.
They have boredom, “I’m bored.” They are saying, “I need you to help me fill myself.” The child then is looking to the adult to find right activity. They become philosophers with questions about the cosmos. Ask them “What do you think?”
Jody passed out sunflower seeds to each of the 30 people present and asked us to describe what we could see. Then to tell about what is inside, which is just as real as what you can see. This was a demonstration of the power of the imagination.
Ages 7-14 in Waldorf schools
Transform what is learned to pictures that can live and grow in the child. Observe carefully harder and harder to do these days with so much stimulation coming at us. We are too hurried. You can’t know who you are unless you can observe. All is in a state of becoming.
After age 14, children can work with abstractions. Not before, so we teach writing before reading because writing involves the whole body. We teach the letters to connect letters to literacy that is more than abstraction. We tell stories of each letters, using fairy tales and pictures that the teacher draws and the children draw.
Jody told us the abbreviated story of the fisherman and his wife and her drawing of the fish which introduced the letter “F” to her first grade class. In first grade, we draw the letters big with the limbs, or on each other’s backs or in the sand. So the bodies and the imagination are filled with experience.
With numbers, one is the biggest number. The numbers are in reference to me. Me and my two parents makes three, etc. We go from whole to parts.
Second grade is a continuation of first also learning multiplication, adding, subtracting, carrying, borrowing, etc with math characters. We tell about saints, legends, fables; people who were connected to the spiritual world and to the earth.
Third grade is the time of the nine year change (8-10 years). The child differentiates self from the environment more. The outer life becomes part of the child’s consciousness; this can be frightening and frustrating, to feel separated, soul loneliness. Earlier there was a glow, now a sharp edge. Sometimes they like what they see, sometimes they don’t. They want adults to be loving authorities to guide them. So we use the Old Testament stories, about being thrown out of the Garden of Eden. Then freedom becomes possible. We teach time, clock time and musical time, as now children have a sense of time, of immortality, of death. We teach practical activities on earth.
4th-5th grade is the “heart of childhood.” They are now capable children. We teach science, zoology, and the specialized capacities of animals. Beavers’ teeth can build their house, eagle eye, cow’s digestion. We tell Norse mythology of idiosyncratic personalities and human foibles. We teach fractions now that they can take things apart.
In fifth grade, we teach roots, stems, leaves, blossoms, fruit and seeds, the relation to the earth and sun. We teach ancient civilizations up to Greek mythology, the history of cultures up to the balance of the Greeks with their sculptures.
6th grade children need to break away. They argue, don’t feel comfortable in their own skin. We teach Roman history, of the seven kings when rules changed with the personalities of the kings. With the Roman Republic, the law became stronger than individual relationships. We march, work with black and white drawing, physics, acoustics, relationships with mathematical tones, optics, heat, magnetism. Sixth grade is the earth year, geography, and geometry, geology, who they are in and on the earth. Come to the end of the Dark Ages.
7th grade is the Renaissance, about great artists, Gutenberg, Martin Luther, chemistry, combustion, and physiology.
8th grade is about revolutions! If we have done a good job they will want to leave our school. American, French, industrial, cultural, technology revolutions. Take apart a computer. Binary systems, algebra and Platonic solids. They learn to write a research paper and write poetry.
Jody closed saying there used to be initiates, like the Dali Lama, who have a knowledge based on a source we don’t have. Now the key word is “initiative,” which starts the opposite of how a human starts. It starts with an idea, then an image is created, what it will be in 3, 5, 10 years. What are the needs of children now in 2011? Observe. Use indications of what you observe. With the imagination comes the energy for the will, to create the physical body. Jody was saying this in reference to our Waldorf initiative in Asheville, calling forth our observation, our imagination, our will, to provide this education for the future.
