What is education?

Waldorf School, Home School, Win, Win

2012-01-20T09:11:00.001-05:00

A couple of years ago, our slowly-growing high school had an idea: Why not allow homeschool students to take courses at our school? Maybe mom can teach everything except chemistry, or Spanish. Homeschool students could enroll in those courses at our school, pay us a prorated fee, and learn. Our classrooms would be fuller, we would have a few more dollars, and homeschool families would benefit from our school.

Objections included ones I’ve heard for years, about “disrupting the class,” “distracting our students,” “lowering, potentially, our standards,” and the “immaturity” of sheltered homeschoolers.

We decided to try it anyway.

And the objections turned out to be, almost entirely, wrong. New kid in Spanish? Our students perk up and pay attention—who is this person? As Elton Mayo’s “Hawthorne experiments” showed early in the 20^th century, change provokes an increase in productivity.

Also, any doubts we had about homeschool students’ preparation were largely unfounded. It’s true that they often don’t have a complete background in everything we could wish. I came to picture the profile of their knowledge like a piece of Swiss cheese—very solid in some areas (knows all about ancient Egypt), very empty in others (often, math). By contrast, students with a more conventional preparation—public middle school or Waldorf middle school—are more like cake, less dense than cheese, but with smaller holes.

Despite this contrast, which I’ve characterized only generally (and I’ve ignored the real differences between public middle school and Waldorf middle school students, a topic for another time), homeschool students are almost always eager to learn and have excellent work habits. If there are holes to fill, they fill them rapidly and well. Basically, kids everywhere are probably more resilient than we often give them credit for being, and, in the absence of experience, stereotypes about homeschooling (or Waldorf schooling) can spin far from reality.

Socially, too, the homeschool kids tend to fit right in. They are generally a bit quieter—new kids usually are—and more mature (less immature peer pressure and exposure in their lives?), but navigate quickly and successfully within a class.

The largest benefit, however, is not one we had anticipated.

Nearly every homeschool student who enrolls for a course or two—there have now been at least twelve (some of whom had tried other schools before coming to us)—enrolls as a full time student within a few weeks. The students discover the pleasure of the company of their peers, and parents are reassured that our school isn’t the “prison” one parent told me she believed it would be for her son. I also guess that parents, in many cases, feel some relief in not to have to carry on homeschooling an adolescent through high school.

Win. Win.

Interview on my new book

2012-01-05T15:39:00.000-05:00

Interview on my new book, The Story of Waldorf Education in the United States: Past, Present, and Future. (Or through SteinerBooks.)

Waldorf Education is Anti-Intellectual?

2011-12-08T18:30:00.000-05:00

News to me. Rather than give an abstract response, let me tell you about my graduating class, Waldorf School of Garden City, 1980, all 18 of us.

Two of us have PhDs, one in biotech and one in history.
Three of us are MDs, including two cardiologists.
Three of us are lawyers, including one who attended Harvard Law.
Five are in business, including a CEO of a video technology company and at least two corporate vice-presidents.
One more is a hospital administrator.
One is a professional fundraiser for a large foundation.
One is a social worker.
One is a world-famous musician.
And one, I just don’t know what happened to her.

Elevator Speech--Part II

2011-11-24T09:26:00.002-05:00

(My friend Winslow Eliot, a former Waldorf student and administrator and current part-time Waldorf high school English teacher, sent me her version of an elevator speech. I've decided to post it here rather than in comments on the old post in an attempt to re-spark the discussion. What do you think? What would you say?)

Person in Elevator: “What’s Waldorf Education?”

Me: “Waldorf Education, based on Rudolf Steiner’s insights into human beings, integrates three essential components:

1. It’s holistic. Education is not just about learning facts and figures; it’s about exposing students to emotional and character building skills and physical, active development. This means showing them how to accomplish and finish projects so they know they can DO things as well as think and feel them.

2. It’s developmental: A seven-year-old doesn’t learn the same way a seventeen-year-old does. We teach kinesthetically and experientially in the lower grades. We try to inspire more interest and engagement in the middle years – teaching history through the telling of biographies, for example, instead of asking students to memorize historical facts. In high school, their intellectual lives are ripe for analysis, knowledge, and weighing what matters and what students themselves can do to impact the world for the better.

3. It’s phenomenological. It’s developed and presented by teachers’ own experience and observations of children and of the subject matter.”

Who is becoming a Waldorf teacher?

2011-11-11T11:21:00.001-05:00

I’m just wrapping up a week of teacher education (the program meets for 13 weeks over the course of a bit more than two years), and I took some notes on the backgrounds of these adult students who plan to become Waldorf school teachers:

Public school principal
Public school assistant principal
Pediatrician
Social worker
Speech therapist
Pharmaceutical sales rep
Lawyer
CFO of a small business
Business manager
College registrar
Artist
Actress
Chef
3 public school teachers
4 mothers
5 students moving from BA or MA programs to teacher education

Of these, two have some background in Waldorf education, having attended Waldorf schools for part or all of their elementary school education.

Approximately one-third first learned of Waldorf education in finding schools for their own children.

Approximately one-third are choosing a mid-career change that will almost certainly earn less money and fewer benefits but, they hope and believe, bring greater intrinsic rewards.

Approximately one-third already have advanced degrees.

Two are men; the rest are women.

Their ages range from twenty-two to fifty-five or so.

Is Waldorf Education a Religion? Is it Religious? Is it Based on a Religion Called Anthroposophy?

2011-10-26T12:01:00.018-04:00

The issue of religion and Waldorf education is not a simple one. The field extends, minimally, over three points of view. The first might be that all education, all meaningful human endeavor, has, in the broadest sense, a religious component. As A.N. Whitehead (1929/1967) said, “The essence of education is that it be religious.” (14) To speak of value, explicitly or implicitly, is to give evidence of a religious engagement with the world. This view is too broad to consider here, however, and does not necessarily distinguish Waldorf education from other methods.

The second point of view, probably the source of Waldorf critics’ frustration with aspects of Waldorf education as manifested by certain teachers or, potentially, by certain schools, is that Waldorf education is religious in a more conventional sense because some ideologues, through misunderstanding and misapplication of Steiner’s work, make it so. As Dorothy St. Charles, former principal of the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School said in a radio interview, Waldorf education is not a religion, “but some people make it one.”

The third point of view, and the more carefully considered, is that Waldorf education and anthroposophy, the method that underlies it, are not religions at all. Douglas Sloan, former coordinator of the joint program in Religion and Education between Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, made this point eloquently as an expert witness in a lawsuit arguing that charter Waldorf schools, as religious schools, violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sloan (2004) argued against this view:

By all scholarly criteria of what constitutes religion, anthroposophy is not a religion. ...

The attempt to define religion has been notoriously difficult, and the approaches to doing so are many. In general there have been three main approaches.

The first can perhaps be called the essentialist approach. Essentialist definitions tend to focus on the inner essence or substance, the metaphysical reality claims, of religions, and the relationships to these demanded of human beings by the claimed realities. One of the conceptual difficulties with this focus is that philosophers and others can make metaphysical and ethical arguments about the nature of reality without advancing these as themselves constituting a religion, although they may well have implications for religion.

The second main approach to the study and definition of religion can be called the functional approach, and is probably the theoretical approach most favored by social scientists, although as I shall point out, some theologians also favor it. Functional definitions of religion stress the effects, the functions of religion, in actual life—the ways in which religion functions to fulfill basic human needs, both individually and communally. Different scholars stress different functions as the defining characteristic of religion. Among these various functional definitions are, for examples: the cognitive—religion provides meaning systems for understanding and coping with life; the psychological—religion functions to meet psychological needs, such as, a sense of security in the face of life’s uncertainties, a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and so forth; the social—religion serves primarily to provide values for social cohesion and the preservation of the social group; and the ideological (Marxist definitions of religion are a good example)—religion serves the power interests of governing elites by deluding the masses. Each of these taken by itself is decidedly reductionist, and, in order to avoid inordinate reductionism, most scholars attempt to fashion combinations of various functional approaches.

One form of functionalism, often utilized by students of religion, is that of the twentieth-century American theologian, Paul Tillich. Religion Tillich defined as expressing “the ultimate concern” of an individual or of an entire culture. Every person and every society, he argued, has its “ultimate concern” (often, to be sure, directed toward less than ultimate objective realities).

In fact, for Tillich, every culture is grounded in its own ultimate concern, to which it gives concrete expression. Culture itself as a whole is, therefore, the religious expression and activity par excellence.

“Religion,” Tillich famously wrote, “is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion.” Tillich’s position can be a good illustration of how the strength of the functionalist can also be its main weakness. The strength is that it enables one to see the religious functions, as noted above, of many human activities not usually recognized as religious: the state, the university, science, technology, the stock exchange, Sunday afternoon football, and so on. Each has its ultimate concern, and often its own “priesthood,” paths of initiation, dogmas, sacred texts, and other marks of religion.

The weakness is that a definition which begins to apply to everything often ends up telling us little about anything.

In view of these various approaches, it is not surprising that one leading historian of American religion (Catherine Albanese of UC Santa Barbara), whose works I reviewed in forming my opinion, has observed that scholars have become increasingly less certain about what should be counted as religion as a general phenomenon. “In the end,” she writes, “religion is a feature that encompasses all of human life, and therefore it is difficult if not impossible to define it.”

In this light it is probably also not surprising that historians of religion turn mainly to the third approach to the definition of religion, namely, the formal. Scholars in the history of religion and comparative religion deal primarily with the actual religious forms manifested by concrete religious groups and movements. These religious forms include such things as beliefs and doctrines (creeds), ritual activities, forms of worship, sacred texts, and recognized sources of authority. The advantage and strength of this approach is that it is concrete and makes it possible to determine whether a group actually functions, not just religiously in general, a la Paul Tillich, for instance, but as a formal, identifiable religion as such. It also is possible then to distinguish it in detail from other religions and their forms, and to trace the actual development of a specific religion over time. In this perspective, a religious group is one that manifests and is organized around these common religious forms, albeit with its own distinct versions of them. This approach can also incorporate aspects of the first two approaches.

It is especially from the perspective of this third approach to the definition of religion, the formal, that I can meaningfully and concretely testify that anthroposophy is not a religion. …

Anthroposophy is the name given by Rudolf Steiner to designate the way of knowing, the method of inquiry, that he established. …

It is a wholly personal choice not only whether one follows Steiner’s method of knowing and tries to develop it, but also whether, out of conviction, one accepts–or does not–Steiner’s own results and content flowing from that method as he practiced it. If the principle of individual freedom based on knowledge is violated in following Steiner’s indications, then the entire method is vitiated.

It is worth noting that the case was dismissed and dismissed again upon appeal. I believe PLANS plans another appeal. Stay tuned.

St. Charles, D. (1994) Interview by Alan Chartock on WAMC, 90.3 FM, Northeast Public Radio, Albany, NY. April; exact date unavailable. Reference obtained from undated cassette tape recording.

Sloan, D. (2004) “Declaration of Douglas Sloan in Support of Defendants’ Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment…” Case No. CIV. S-98-0266 FCD PAN. PLANS, Inc. v. Sacramento City Unified School District, Twin Ridges Elementary School District, DOES 1-100. United States District Court, Eastern District of California. July 30, 2004.

Whitehead, A. (1929/1967) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.

The Elevator Speech: What is Waldorf Education?

2011-10-25T08:46:00.007-04:00

What do you say? I mean it, what do you say? Comment below!

It happened again. A dinner with strangers, four couples at a round table in a big room. –And what do you do? –I’m co-founder, Faculty Chair, and a teacher at the Great Barrington Waldorf High School. –Oh. Great. Waldorf? What’s that?

And, as usual, I’m at a bit of a loss. I just don’t have an elevator speech. Depending on the noise level of the room and my assessment of the question, I say something about balancing academics, arts, physical activity, and social health. Or I say something about a non-denominational, non-sectarian approach to spiritual questions.

Sometimes I find myself in a meaty, fruitful conversation. Sometimes people’s eyes glaze over and I turn the conversation to another topic as soon as possible.

When I started looking into definitions and descriptions of Waldorf education, more than fifteen years ago, I believed it would be easy to find, say, a pithy paragraph in Rudolf Steiner’s work that would begin, “Waldorf education is…” But such a paragraph doesn’t exist. So I looked at the work of Henry Barnes, Jeffrey Kane, Eugene Schwartz, Steve Talbott, Douglas Sloan, and other very smart writers and thinkers about Waldorf education. All of them had lots of good things to say, but none had a synopsis that could fuel the elevator speech or the dinner table introduction.

So I’m putting it to those who read this blog: What do you say?

Waldorf Schools: Where are the Boys?

2011-09-12T15:40:00.003-04:00

Several years ago, one of my master’s degree students wrote a study (unpublished) based on a sample of 4000 U.S. Waldorf school students in grades 1 through 8 and found that there were 8% fewer boys than girls in Waldorf schools. These results are independent of the gender of the teacher (we had theorized that male teachers might attract or retain more male students) and independent of the grade. That is, first grades are “missing” boys just as often as the higher grades. (We had theorized that boys and girls might enter in equal numbers, but that boys would leave over the years for one reason or another.)

Following this work, another student (also unpublished) surveyed Waldorf school parents. Parent attitudes largely determine school choice, and, perhaps, mothers choose Waldorf schools for their children. Fathers are then more likely to intercede and insist that their sons attend another school, one with a more competitive sports program or an apparently beefier math and science program. The study, not conclusive, suggested that this was the case. Anecdotally, that has been true of several families at the school in which I teach.

A further study might investigate what aspects of Waldorf education are perceived as more appropriate for girls than for boys.

Regardless, Waldorf schools—individually and jointly in teachers’ conferences—would do well to keep an eye on the breakdown of their enrollments between boys and girls, and attempt to address imbalances through study, research, experimentation, and hard work. Eight per cent is two students in a class of 25; what school can afford to overlook such an enrollment boost?

(My own small Waldorf high school currently enrolls 16 boys and 15 girls, but we continue actively to address the questions I raise above.)

Did Dwight Shrute go to a Waldorf School?--New Addition

2011-08-29T10:38:00.000-04:00

New information has come to light that warrants re-posting this:

He wears Birkenstocks with socks AND carries a spare pair in his car.

He speaks German and apparently knows about that awful German children’s book, Struwwelpeter.
He plays the (fluorescent plastic) recorder.
He believes exposure to germs strengthens your immune system.
He wanted to teach children to make cornhusk dolls...

Did Rainn Wilson or a writer for the American version of The Office go to a Waldorf school?
Is there other evidence that Dwight Schrute did?

Inquiring minds want to know.
Comments, please!

How to Ruin the Soul of the Child

2011-08-12T21:01:00.002-04:00

Translations of Quotations Taken Out of Context from Rudolf Steiner

(Before we begin, you deserve some attempt to make sense of Steiner’s frequent references to “soul ruining,” some of which are collected below. As a first pass at attempting to say, in part, what Steiner may have meant by “soul ruining,” we may turn to a recent item on NPR’s Planet Money. Job training, it turns out, is more effective for those who have had an early childhood education, controlled for socio-economic variables. Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman found that training relies on what he calls “soft skills,” which “involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated,” things you learn in preschool. Astonishingly, on average, boys who went to preschool, in one study, were found to be 50% less likely to be in jail, and to earn 50% more than their peers. Further, skills not learned early are harder and harder--and ultimately impossible--to learn later. Doesn’t it seem possible—adjusting for translation from an early 20th century German idiom, expressed in lectures transcribed later—that the souls of one group were less “ruined,” in an early 21st century, non-judgmental way, than the souls of the others?)

Conclusions can live and be healthy only in the living human spirit. That is, the conclusion is healthy only when it exists in completely conscious life. That is very important, as we will see later. For that reason, you ruin children’s souls if you have the children memorize finished conclusions.
p. 150
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf

Proceed to reflect with the children, without hesitation, that you are looking beyond their horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the children that they will understand only later. The principle that dictates that you teach the children only what they can understand and form an opinion about has ruined much in our culture.
pp. 48-49

You can present the human intellect, in a makeshift way, with historical or physiological facts before age twelve, but by doing so you ruin human nature; strictly speaking, you make it unsuitable for the whole of life.
p. 110

Do not give children verbal definitions but show them the connections between the concepts and the phenomena related to air and those related to solid bodies. Once we have grasped the concept of solid bodies flowing in the direction in which they tend when not prevented, we can dispense with the concept of air flowing into empty space. Healthier concepts would arise than those that fill the world today—such as Professor Einstein’s complicated theory of relativity. I mention this as a passing comment on the present state of our civilization, for I cannot avoid pointing out how many harmful ideas live in our culture (such as the theory of relativity, especially in its most recent variation). These ideas run a ruinous course if the child becomes a research scientist.
p. 117

By using shorthand, we retain something in our culture that, if left to ourselves with our present natural aptitudes, we would cease to notice and, in fact, forget. We thus keep something artificially awake in our culture that destroys it just as much as all-night studying ruins the health of overzealous students. For this reason, our culture is no longer truly healthy.
p. 132

The children do not as yet have a full understanding for matters of the rights sphere, and if they are confronted with these concepts too early in their development, their soul forces will be ruined for the rest of their lives because such concepts will be so abstract.
p. 151
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf

Thus, because of this method of treatment—giving him wine as a young child—he was completely ruined by the time he was seven years old.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/discussions_with_teachers/discussions_with_teachers.pdf

Experimental psychology can be a valuable basis of psychology but when it sneaks into pedagogy and even into courtrooms, it ruins everything that requires healthy development, that needs fully developed people not separated by a gulf from other fully developed people.
p. 150

We must not understand our task as imagining that what is good for one is good for everyone, since thinking so abstractly would be the ruin of all genuine desire.
p. 162
For the convenience of the faculty, the child has, for instance, mathematics or arithmetic in the first period; then, perhaps Latin, then, maybe a period of religion. After that, there is music or singing, but maybe not even that, and, instead, geography. We cannot more fundamentally ruin human nature than by teaching children in this manner.
p. 168
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/education_as_a_force_for_social_change/education_as_a_force_for_social_change.pdf

The first thing you have to do is to dispense with all the textbooks. For textbooks as they are written at the present time contain nothing about the plant and animal kingdoms that we can use in teaching. They are good for instructing grown-up people about plants and animals, but you will ruin the individuality of the child if you use them at school.
p. 37
The chief point is that thinking must never, never be separated from visual experience, from what the children can see, for otherwise intellectualism and abstractions are brought to the children in early life and thereby ruin their whole being. The children will become dried up and this will affect not only the soul life but the physical body also, causing desiccation and sclerosis.
p. 84

Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child’s feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/kingdom_of_childhood/kingdom_of_childhood.pdf

Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year. I was always glad to hear, therefore (and I don’t mind if you consider this uncivilized), that the children of some anthroposophists had no knowledge of writing and reading, even at the age of eight. Accomplishments that come with forces that are available later on should never be forced into an earlier stage, unless we are prepared to ruin the physical organism.
p. 116
Through ill treatment, a violin may be ruined for ever. But in the case of the living human organism, it is possible to plant principles that are harmful to growth, which increase and develop until they eventually ruin a person’s entire life.
p. 137

We ruin our students’ future worldviews when we introduce them prematurely to subjects such as chemistry, mineralogy, physics, dynamics, and so on.
p. 192

People prefer to fall back on traditional religious creeds, trying to bridge what remains unbridgeable unless they can rise from the sensory world to the spiritual world, as anthroposophy endeavors to do. For adults, such a conflict is indeed tragic. If it arises in childhood before the eleventh year, it brings disturbances in its wake that are serious enough to ruin the soul life of a child. A child should never have to say, “I study zoology and find nothing about God. It’s true that I hear of God when I study religion, but this does not help explain zoology.” To allow children to be caught in such a dilemma would be awful, since this kind of questioning can completely throw them off their proper course in life.
p. 281
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/soul_economy/soul_economy.pdf

At about the age of twelve, while still under the guidance of authority, another important desire, namely, to reason independently, begins to develop. If we use independent reasoning too much before the age of twelve, we will actually ruin the child’s soul and bodily forces. In a certain sense, we deaden human experiencing with reason.
p. 135
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/renewal_of_education/renewal_of_education.pdf

The Anthroposophical Writer of the English Language Must Read This

2011-08-04T23:37:00.000-04:00

Too many anthroposophists adopt the style of (badly translated) German in writing for an American audience. Here's some advice on avoiding this clunky and annoying style:

Germans capitalize Nouns. Americans capitalize only proper nouns; anthroposophy is not a proper noun and should not be capitalized, nor should any number of other nouns translated from German into English.

Germans are a definite people and use definite articles more frequently than Americans do. A German (Steiner) could write a book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. Three definite articles in a ten word title. Educating Children sounds less stilted to American ears. Teaching Children is even better, and, by the way, the word "pedagogical" is archaic in English.

Germans, as definite people, also speak definitely, using "must," for example, far more frequently than Americans do. What is common in Germany sounds almost impolite, and certainly too commanding and definite, to Americans.

Further, especially with regard to Steiner's lectures from the early 20th century, the style of argument is often to indicate the extreme, recognizing that the audience understands this as a definite boundary within which action will (must!) occur. When Steiner says, for instance, that teaching abstract concepts too early will "ruin a (the) child's soul," he is not saying that one teacher in one instance will curdle the soul the way one undissolved piece of sugar will crystalize a batch of fudge, or one dust mite may ruin a computer chip. He is indicating, in a culturally appropriate way that we need to translate, that such activity, pursued in the wrong way, over time, will lead us in a direction that is unhealthy for children (the child).

It is already enough. We must now stop this activity by the conscious retranslation of the concepts and the language we use to describe our engagement with anthroposophy. Not to do this simply demonstrates our superficial understanding (our misunderstanding).

Do you have to be an anthroposophist to teach in a Waldorf school?

2011-08-04T23:17:00.002-04:00

No.

(And, to answer the question in Comments below, it depends on the program in which you're getting your Waldorf teacher education--they vary considerably and there's no standard or template--and it also depends on what your definition of "studying anthroposophy" is--if you mean reading Steiner's work in areas outside education, that's one thing. If you mean reading any of Steiner's works, including those in education, that's another...)

We are Plato's Cave Men and Cave Women

2011-08-02T11:57:00.000-04:00

A student asked me to write this up, so here goes.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is just that, an allegory. We mistake it, then, if we try to identify ourselves or others as, say, prisoners. We are all prisoners, but we are also all, to some extent, those who have freed themselves.

For those not familiar with this allegory, I’ll review it. You can find it in Book VII of Plato’s Republic.* Find a contemporary translation. The language should sound fresh, immediate, direct. Plato did not write or speak in archaic or stuffy language. (Grube’s translation is good.)

Imagine that we are prisoners in a cave, chained so that we can see only the rear wall. We cannot see our neighbors, or even our own bodies. Reality, for us, consists of the shadows on and echoes from the cave wall. If we push the allegory, we could say that even our own thoughts, while we are thus chained, are only the shadows and echoes of true thoughts. We have been chained since before we can remember, and we believe that reality consists of the shadows and echoes that we perceive.

If we are able to free ourselves, however, we notice that there is a fire behind us on an elevated platform. Between the fire and us is a low wall that disguises beings who carry objects back and forth, holding them aloft so that the fire casts their shadows on the back of the cave. The prisoners take these to be real.

But, recognizing our mistake, although we are now free, we have not yet seen reality. We need to make our way up a path and out of the cave, into the real world, to recognize the source for the objects of which we had previously seen only the shadows. To be clear—because many who refer to this allegory leave out the middle portion, referring only to prisoners and then their apprehension of the world outside the cave—when we were prisoners, we saw the shadows of images of the things that are real. And, to take common experience, the sun that we see in the sky, the brightest thing in common experience, it is, by this allegory, only the shadow of the image of the true sun.

Emerging from the cave, having spent a lifetime in darkness, we are blinded by the light. It takes time for our vision to adjust, to be able to see in this new, true world.

Then, when we embrace the task of returning to the cave to free those still imprisoned, we are blinded a second time as we pass from light to darkness. To the perception of the prisoners, then, we appear to be blind and to have lost our minds, unable to see the shadows and babbling about a world of which they have no conception. They see no value in our attempts to free them, and may, Plato tells us, turn on us and try to kill us if we persist in attempts to free them.

Also, having seen the world outside the cave, we have lost interest in the now meaningless shadows of images. When we see prisoners competing over shadows, we withdraw, we decline to join this fruitless activity.

Our task, then, becomes a task of education, of gradually turning the prisoners’ minds and sight—these are inextricably linked—to the light of the real.

I don’t want to argue about whether or not this is a good allegory—it has survived more than 2000 years—or whether or not it promotes authoritarianism—those who know leading those who don’t. I want to argue that, as an allegory, it applies in all its parts to each of us.

Each of us is, in some respects, deluded, a prisoner who takes shadows for reality.

Each of us, too, is somewhat free, has turned at least slightly to see the fire and the objects that cast the shadows, has begun to recognize his or her imprisonment.

Each of us has, if only in rare, powerful dreams or fleeting, high ideals, glimpsed the world outside the cave.

Each of us has been blinded by light and blinded by darkness.

Each has returned to others in the cave to help them.

Each has benefited from the work of others to bring us closer to freedom and reality.

Can we say it’s not so?

*Plato, in his humility and in order to indulge a powerful rhetorical device, claims not to record his own thoughts and words, but those of his teacher, Socrates. This is why Plato is the author of the Socratic dialogues. In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates speaks to Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, whose name means “bright eyed” or “owl eyed,” an apt and symbolic name for the allegory laid out in the dialogue.

Good Teachers Don't Answer Their Own Questions

2011-08-01T12:18:00.000-04:00

Once Harry Kretz asks a question, he stands and he waits. You can see that he is willing to wait while civilizations rise and fall, oceans dry up, stars die and fall from the sky, the universe rumbles to an end, bang or whimper. He’s present, attentive, with his students, but waiting. He has asked a real question that a real student needs to answer for a real reason. Not to prolong a class, or to demonstrate knowledge, or to be pedantic, but because he’s teaching young human beings and it’s necessary for them to exercise themselves, to rouse their minds to activity, to make connections for themselves. Mr. Kretz asks a question that requires students to engage, to think, to draw new connections, to make an insightful leap across a previously uncrossed gap.

Mr. Kretz, one of the finest teachers I have known—patient, respectful, humorous—will tell you that many teachers, especially young, smart ones, don’t really know how to ask questions. “Don’t ask a question that you don’t actually care if the students answer,” he might say. And, once you’ve asked a question that you believe students should answer, don’t do what too many of us do. We wait a couple of seconds and then, impatient, the onrushing momentum of an un-taught curriculum or the threat of silence or of boredom upon us, we answer it for ourselves. And our students relax back into watching the teacher’s show.

“Er. Um.” A student hazards a guess, voice rising at the end, questioning. Mr. Kretz absorbs this answer and asks another question.

(Speaking of leaps, Helen Keller compared leaps of mind and dancing. Here’s Merce Cunningham from Russell Friedman’s biography of Martha Graham: “[I] felt [Helen Keller’s] two hands around my waist, like bird wings, so soft. I began to do small jumps. Her fingers, still around my waist, moved slightly as though fluttering. I stopped, and was able to understand what she said to her companion: ‘So light, like the mind.’” Sometimes, poetic truth and literal truth are the same thing.)

Two Students: Tom won't learn, Huck won't hate

2011-07-20T22:28:00.001-04:00

A quirky student, brilliant in some respects and challenged in others, I’ll call him Tom, was given the German Seifenoper, “soap opera,” as a vocabulary word, one among many. Probably because it appeared in a story the class was reading.

Tom refused to learn it. “I know that I will never need to know the German word for soap opera, so I refuse to learn it.” No amount of pleading or reasoning would sway him, not that the German teacher tried too hard; this situation was ultimately more amusing than annoying, and she had better uses for her own time. She could have pointed out that he would learn two potentially more valuable words--for soap and for opera--in one swell foop, but she didn't.

Wow. Think of the energy, commitment, and bent of mind it takes to examine each piece of information coming at you in school in order to determine, before you engage with it, whether or not it will be of use to you in the future. As if you could really ever know such a thing. Approaching education as if packing for a trip, and knowing you have to be ruthless in order to pack light. “I’ll learn this. I won’t learn that.” There’s an admirable, ethical stance at the core of Tom’s refusal, even if the project itself is wholly questionable.

I heard about this, and spoke to Tom. “I’m tempted to write a short story,” I told him, “in which a boy in a circumstance similar to yours loses his life because he doesn’t know the German word for soap opera. In my story, he’ll live if he knows this word, but he won’t know it, and he’ll die. It’s unlikely, of course, but you have to admit it could happen.”

(So you don’t believe I’m too harsh, I had spoken with the class about how it’s the case in literature and movies that so many people die because it’s an easy way to introduce dramatic tension. We care if the hero lives or dies. It’s harder to write a story or shoot a movie in which we care if the hero… brushes his teeth or not.)

He smiled. He understood my point. But he didn’t change his ways, not then, and, maybe, not now.

Another boy, I’ll call him Huck, was very quick to solve math problems, although he did it in a remarkable way. He would read a problem, and then attack it three, four, five, or more ways, getting sometimes the right answers, if the methods were sound, and sometimes the wrong answer. He would examine all the different answers and then decide which he believed to be correct. Trial and error. Not a perfectionist, almost an imperfectionist.

A girl in the same class, I’ll call her Becky, approached problem-solving more conventionally, working carefully step-by-step until she was certain she had the right answer. A perfectionist.

One day, I set the class a problem. Huck worked quickly to the answer and announced that he had it. Becky, working methodically, looked up and said, exasperated, “I hate you, Huck.”

Huck sat back and looked at her. “Well, Becky, I don’t hate you,” he said. “I guess you suffer from unrequited hate.”

Lessons from the Tide Pools of Hermit Island, Maine

2011-06-27T14:13:00.000-04:00

Each fall I take our senior class to Hermit Island, Maine, on the coast near Bath, to study tide pool zoology for a week. We set up camp amid birch and pine trees and within the sound of the surf—boys’ and girls’ tents, a couple of picnic tables for a “kitchen” and a couple more for a “dining room.” We stretch a tarp overhead—it rains at least once during the week—and a clothesline nearby. We circle folding chairs around the fire pit and grill steaks.

We talk late into the night. The first night, students chatter and let fall away the social and electronic world they have just left behind. The second night, more calmly, we discuss the world they are about to enter and how to make it a better place. They can allow their idealism free reign, stare into the fire, and imagine how, given a chance, they will change the world. They jump up to sing, they sit quietly to write a poem, they whittle spoons, they—hesitantly—chase skunks away from the food they have forgotten to pack away.

In the morning, students make breakfast—they’re responsible for planning, cooking, and cleaning for all meals. For some, it’s a challenge to get instant oatmeal on the table; others present a restaurant-worthy vegetarian frittata. We hike half a mile to the “Kelp Shed,” a snack bar in the summer and our classroom in the fall, where we meet about 100 seniors from other high schools across the country. Students have come from as far south as Atlanta and as far west as Chicago.

Each morning, teachers from the eight or so schools that have gathered share two-hour presentations on the animal phyla of the tide pools. (I’ve co-taught mollusks for the past three years with a teacher from Vermont.) Students take notes, make drawings, ask questions, and have a chance to examine live specimens they’ve helped collect.

Students are delighted by hermit crabs, intrigued by a sea star’s hydrodynamic tube feet, awed by the relative power of a little clam’s single foot, slightly scared of the crabs’ pinchers—although there are always a couple of students who hang as many crabs as possible from their clothes and skin. Students spend a morning with lobsters, learning about migrations, territorial disputes, mating rituals, and lobster offspring, the superlobsters. Many students name their lobsters—highly unscientific, but understandable—and one purchases it in order to give it its freedom.

The rhythm of life revolves around the tides. We wake in time to be at the tide pools near low tide, sometimes five in the morning. We coach students in walking on the sharp rocks and slippery seaweed, in watching out for rogue waves. We peer into tide pools that appear at first to contain nothing but gray-green blobs.

We’re far from home, we’re tired, we’re not necessarily dressed for the weather, we’re awake when we’d rather not be, we’re uncertain of our footing, we’re cold and wet, and we’re just not sure why we are here. “Dr. Sagarin, I feel like a clam and I don’t want to be a clam. Now I know why they call it ‘clammy.’”

Each year, it amazes me how, within about twenty minutes, our vision begins to clear, and we begin to see and then to identify plant and animal life in the pools. What was, at first, a pool of meaningless shapes and dull colors begins to teem with life. Purple sea stars, green urchins, orange anemones, red hermit crabs, blue mussels, white barnacles, transparent sea vases; once we’ve seen them, we can’t believe we didn’t see them earlier.

We forget our fatigue, our cold, wet feet, and we begin to discover our kinship with a world we have never seen before. We overcome the strangeness of the place and begin to lift rocks and reach under overhangs. With luck, we snag a young lobster or an old Jonah crab, and, gingerly, we learn to hold them so that they are calm and safe. We return them to their holes or crevices. One student finds a colony of large anemones in a tiny cave, and group after group of students approaches to admire it and snap photos. The students name the cave after the one who found it.

It seems to me that this is a lot like education: we leave our homes to go to a strange place and we’re thrown together with others our own age and a couple of adults called teachers. The world makes demands on us—chores, schedules, rhythms, work. At first, at least metaphorically, we’re cold and wet, we’re not sure why we’re here, and we’re not sure what we’re looking at. But, with time and guidance, we begin to see for ourselves and then to discover. A teacher can show us where to stand, how to look, encourage patience, demonstrate how to turn a rock over without destroying what’s beneath it. But we have to use our own eyes, our own hands, and our own minds to make sense of our experience. And then we can begin to explore on our own.

This process, which occurs in each of us to a greater or lesser degree, is transformational and transcendental. No student who has spent an hour in the tide pools will look at this part of the world the same way again; and, by extension, we hope, will learn that other apparently inaccessible, cold, wet, seemingly empty spaces are worth the trouble to get to know.

Is the Bible a Banned Book?

2011-06-24T14:52:00.000-04:00

What do you need in order to look at Medieval art, to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, speeches—or Abraham Lincoln’s speeches—or to read Moby-Dick?

Regardless of your personal beliefs, your faith, or your lack of faith, you need a knowledge of the Bible.

So, in our high school, we teach a course for 10th graders called “The Bible as Literature.” Not that this matters, but, to give some perspective, the woman who teaches it happens to be a Jew who tutors local students in Hebrew for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. (She has also taught an elective course in Hebrew for our students, and she teaches another seminar on World Religions.)

Each spring, as a private school, we submit a list of the books we’ll be using the following year to local districts in New York State. The districts buy these books using the money of taxpayers—the parents of our students—and send the books to us. We use them and return them at the end of the year. Our students come from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, but only New York has such a law or program. Students from Massachusetts and Connecticut private schools buy their own textbooks.

Maybe you can see where this is heading. We submit a list of dozens of books that includes, say, The Great Gatsby, Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, The Color Purple, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Algebra 2, and… the Bible.

And, a few days later, a nice person from the local district calls to say that they can’t order the Bible. It’s not her job to say why or why not a book may be ordered—the computer just won’t let her do it. Software for separation of church and state.

So, presumably, the way we’re asked to teach is this: “See that man wrapped up like a mummy in that painting by Giotto? Does anyone know who he is? Well, let me tell you about Lazarus… He’s a guy whose story is told in the Bible.” “Does anyone know to whom Lincoln is referring when he speaks of the ‘better angels’ of our nature? No? Well, let me tell you about Paul… He’s a guy who wrote letters that you can find in the Bible…” And on and on and on. Good humanities teachers—literature, history, philosophy, you name it—will necessarily reveal to their students that the world in which they live is full of allusions to a book that the district is not allowed to purchase for them.

Let’s hope against hope that they’re iconoclastic enough to look into it for themselves.

Our students buy their own Bibles.

Did Dwight Schrute go to a Waldorf School?

2011-06-17T11:36:00.002-04:00

He speaks German and apparently knows about that awful German children’s book, Struwwelpeter.
He plays the (fluorescent plastic) recorder.
He believes exposure to germs strengthens your immune system.
He wanted to teach children to make cornhusk dolls...

Did Rainn Wilson or a writer for the American version of The Office go to a Waldorf school?
Is there other evidence that Dwight Schrute did?

Inquiring minds want to know.
Comments, please!

"Earino" (Spring): Fragment of a Lost Socratic Dialogue

2011-06-10T08:48:00.001-04:00

Socrates meets his students—Halitosis, Leukemia, Diabetes, and Osteoporosis—in the woods near Athens known as the Academia.

Socrates: It is good to see you all again. We were discussing justice and the good life... Halitosis! What are you doing?
Halitosis: One minute, Socrates. My mom texted me that I forgot my lunch and I have to text her back...
Socrates: Well, okay. But then put that thing away, whatever it is. Haven’t we established that direct communication is the only true communication? As I was saying… You know Leukemia, it’s very hard for the other students to concentrate when your toga is so short…
Leukemia: But Socrates, it’s too hot here in Athens in the spring. And I have such nice legs. You want me to wear long togas like you old people? That’s so mean…
Socrates: That’s not really the point, Leukemia. When you consider… Diabetes! Are you here to learn or to eat? I can hear you chewing like a cow and it is distracting.
Diabetes: I’m not eating, Socrates. This is a breath freshener. In chewing gum form. It’s minty fresh. Would you like one?
Socrates: No, Diabetes, although it’s kind of you to offer. But, listen, is that what I find stuck to every stump and boulder in the Academia? The gods know I walked home yesterday with a chunk of that stuck to my sandal. It’s very annoying… Where was I? Oh, yes… Yes, Osteoporosis?
Osteoporosis: I have to work this afternoon and I feel terrible and I have a headache and I really want to take a nap before I go to work, so can I go now? There’s nothing really important happening here…
Socrates: Well, it’s obvious why not, isn’t it?
(End of fragment.)

Giving a Test 101

2011-06-08T09:15:00.003-04:00

Among the reasons for high school and middle school students to lose confidence in their teachers are simple things—organization, preparation, clarity, attention. A lack of these may become particularly evident in times of stress, and there may be no more acute case in the everyday life of a school than during the administration of a test. I believe I can hand identical tests to different teachers who will walk into classes that have been identically prepared and, depending on how the teachers handle the test-taking, from beginning to end, student attitudes and results will vary widely.

An organized, clear, attentive teacher will elicit the best behavior and results—the room will be calm, the test fair. A disorganized, unclear, inattentive teacher will elicit bad behavior—including cheating—and worse results.

So I thought I’d walk through test-administering 101.

Write a test that is fair and that allows students to demonstrate what they know. It could even be fun… Start with a cartoon or a joke (maybe an “in” joke that you and the class share). The test should should be difficult to get a perfect score on but also difficult to fail. It should test students on what they should know—what is important in your course, what you have reviewed.

Frankly, in most cases, you should be so confident of your students that giving or taking the test is just about beside the point—you should know the students well enough to know what they know, to know how well they will do on your test. (In which case, you don’t have to give it at all.) Or, if you give it, you can make it, too, into part of the learning for your course. Ask them to synthesize information in an essay. Don’t insult their intelligence. Don’t waste your own time.

Begin, perhaps, by telling the story of how you cheated in high school and how bad you feel now. Or how you got caught and learned your lesson. Or about the girl who plagiarized a Spanish paper in senior year of college and got un-accepted to law school, wrecking her life. Make it clear how seriously you take cheating. Tell students they will fail if caught cheating, and stick to your decision.

Give clear instructions for taking the test and for what to do when finished (For example: read it over, hand it to me, face down, with all essays or scrap paper stapled in order, with your name on each sheet, sit down without speaking and read a book until everyone is done).

Separate students as much as possible. Move tables and desks as necessary to create space.

Have students clear their desks except for test-taking essentials. (If they need scrap paper, you give it to them.)

Once you hand out the tests, face down on each desk, no talking. Talking gets a reduced grade.

Anyone who has a question can walk over to you and whisper, one at a time.

Sit in the back of the room, behind the students. They can’t see you, you can see them—head swivels, desk searches…

Do not talk unless absolutely necessary. Do not leave the room. Do not turn your back on the students.

Give time or progress updates if helpful; “You have ten minutes until the end of the period.” “You should be at least halfway through the test by now.”

If you are tough but fair, students will feel secure, they will perform better, results will be indicative of what you want them to be indicative of, and your life will run more smoothly.

Teachers usually don’t fail, in my experience, because they don’t know the subject they are teaching, or because they aren’t committed to the job. They fail for one of four reasons. (I teach in a small private school; teachers in other schools may amend my list.) First, young or inexperienced teachers may discover that they simply are not teachers—that their dream of teaching was a romantic one, and that the realities of teaching are simply not for them. This can be a hard lesson to learn, but one better learned sooner than later. In most cases, teachers and schools part ways peaceably and with mutual respect in circumstances like these.

The other three reasons for leaving teaching do not always results in peaceful partings. Teachers may lose the confidence of the parents of the students in their class; they may lose the confidence of their colleagues; and they may lose the confidence of the students in their class. This last may be expressed in different ways depending on the teacher and the age of the students—lack of control or discipline, disillusionment, disdain, complaints, insecurity… the student behaviors that signal that a teacher is not up to the job are myriad. And parent or colleague confidence is almost always tied to student confidence and security, which is made acutely visible when taking a test.

Turning School on its Head: Information and Experience

2011-05-17T11:58:00.001-04:00

William Blake wrote Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Today, we could write, less poetically, Songs of Information; our children’s innocence is quickly and largely lost to the information in and with which we live.

It used to be that life gave us experience, from the school of hard knocks on up. Until recently, historically speaking, more than 9 out of 10 persons worked in agriculture, and everyone knew a great deal—how and when to plow, till, sow; how to herd and heal, how to shoe, how to hunt, trap, tan, weave, sew, dress, butcher, cook, how to mend a wagon wheel or a fence, how to build, how to clear, and on and on. Those who didn’t farm knew a trade. Experience filled a life.

But if we wanted information we had to go to school (or church, but that’s a different topic). We could say that the job of schools was to provide information that life experience did not—literacy, numeracy, the content and interpretation of books, “subjects” like history, geography, science, philosophy, theology, and on and on. Information filled a school.

Without quite realizing it, we have turned the world upside down.

For young people, especially, information is everywhere and experience is hard to come by.

This makes the job of schools and schooling different. We need to reorient—we are reorienting—education to provide experience, and trust that none of our students will suffer from too little information in the next lifetime or more.

Experience allows us to discern and sift and sort the information flowing past our eyes. It allows us to live as human beings in a world that increasingly seems not to need human input. Schools that offer experience—and trust that we no longer need primarily to be the arbiters of information—will serve their students best.

Excerpts from a Conversation on Starting a Waldorf High School

2011-05-16T14:19:00.001-04:00

I had a stimulating conversation last week with a representative from a Waldorf school with a healthy elementary school enrollment that is interested in starting a high school. Here are some of my notes--slightly expurgated to protect the privacy of all involved.

In my experience one group—parents, teachers, or trustees—usually drives change at a school. It’s better if 2 of the 3 are ready to initiate change. The first step is to identify which group is ready to move forward. If no one group is leading and each group is somewhat split, you may have to adopt a slightly different strategy, one which may be stronger in the long run, and form a coalition of the willing among parents, teachers, and board members.

A high school committee that includes representatives of all constituencies, with a clear mandate to plan (and return to the community at each step to collect information and inform everyone of progress and possibilities), may well be the way to go. One key to our success, I believe, was our willingness to hear criticism, concern, and anxiety, and to acknowledge and deal with them as well as we could.

This group may be the same as—but doesn’t have to be the same as—a study group on adolescence. The study group, for instance, may be more teacher-centered, while a planning committee might be a joint board-faculty-parent group.

Then the question is, how to get others on board? For trustees and parents, reassurance regarding minimizing risk and forwarding the benefits—I believe, for instance, that a HS will slow middle school attrition—will work. Identifying a target class, raising money in advance, and good planning are all helpful. Teachers mostly want to be reassured that a HS won’t mean more work for them. Sorry to by cynical, but it’s often true…

(Our biggest mistake by far occurred early on. In planning, we discussed two possibilities. One was growing the school only to 9th grade for a few years—private schools in our area often have grades through 9th grade; students then transfer to boarding school or another prep school for high school. The other was to carry on adding grades (as we did) until we had a full high school. The 9th grade, as I mentioned, had a good enrollment of 13 students, and then the bottom dropped out of the school with the con man I mentioned. And some of those who had been ready to move forward then recommended stopping at 9th grade to regroup. The trustees waffled through the spring, and students who would have stayed or enrolled in a new 9th grade left to find other schools. The uncertainty was crippling. In the end, it made greater financial sense to have a combined 9th and 10th grade—with more students than 9th alone—and that’s what we did. But the hesitation and uncertainty, born of a lack of clarity, nearly killed us.)

Identify a pioneer class, then inform them and their parents with articles, talks, etc., about the value of the HS you’re planning. Make them part of the process. I think 15 students is a good goal, but it’s a bit high—10-12 might be more reasonable and attainable; crunching numbers will show what’s possible.

Given demographics in our area, we are committed to a school of no more than about 50 students; other areas could support a larger school in the long run. We believe there’s a “deadly middle ground” between about 60 and 150 students—depends on your revenue and expenses—and we’re trying to avoid it. Most Waldorf high schools fall solidly in it, which I believe is a perennial challenge—they need teachers and facilities and resources for a school that could support 200 students, but they only have, say 90 students to pay for it…

Don’t count out local homeschoolers and other feeders—it’s fine for students who haven’t been in Waldorf schools to join in 9th grade, and you may be surprised how many allies you find among those disenchanted with their options. (Many students who had left the Waldorf elementary school returned to us for high school—a year or two at other schools taught them that the grass wasn’t as green as they thought!)

Another strategy—used in Freeport, Maine, for instance—is to identify two lead classes. Graduate the 8th grade and send them off to another school for a year with the promise that they can return to a 10th grade the following year. The next year’s 8th grade then becomes the 9th grade, and you open the HS with 2 classes. Ta da!

One of the hardest things, beyond your control, is creating something where nothing exists. You have no track record, no college acceptances, no happy students, nothing to sell but a good idea and commitment…

I believe it is good to have a paid planner or consultant for a couple of years to move you from idea to reality. Other schools have used this. We didn’t and we probably should have; things came to fruition very quickly for us, and we grabbed the opportunity we had. This was less than ideal, but, given that Great Barrington had closed a high school in the late 80s, may have been our only chance.

I can hardly emphasize enough how much depends on the quality of teaching. You have to have at least one amazing high school teacher, a tough cookie with a warm heart and a good head who can lead a faculty, guide students through the years of a pioneer high school, and reassure parents that their students will be prepared for college and for life. It’s a rare elementary school teacher who can make this leap, but maybe you have one. If not, the search for one is an essential part of your planning. If everything else is in place, and parents and students don’t trust the quality of the teaching and don’t value their relationships with their teachers, it won’t work.

Planning will also include a lot of high school-appropriate topics that elementary school teachers don’t like to deal with—dress, plagiarism, substance abuse policies, and on and on and on. Maintaining school spirit in the face of all this can be challenging. You can easily find out what other high schools do, but you also have to authentically make these things your own.

A final point to emphasize, perhaps prematurely, is that a Waldorf high school is as different from the elementary school as the elementary school is from the preschool. If students perceive that the Waldorf high school is “just more Waldorf,” they won’t want to come. “Selling” the differences—a voice in making some of the rules, choosing elective courses, travel and work opportunities, challenging courses with different, expert teachers, sports, mastery in the arts, etc., etc.—has helped us a lot and continues to be a challenge for us.

Apologies

2011-05-13T13:59:00.001-04:00

Blogger was down yesterday and today (May 12 and 13) and seems to have eaten my recent post (and many others' posts, as well). I've replaced it. If it reappears, then there will be two. C'est la, c'est la.

Waldorf School Theocracy Syndrome (WSTS)

2011-05-13T13:46:00.001-04:00

Does your school suffer from Waldorf School Theocracy Syndrome (WSTS)? Now there may be help! Read on to learn more.

Patient complaints/Symptoms:
Checking 3 or more of the following symptoms may be a sign that your school suffers from WSTS.
___ Enrollment attrition, particularly in middle school grades.
___ Too many classes with more girls than boys.
___ “Churn” or large turnover in enrollment (even if numbers overall are holding steady).
___ Stressful parent-teacher relationships.
___ Administrative dysfunction.
___ Arguments that rationalize dysfunction as “karmic.”
___ Failure to produce an organizational chart that makes sense.
___ Parent Association dissatisfaction.
___ Parking lot gossip.
___ Teachers’ room gossip.
___ Trustee attrition.
___ Falling community reputation.

Diagnosis:
Waldorf School Theocracy Syndrome (WSTS)

Waldorf teachers act, and believe they should act, as the priest-interpreters of Rudolf Steiner’s will, allowing their appropriate classroom and pedagogical autonomy to spill over into the economic life or rights and responsibilities life of a school.

Discussion:
Theocracy—rule according to the word of a god, often interpreted according to a fundamental text (hence, fundamentalism)—contradicts Steiner’s threefold social organization, which Waldorf schools espouse as an idea found in some of their fundamental texts. This belief and its attendant behaviors contradict the tenets of anthroposophy, too.

Treatment:
▪ Acknowledge that all members of a school community have rights and responsibilities.
▪ Acknowledge that, with regard to rights and responsibilities, all members of the community are equal. In particular, teachers’ authority does not extend to this area.
▪ Consult all constituencies to create lists of rights and responsibilities for each group.
▪ Constitute a group of teachers, parents, and board members, democratically, separate from the economic life of the school and also separate from the pedagogical life of the school, to administer the life of rights and responsibilities within the community.
▪ Empower this group to recommend and set policies and procedures and mediate conflicts among constituents of the school community.
▪ Figure out where the buck stops, and stop it there.

(Note: WSTS is a condition or syndrome that does not respond to “one size fits all” or “magic bullet” treatments. Each case requires individualized, ongoing attention and care.

Hard Work for Teachers and Students

2011-05-05T09:59:00.001-04:00

Students wrote poems and then illustrated them in the style of William Blake. E., a high school English teacher, showed me the students’ work. It was awful. I was their art teacher. “I know she can do much better than that. He can too…” Were talented students just lazy, willing to make beautiful art in art class and then shrug it off in English class? A mystery.

E. showed up at school the next morning with a sample of what she had wanted from the students. She had written her own poem and then, not a natural artist, illustrated it painstakingly. Wow.

“How long did that take you?”

“Four and a half hours.”

A hah.

Students had each spent less than an hour on an assignment that took a teacher four and a half hours to do to her own standards and expectations. They had homework for other classes, they even had other work for English, and they had been given only one night for the assignment. It wasn’t a surprise that none of them, talented or not, spent the hours necessary to fulfill the teacher’s (unspoken) expectation for the quality of the work.

E. showed the students her work, told them how long it had taken her, made her expectations for the assignment explicit, and gave them several days to complete it. Their work was beautiful.

***

Z., a bright, motivated student who seemed interested in everything in the world, one of the few teens I have taught who was willing to say publicly that something academic—the quadratic formula or the defenestration of Prague—was cool, handed in his first essay for me. It was intelligently written but brief and almost illegible. I handed it back to him with this comment: “Brief. Sloppy. Seems hastily written.”

Turns out he wrestled with dyslexia and no one had told me. He had worked as hard on his essay as anyone in the class, it just didn’t show.

I generally grade essays with a check mark if they’re acceptable, a rare “check-plus” if they’re exceptionally good, and a check-minus if they’re unacceptable and should be re-written. But I edit them, correcting every misused comma, spelling mistake, awkward phrase, poor word choice, or lack of proper paragraphing.

(One of my fundamental beliefs as a teacher is that students generally enter high school capable of writing a perfect, simple English sentence and can then, with teachers’ assistance, learn to write more complex but still perfectly grammatical sentences. They will make mistakes along the way, but these can be minimal and instructive, rather than evidence of laziness or apathy.)

The content of Z.’s essays was often excellent, but other factors, most probably due to his dyslexia, kept him from getting check-pluses.

A year later, in a different course (one of the beauties of a small school is that we teachers get to know and teach students over several years), Z. handed in yet another essay. I read it through, pencil poised. Not a single correction. Thoughtful content, as usual, and no errors. Cool!

(Basing my assignments on those I found most meaningful when I was a student, I have students write many brief essays in most of my courses; I would rather read 1-2 really well-written pages than 5-8 pages thinly cribbed from Wikipedia and then padded with adverbs and adjectives.)

I returned the papers to the students. Z. came to see me, grinning. “I decided I was tired of your corrections. I wanted to write an error-free paper, to see if I could do it.” We chatted for a bit. It turns out it had taken him time to achieve his goal, but not quite twice as much time as he normally spent on assignments.

“You’re in trouble now,” I said.

“Why?”

“Now that I know what you can do when you try, you’ll have to do this every time.”

I can’t say that he rose to the bait completely, but the standards to which he held himself did change for the better, dyslexia or no dyslexia.

***

Will, work, and time. Aren’t these the keys to mastery, for teachers and for students, regardless of personal challenges?

Don’t Look Now—Psychopathic Tendencies in (Educational) Technology

2011-04-29T09:07:00.001-04:00

Imagine a perfectly rational, logical person, one with a perfect memory, but one who has no emotions.

Scary, huh? Sort of a psychopath? Yet we have spent countless hours and sums over the past century or so developing a machine that embodies exactly this fantasy, and many of us now spend hours each day interacting with these devices—perfect logic, perfect memory, and no emotions. In fact… don’t turn around… you’re probably reading this on one right now.

Real psychopaths have a will of their own and present obvious danger to those around them. Machines represent the will of their creators and users, and so computers—fortunately—act only as psychopaths in the movies (2001, A Space Odyssey) or in the hands of actual psychopaths. (Whether or not a device with latent psychopathic tendencies magnifies psychopathic tendencies in each of us would be an interesting area of study.)

Further, as Joseph Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason) and others have pointed out, tools are not merely the embodiments of instrumental reason. (Instrumental reason, you could say, arises when we generalize the values of technology to all values.) Tools embody the values of their creators and they become part of the human world in which they are used—once created, they become part of the way we picture the world and our role in that world.

Consequently, as Weizenbaum also points out, all technology is educational—one function of education is cultural transmission, and technology is intimately bound up with any culture.

Once upon a time, a human being grabbed a rock and used it as a hammer. She may have put it down, looked around, and thought, “Gee, I never realized how many hammers are lying around here.” Technology begins—and ends—not with devices external to us, but in our own minds and in our perceptions of the world.

Further, in the long run, the devices we create may replace an older version of the world with a new version in which the values of the device may be mistaken for reality itself. A simple instance will suffice. Experience used to be seamless and whole, one with the rhythms of nature—sunrise, sunset, the cycle of the moon, the seasons. Eventually, European monks decided to build a mechanical bell ringer to remind them of the time to pray. This precursor of our modern clocks (from the French cloche, bell) had no face and simply established a mechanical rhythm, roughly correlated with the times during the day and night when a bell should ring to call the monks to prayer.

Over the past 800 years, we have so internalized and enhanced the mechanism of the clock that most of us would agree that clocks “measure time.” A moment’s reflection will show that they do no such thing. What do they do? Like a metronome, they establish a mechanical rhythm. That’s all. Any interpretation of time with regard to the rhythm of the device belongs to us, although we have largely forgotten this.

Clocks, then, despite their obvious advantages, have also served to mechanize, standardize, and fragment our experience of time.

(Similarly, the moveable type printing press mechanized, standardized, and fragmented our experience of texts.)

Leaping ahead, we may say that computers, because of their astonishing malleability—what do you want the computer to do? We’ll program it to make it do that—don’t simply introduce psychotic rationalism to one portion of reality—say, our experience of time or of a text—they co-opt, rationalize and standardize experience itself. The experience of the computer is the illusion of experience.

Now, Jill or Johnny, I want you to go upstairs and don’t come down until you’ve spent at least one hour doing your homework on your psychopath.

Teaching 8th grade history in a Waldorf school in a nutshell…

2011-04-26T14:34:00.001-04:00

I produced the following BRIEF outline for my adult students. I have others on other grades that I'll post soon. Hope it's helpful to some; if it's not, ignore it!

Tell stories of cultural changes—in the arts, science and technology—from 1600 to the present. This focuses on the Industrial Revolution and Romanticism (which, of course, should be considered not only as an anti-industrial response, but as the seed of everything from the environmental movement to anthroposophy, not that you’ll tell the students this—see Barfield’s “Romanticism Come of Age.”)

NOTE: Many schools call this a “Revolutions” block and focus also on the American, French, and even Soviet Revolutions. This is fine, but this topic can also wait for 9th grade. (I believe that because many Waldorf schools do not have high schools, they seek to push some high school material—especially cultural history—into the 8th grade curriculum. This may not be a bad thing.)

NOTE: Many schools teach U.S. history in 8th grade. If this is done according to the theme of “human transformation of the world”—the inner world of human consciousness and, more important for 8th graders, the outer world of politics, economy, and technology—and not as “mere” U.S. history, then this is fine (but not an ideological necessity). From this point of view—the cultural—wars are less important than they would be from a different point of view.

Depending on the direction you choose you will have an endless supply of fascinating biographies from which to choose (and you can create a longer list from which students may choose projects). Because you have honed your techniques in teaching history in grades 5, 6, and 7, the practice of using human lives to narrate events and illustrate themes will come easily to you. Whittle down the number of lives with which you will contend and don’t belabor any too much (presentation and review for each; no need to spend days and days on John and Abigail Adams, for goodness sake; but, if you love John and Abigail Adams, then have at it).

The lives of inventors and industrialists point to the themes of urbanization, industrialization, transportation, and communication. The world moves rapidly from a perennial simplicity to the acceleration we experience today (Henry Adams, tongue in cheek, saw such an acceleration in human use of energy that he predicted the end of the world in 1926. He was right.) But be on the lookout for the quirks and foibles of your characters (the quirky, foible-full eighth graders love them)—James Watt was so terrified of steam power that he never built an industrial steam engine—he worked on table-top models.

Revolutions, again, point to a larger question about teaching history to youth in general. Life has always been brutal (nasty, brutish and short, in Hobbes’s formulation), from ancient slaughter through torture to modern genocide and holocaust. You can easily acknowledge this—and other forms of human suffering, as in the story of Buddha—without indulging it. Please choose biographies that inspire by example, and mention brutality matter-of-factly in passing. An experienced teacher I know assigned Schindler’s List as a class reader in 8th grade; I believe this is wrong—not that individual 8th graders won’t pick up such books on their own, or that students shouldn’t read exactly this in a few years—because we shouldn’t expose students to the brutality of human existence before they can contend with it in their own emotional lives. To ask them to do so stunts their inner growth, and may—in the presence of other life-factors—express itself in unhealthy, risky behaviors like cutting, drug abuse, or eating disorders.

Main Lesson or Seminar Teaching in a Waldorf School (...or Anywhere You Care to Teach)

2011-04-14T11:37:00.002-04:00

Waldorf schools begin each day with what has come to be called a “main lesson”—an unfortunate term in that it subtly denigrates all the other classes of the day, although this was not Rudolf Steiner’s intention.

The high school at which I teach calls these classes “seminars” because that’s descriptive of the way we teach them, it doesn’t connote elementary education, and it doesn’t denigrate other classes.

Many of the ideas and practices recorded here have evolved over my twenty-six years of teaching; what seems simple and obvious to me now in some cases took more than ten years to become so. But slow learning is better than none at all, and it is sometimes deeper than faster learning.

I wrote the following for my teacher education students, and I share it here for the reason I initially started this blog—to provide access to things I had written for which I occasionally get requests. It saves time if they’re here to read or copy—no offprints or email attachments. This document presents main lesson primarily as a middle school history teacher might approach it because the course in which I present it is Teaching History in a Waldorf School, Grades 5-8. Teachers of other grades and other subjects will make their own adjustments.

Finally, I refer in here to doodling and to note-taking, both of which I've written about elsewhere on this blog.

Business
I begin by calling the class to order and getting business out of the way—announcements, attendance, and so forth. To say the morning verse before this—as I once did—now strikes me as bizarre. The verse prepares us to learn. So why prepare to learn and then spend ten minutes on trivial matters?

Morning Verse
Once business is accomplished, I usually say the verse with my class, although, given that many of them often arrive half asleep and malnourished, I sometimes ask them to walk or run around the school building (I used to teach in a room that had a running track just outside the back door, and a lap around this—even if calmly walked—usually brought the students back to me calmer and more alert). Then we say the verse together.

I ask politely for quiet before we begin. I never insist that students say the verse, only that they are quiet and respectful to those who do. If necessary, if no one chooses to say it, I say it myself and students listen. That’s fine. It happens perhaps once with a new group, but usually not again.

I also usually ask a student to begin the verse. If I begin it every morning, I am the one with initiative, my voice is heard, and I may be the only one who utters the word “I” that begins the verse—students joining gradually, “…into the world,” leaving off the “I look.” There are other ways to accomplish this—through regimentation and discipline—but I’ve chosen this different way. I believe this practice is fine to use with students beginning in roughly sixth grade. Before this, I wouldn’t call on their “I” so much.

For Middle School Only
After the verse, perhaps 10 minutes of singing, recorder playing, or speech. I don’t do “mental math” unless we are in a math block. If I did happen to decide to do it, I wouldn’t do it on the same day as recorder or singing or anything else. I don’t find anything about “circle time” in Steiner’s work, and I believe that his request for economy in teaching asks me to get on with my history lesson. (Math requires extra practice, it’s true, but this can be scheduled at a different point in the day, not during main lesson.) In high school classes, I don’t even do any of this, but proceed right to the lesson.

Main Lesson or Seminar
First review (feeling, judgment, discussion), then new material (thinking—but warm and interested thinking), then, if time remains (which I believe it should in middle school, perhaps less in high school), work (will).

Review
The review has three functions. The first is to come to some judgment, conclusion, or opinion regarding the material of the previous day (or previous days; there are clearly times when a “summing up” involves matter learned over several days—observing the changes in form and feeling as we pass from Egyptian through archaic Greek to classical Greek postures in sculpture, for example). This may take five minutes, and it may take nearly an hour. It’s good for me to have a plan for the day, but I am almost always willing to stray from it if student questions (legitimate questions) ask for a longer discussion or review.

A more mundane function of the review is to give notes from the day before, which I put on the board and then answer questions while students copy them. I developed this technique as I became increasingly aware of the strangeness of the process of asking students to pay careful attention to what I am saying while also remembering and writing down what I just said fifteen seconds ago. This splitting of consciousness, I believe, works against actual learning (it’s a necessary skill in college, but can be developed quickly late in high school). By giving notes the day after a presentation, we cover the material twice, and students can listen without interruption to new material.

The third function of the review is to address a question with which I have left the class on the previous day (see below). Again, doing this may take a couple of sentences, shedding a little light in the darkness, or it may yield a full-blown discussion.

(Steiner: “When they return on the following day they again have the spiritual photographs of the previous day’s lesson in their heads. I connect today’s lesson with them by a reflective, contemplative approach—for example, a discussion on whether Alcibiades or Mithradates was a decent or an immoral person.

When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, followed on the next day by reflection, by judgments, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

New Material
Following the review, I present new material. I ask students to listen quietly. I ask them NOT to take notes (see review above).* I ask them to hold all questions, and to jot down any questions while I am speaking in order to ask them at the end of my presentation (which my students have taken to calling “Story Time with Steve”). Student questions can turn a twenty minute story into an hour’s drudgery as they ask about what I was just about to address, or they ask interesting but digressive questions. I resolve not to digress too much or to interrupt myself during this time, too. Unless behavior absolutely requires it, I won’t stop the class for an elbow bump or a giggle. The start-stop of “regular” discipline can lead to greater chaos than overlooking small slights. If necessary, I can make a note and address it later. If I can and need to, I can calmly walk over to a student without breaking my speech and turn him around, or remove a note from her hand, or otherwise indicate that a behavior is unnecessary.

I allow students to doodle, to knit, or otherwise to quietly, privately occupy their hands. I fought this for more than ten years before I awoke to the fact that I had been a good, attentive student my entire life, through graduate school, and had doodled incessantly, despite all attempts to make me stop. As long as my students are listening and not distracting each other, their quiet activity doesn’t bother me.**

A history presentation involves four basic elements:
1. Creating distance in time, a sense of time;
2. Creating a sense of space—how far is it from here to there; how would you travel in those times? And of place—what is the geography, how would someone living then experience it, how did it influence these people? What is the climate?
3. Creating a sense of character—what we often call “biography,” although really I’m simply telling stories of different lives (birth dates, father’s occupation, and other such trivia are usually inconsequential and the students and I know it; or these things can be included easily in notes on the following day if it is necessary to have some record of them).
4. And creating a sense of an event or happening. Any more than this is unnecessary in middle school, and much more than this is not even necessary in high school; discussions bring out 5. the larger themes—I don’t “teach” them, we discover them in conversation, usually in review. (See Steiner’s work for specific indications for themes and topics for each year, including approaches to history in high school years.)

(Steiner: “Let us take another example, a history lesson. In the teaching of history there is no apparatus, no experiment. I must find a way of again adapting the lesson to the life processes, and I can do this as follows. I give the children the mere facts that occur in space and time. The whole being is again addressed just as during an experiment, because the children are called upon to make themselves a mental picture of space. We should see to it that they do this, that they see what we tell them, in their minds. They should also have a mental picture of the corresponding time. When I have brought this about, I shall try to add details about the people and events—not in a narrative way, but merely by characterization.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

Questions
Following story time, I ask for questions. Sometimes there are none; students bask in what they have just heard. Other times, I haven’t said what I thought I said, or been heard as I meant to be heard, and I have to explain or present something again. I generally try to answer all questions, but, if necessary, I end the section by promising to answer questions privately or address them in the future.

Details, Recapitulation
If there are details I need to add that weren’t central to my presentation—a perspective on life in those times, an anecdote that isn’t central but that illuminates something relevant, and so on—I add them at this point. If we’re short on time, I keep it short. If the review and presentation have gone quickly, I can “digress” and add a lot. This time also allows me to briefly recapitulate or synopsize the material I have presented.

(Steiner: “I now describe and draw the children’s attention to what they heard in the first part of the lesson. In the first part, I occupied their whole being; in the second, it is the rhythmic part of their being that must make an effort. I then dismiss them.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

A Last Question
I complete my presentation in two important ways, ways that, although they may take only a few seconds of time, lay the foundation for my future teaching, give the students something to chew on overnight, and lay the ground for good discipline (which is to say, good behavior, which is to say, an attitude of wanting to learn, to hear what I have to say). I ask an open-ended, discussion question, such as, “You learned today about all the different characteristics of cave paintings. What do you make of these? In particular, why is it important—I’ll tell you that I believe it’s very significant—that these paintings have a black outline around them?” Students may leap to answer immediately, but they know I won’t say more until the next day. They can talk on the playground, ask mom and dad at dinner, or forget the question until I remind them the next day, but they’ve heard it and taken it in. The question previews the next day’s review.

Anticipation
I also make a statement about what we’ll learn the next day. It may be prosaic—“Tomorrow we’ll move on to the study of ancient Egypt”—but it’s better if I can make it slightly mysterious—“Tomorrow you’ll learn about people who gave coffins as great gifts.” Whether they remember or not, these questions work in the students overnight and they enter the classroom ready to learn (and ready not to misbehave). I believe these few seconds are the single greatest discipline technique I know. I also know that if I don’t write down my question and topic, I will likely forget them until the class is dismissed. Even if I can conduct the lesson without notes, I write down these items in order to remember them.

Work
Then we get to work on essays, drawings, or paintings. We may go to the library to do research. The longer I teach, the less necessary I believe homework to be, and I try, especially in middle school, to have students complete their work, or at least the bulk of it, in class. We clean up our work (“Mr. Sagarin, can I keep working during recess?” “Yes, you may”), stand quietly behind our chairs, and are dismissed for snack and recess.

Attention
So this is what I aim at. It rarely goes as planned and never perfectly. But more important than anything listed above is attention to the students. Do I need to shorten my presentation because the students are exhausted? Fine. Does something I read inspire them, and I keep reading for an extra twenty minutes, and continue the next day? An example: One year I read a portion of Voltaire’s Candide to a class, simply to give them the flavor of his writing and thinking. They were so taken by it that we read a chapter a day for the rest of the block. I had not intended to do anything like this, but see great value in attending to students’ actual interests. Does my review fall on deaf ears? I’ll cut it short and spend an evening thinking about how to present it in a way that these students can hear.

Also, and this is tough to write about clearly, I try to be specifically aware of each student—I’m not good at this, but I try to make sure each student speaks at least once in each class (and that some students don’t speak too much). I try to pay attention to those who need attention and leave alone those who seem to need to be left alone. Also, if something I’m teaching relates to the circumstances of one of the students, directly (parent dies in real life; parent of historical figure died young) or indirectly (this student is obsessed with fairness, and someone I’m teaching about was known for being extremely fair), I keep the student in mind. I don’t blurt out, “Oh, and Johnny, didn’t your father die young, too?” In fact, I’m likely to try to be more tactful in discussing the historical circumstances, rather than less, given what I know. These may not be the best examples, but I think the point—lessons meet real life, we hope tactfully, in a classroom—is clear.

“Typical” Main Lesson (That is, one that never actually occurs)
10 min.: Class business.
3 min.: Verse.
15 min.: Music, but not in high school (I still wonder how necessary this really is in a main lesson period).
20 min.: Review (highly variable; and I increasingly think of this as the period of “real” learning—new material is an introduction…); discussion; note-taking.
20-30 min.: New material, including questions and added description (longer in HS).
1 min.: Question.
1 min.: Preview.
30-40 min.: Work; giving and collecting assignments. If everyone’s doing well, I can get some work done, too. (Shorter, but still present, in HS.)
Dismissal.

Breakfast in Jail: Unintended Consequences of an Attempt to Educate Me

2011-03-29T12:54:00.000-04:00

In second grade, our teacher took us to the local police station for a tour. I’m not sure why she did it, but I recall enough to surmise that the effect on me wasn’t what she had in mind.

We were shown around the small offices. I remember dark wood and the govern-mint green walls. We stepped down a short hallway, and there was the lock-up, green painted steel bars, a tile floor, a cot, a toilet. A large officer talked to us. “And if you have to spend a night with us, here’s where you’ll sleep, and there’s where you’ll have to go to the bathroom. In the morning, we’ll bring you coffee and donuts.”

Donuts! We never had donuts for breakfast at home, and, as someone who really enjoyed (enjoys) food, the idea of donuts for breakfast was just about enough to make me volunteer to stay. An adventure with a donut at the end of it. What could be better?

I’m happy to report that I haven’t spent a night in jail and I don’t believe I ever will. But donuts for breakfast are still a real treat.

Thinking about Scientology's "Study Tech"

2011-03-17T12:13:00.002-04:00

According to Lawrence Wright, in a New Yorker profile (Feb. 14 & 21, 2011, pp. 95-96) of Paul Haggis, “The Apostate: A former Scientologist speaks out,” and corroborated on a Scientology FAQ, education in schools established by Scientologists is based on three principles, together known as “study technology” or “study tech.” According to the Scientologists, “the impediment to students’ ability to retain and effectively use data [prior to L. Ron Hubbard’s discovery of ‘study tech’] was the absence of a technology of how to study.” Study tech rests on three principles: the use of clay or other materials to model concepts that are otherwise abstract or difficult to understand; the use of dictionaries and other sources to clarify precise word meanings; and the teaching of a topic as completely as possible to avoid “too steep a gradient” in learning.

These principles sound innocuous, but I believe reflection yields some reservations.

In the article, Haggis’s daughter is cited regarding the helpful use of clay to model an atom. But this takes a complex, easily misunderstood and still not completely understood phenomenon—an atom—and renders it in crude material terms. Clay cannot hold an electrical charge, or act like a wave and a particle simultaneously, or evince entanglement, or demonstrate statistical probabilities or quantum states. Most of what’s important or interesting about atoms is necessarily left out, glossed over, or caricatured. Like those annoying silver balls and hoops on the credits for the amusing TV show, The Big Bang Theory, the clay is just sort of “there,” reinforcing our lack of understanding of the matter of the universe, or, more worrying, reinforcing a false materialism.

Similarly, dictionaries, while helpful, offer only a low-level consensus on conventional meanings with, at best, a historical look at word origins and usages. Definition is among the lowest order of understanding and interpretation, often necessary but rarely enough. Taken to an extreme, a dictionary or definition-based approach to learning yields knowledge as a sort of butterfly collection, each specimen pinned and identified. Something is missing here: life.

The concept of “too steep a gradient” seems the least objectionable; Vygotsky’s concept of a “zone of proximal development” may apply here, the idea that we start from where we are and then, with the guidance of teachers or of experience, move beyond our current state at a rate that is not so slow that it causes boredom and not so rapid that it causes confusion. There is probably “too steep a gradient” for each of us. On the other hand, we are only capable of learning “completely” within the limits of our developmental stage. How much science can, say, a 3rd grader learn completely? Clearly, very little, and with very little understanding of the actual creative work of a scientist. Effective learning clearly builds on what comes before, but, also, on anticipation of what is still unknown.

The Dinosaurs lived in Stockbridge?

2011-02-25T12:02:00.000-05:00

Some students enter high school believing—as movies have shown them—that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in the distant past. How distant, they cannot say, because to know the dates for the evolution of humanity—perhaps 4 million years ago—and the last mass extinction of dinosaurs—about 65 million years ago—leads to the simple realization that there’s no overlap here. Further, some students picture this overlap in historical time, Stone Age human beings fending off dinosaur attacks.

If we picture all of human history—about 10,000 years—on my blackboard, which is 5 feet wide, then where did the dinosaurs live? My blackboard is oriented north-south, parallel to Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Putting today, 2011, on the far right and the Neolithic revolution, around 8000 BCE, on the far left, we can then extend the timeline back, north along Main Street, and ask, where did the dinosaurs last live? And the answer is, roughly, a bit more than 6 miles north, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of Norman Rockwell and the Red Lion Inn. It’s amusing to picture the dinosaurs in rocking chairs on the Red Lion’s porch, perhaps smoking the cigarettes that, according to Gary Larson, may have done them in. (As one of the largest remaining wood-structure hotels, I’m sure there’s no smoking allowed on the front porch of the Red Lion.)

Comparing the distance between the end of the age of dinosaurs and the beginning of history gives a valuable and needed corrective perspective for students who suffer from too many movie images of the world.

Steiner's so-called "Education for Adolescents"

2011-02-03T19:30:00.002-05:00

Among my pet peeves regarding the translation and publication of Rudolf Steiner’s educational work is this:

The book Education for Adolescents is misnamed and therefore overlooked by many Waldorf teachers who might benefit from studying it.

Through about the 1960s, the book was published with the uninformative but more accurate title, The Supplementary Course. It was called this because it supplemented the course that Steiner gave for the teachers at the first Waldorf School in late summer 1919 before the school opened its doors. After one year of success and failure, ups and downs, and observation of how the students and teachers were doing in real life, Steiner gave 8 lectures, literally a course for teachers meant to supplement the course he had given the year before.

Reading through, it’s clear, too that the first four of the eight lectures basically pertain to all teachers, not simply those who teach adolescents. And, later, when he addresses the teaching of adolescents—the Waldorf school was about to open its high school grades—it’s clear that he’s speaking to teachers of all grades (except early childhood, not because he didn’t want to, but because the first Waldorf school had no early childhood or kindergarten program at that point in its life).

It’s one thing for the book to be overlooked by those who might profitably read it.

It’s another when some do read it but ignore the discussion in it because “it's for high school students,” projecting an understanding of an erroneous title onto the contents.

Finally, it’s here, in lecture 3, that Steiner lays out, clearly and beautifully, the concept of a lesson carried over two days (not three; I am not aware of any source for a three day lesson), one that is not, in fact a “threefold” lesson in the conventional way these are conceived, but in a way that calls on the whole child to begin, that then carries into imagination and will, and that then returns to judgment and conceptualization on the following day.

But don’t take my word for it, read the darn thing yourself.

Snow Day

2011-02-02T11:53:00.001-05:00

Today is the best of snow days. We called it last night around 7 p.m., so no one had to get up extra-early to make phone calls or send emails. And the weather cooperated. By dawn there were six inches of new snow on the ground, and the changeover to ice, rattling my windows, was just beginning. But not all snow days are equal.

A friend used to work as a local reporter. Interviewing a school superintendent, he asked, innocently, “What’s the hardest part of your job?” The immediate answer: “Snow days.”

Snow days remind me of George Carlin’s question: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

If we close school, we’re wrong because it just wasn’t that bad.

If we don’t close school, we’re wrong because it was clearly unsafe to travel.

How do we decide? The local superintendent consults the town road crew, who are often actually awake at 4:30 in the morning, plowing, sanding, and salting. And then, based on their recommendation, he makes a decision.

Private schools, of which we are one, follow this decision because some of our students, too, travel to school on buses provided by the district. If the buses are running, we’re open. If not, we’re closed. It’s a pretty simple protocol, and it works well most of the time. But New England weather is unpredictable and so we usually end up looking like idiots or maniacs at least once a winter.

Another Exchange on Waldorf School Administration

2011-01-31T12:34:00.002-05:00

What follows is another brief exchange on administration in a Waldorf school. The questions are from a person thinking of applying to work in a Waldorf school; the responses are mine.

What I have seen in the Waldorf schools I have been associated with are Administrators who have no Waldorf training background or Anthroposophical study (or interest, for that matter).

It seems to me that this is just not workable in the long run—how can the administrator gain the trust of the teachers without at least some real interest? In one school at which I worked, however, one administrator was an anthroposophist through and through but then not a good administrator. This person would sit in the office talking about the influence of Jupiter while the bookkeeper’s questions went unanswered… That was a disaster and the person ended up losing the job. So some interest in anthroposophy is probably essential, but that alone, of course, isn’t sufficient.

It also appears to be a relatively new concept for a Waldorf school to allow someone outside of the faculty to assist with the running of the school. Having been an administrator for a lot of my previous career, I see this as a positive move for the sustainability of Waldorf schools, if a school can afford that position.

I agree, and I think there are differences between what Steiner meant by “administration,” which really has to do with things that impact the children’s experiences in the classrooms, and what we now call “governance,” which includes lots of things that the first Waldorf school simply didn’t have to deal with (and, I’ll bet, when they did have to deal with such things, Emil Molt, not the administrative committee of the teachers, handled them), things like admissions, business management, publicity, development, etc.

I also believe that the role of Administrator is probably different in each school, meeting the school's needs where it is and helping to carry it where it needs to go.

I couldn’t agree more. There is no blueprint. Each school is a different organism.

That being said, do you find that there are some "general" experiences that prove to be beneficial in being an Administrator (qualifications, etc)?

Yes—things that any good administrator would have—organization, a sense for the whole, an even temper, mediation and facilitation skills, management (of admin. staff) skills, strategic thinking, and on and on… And, in my experience, I had to develop what I didn’t have!

Is it necessary to have been a Waldorf teacher? (I know you say it is optimal, but I agree that usually a teacher prefers a classroom--administration, being a part of a team, requires another set of skills--at least that's been my experience).

No, not necessary. BUT I believe it’s powerful (and perhaps, according to Steiner, necessary) for an administrator to teach, even if just a period or two per week—if nothing else, the administrator can have a third grade reading group, for example, or teach a middle school main lesson block, or whatever matches with her or his abilities. This contact with students is invaluable—it keeps an administrator “grounded” in the work of the school.

I also wonder if the skills I have in being a director/administrator for several programs for children would be useful in the administration of a Waldorf school? Are they "universally translatable" skills? Or do they need to be more anthrophosophically based?

Yes, I believe solid administrative skills are directly translatable. More than 90% of the work is the same from organization to organization. It’s also valuable to have a solid understanding of Steiner’s work on threefold organization because of the way it informs so much of the rhetoric around Waldorf school governance, administration, and organization. And it’s NOT well understood, in my experience. An administrator who is willing to develop a good understanding of this aspect of work in a school can be invaluable to the institution.

Why are some Waldorf school parents so emotional?

2011-01-27T17:22:00.001-05:00

Parents love and want the best for their children. They live vicariously through their children’s experiences, good and bad, and defend and protect their children vigilantly. All of this, healthfully pursued, is noble, good, and understandable.

The emotions that attend parent experiences in Waldorf schools, however, seem more frequently than at other schools to spill over into extremes.

Sometimes, parents who apply to a Waldorf school have their child rejected, and then seem, instantly, to develop animosity to the school, a school they were almost desperate to be part of moments before; their hopes were high, then their hearts were broken. By contrast, parents of applicants rejected by local prep schools are much more likely to be upset but still to hold the school in high esteem; and, if a place there opens in the future, to send their children. Those rejected by a Waldorf school may form a negative impression that they carry for years. They don’t just feel rejected, they feel ill-used.

Or parents enter a Waldorf school community with tremendous energy, enthusiasm, and idealism, only to have their perceptions change a couple of years later when they realize that the school actually doesn’t, can’t, live up to their image of it. In my experience, this process is more intense than the general “burnout” that parents who volunteer at any school can feel. And schools contribute to this phenomenon—maybe even cause it—by allowing expectations to be so high. Out of insecurity, perhaps, Waldorf schools may represent ideals, far more than they can ever deliver, without offering a healthy dose of reality.

Or parents withdraw their students—sometimes for perfectly valid reasons, and sometimes for reasons that have more to do with adult interactions and not with a child’s experience in school—and badmouth the school for years afterward. Again, by comparison, parents who leave a more conventional school may blame a teacher or an administrator or a social dynamic, but they are less likely, I believe, to blame the school as a whole.

In all of these cases, it seems as if the emotions attached to the experiences are greater than the emotions attached to parallel experiences at another school—Montessori, Country Day, public school.

I have two interlocking theories about why this is so.

First, the idealism and even zealotry of the convert can be dangerous. To the extent that parents act as “converts” to Waldorf education and see Waldorf schools as “more” than just schools, or to the extent that Waldorf schools raise parents’ expectations too high, higher than the schools can ever fulfill, they are in for an awakening down the road. Many families navigate this terrain well, but for a few it provides a shock from which they don’t easily recover.

Second, parents see the world through their children’s eyes and occasionally forget that it’s not appropriate for an adult to see the world only as a third or seventh grader sees it. Research demonstrates, for example, that children lose confidence or faith in school between third and fourth grade. Whether we call this evidence of a “nine year change” or something else, it’s a genuine phenomenon. Teachers see it all the time. Children who loved school and loved their teachers in second grade begin to question these things in third and fourth grade. A parent invested in perfection just can’t stand to hear the words—perhaps uttered more as a test than as a fact, “I hate my teacher.” The teacher is the same one of whom the student said the year before, “I love my teacher.” Usually it’s the student who is changing, of course, not the teacher. (This is not an argument for parent blindness—not all teachers are good teachers for every student, and no parent should be so zealous as to keep a child in a class or school against better judgment.)

And parents don’t just lend undue credence to the reports of their children, they often affect the behavior of their children, as well. I have seen seventh grade parents, upset with children’s behavior that caused hurt feelings and schisms in the class, behave to each other exactly in order to create hurt feelings and schisms among the parents. A rule of thumb for teachers and administrators might be, parents may look like adults, but, when pushed, will behave like the children in whom they have such a great stake.

I don’t say this to insult parents (I have two children myself, and my wife frequently used to ask, “How can you be so good with other people’s children, and so obtuse with your own?”) but to warn of unconscious behavior that can only make some difficult situations worse.

What do you think?

A Perspective on Wealth

2011-01-21T14:44:00.000-05:00

If you are reading this, you are likely among the wealthiest persons ever to live. Ever.

Do you have heat in your house, a car, hot and cold running water, a refrigerator, a washer and dryer, a TV? Do you have more than one pair of shoes, more than a couple of sets of clothes?

Imagine trying to replace all of these things with labor—yours or your servants’—in a pre-industrial world. Think of the horses, liverymen, stablehands, cartwrights you’d need to begin to replace your automobile. (And, if you don’t own a car, you can still probably travel a hundred miles or so by public transportation for the cost of about an hour’s labor.)

Imagine what it would have taken to have a variety of fresh food—bananas in December—available to you year-round.

Imagine the labor necessary to cut, haul, and split the wood to heat your house and your stove.

Imagine the labor needed to herd the sheep, grow the flax or cotton, harvest or shear it, turn it into thread, weave the cloth and sew your clothes. To make your shoes. To bring you news of the world. To give you a hot bath or shower any time you like.

(Of course, regardless of your wealth, the pace of your travel wouldn’t come close to the speed of travel today, for those who can afford it. You might not be able to find a banana in January for all your wealth. And nylon, lycra, and polypropylene simply didn’t exist.)

Each of us in the industrialized world lives like only a king could live through most of human history. Cheers!

Theories of Motion

2010-12-20T14:46:00.001-05:00

The Greek “dunamis,” from which we get words like “dynamic,” can be read or translated several different ways, and each interpretation brings with it a world-view. At one end, we can translate it as the physical property of “potentiality.” This ignores, however, much of what Aristotle or another Greek would have meant by the word. They would have tied our material interpretation to other, metaphysical and immaterial meanings, ultimately, perhaps, including a concept of “divine power” and the force of a “daimon,” a deity inferior to the highest deity or deities.

If we ask today why a ball that we throw through the air continues to move after it has left our hand, we discuss mass, force, acceleration, momentum, and gravity, each of which can be measured, if not (yet) thoroughly understood.

But the dunamis, because it is immaterial, cannot be measured. Hence, we have learned over the past centuries to redefine it, to shape it into a concept (potential energy) that can be measured, and to ignore other meanings that it may have.

Further, ignoring these other meanings, relegating them to the qualitative sphere that we have gradually come to see as derivative of a more quantitative engagement with the world, we have come to disbelieve in their existence, to see their existence as superstition.

But this disbelief consists of a series of assumptions that put us in an illogical, if apparently reasonable, position. We may say that we have no need of an immaterial concept of the dunamis, that we find it extraneous to what we want to know and do, but we simply cannot pass judgment on its existence or non-existence. Without quite acknowledging it, we have allowed theory to become fact.

We throw a ball and it travels through the air. The ball weighs, say, 5.25 ounces and has a circumference of 9.25 inches. It’s covered in white horsehide and stitched with thick red threads. It spins and generates air pressure differentials that cause its trajectory to curve. The “force of gravity” (which we can measure but cannot yet comprehend or explain) draws it and the earth together. It drops past the batter’s knees, a called strike three. And there may—or may not—be a lower deity, a daimon, one of the dunamoi, guiding it along its way. We just don’t know.

Am I actually suggesting that I believe in immaterial beings of motion? I don’t believe but I also don’t disbelieve in them. But I acknowledge that my belief in physics does not contradict a belief in a qualitative understanding of motion and even of beings of motion, the dunamoi.

Learning to Think in High School

2010-12-03T15:08:00.000-05:00

We learn with more than just our heads. Lots of us, not just those in Waldorf schools, agree with this.

In 1956 (and after), to take a prime example, Benjamin Bloom described a taxonomy or hierarchical organization of learning within a threefold context of cognition (thinking), affect (feeling), and psychomotor behavior (will). Based on continuing research, his taxonomy has since been modified and now includes these six levels, from the highest to the most basic: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering.

Based on the work of John Gardner at the Garden City Waldorf School in the 1950s and 1960s and Douglas Gerwin since then, Waldorf schools approach each grade of high school differently in terms of assignments, expectations, and the development of thinking.

Looking over their work recently in preparation for a faculty meeting, it occurred to me that John Gardner almost certainly took Bloom’s work and compressed it—six levels sandwiched into four years of high school. And it makes sense to do this. Bloom’s work was based on higher education, on students who had largely passed the developmental stage of adolescence. For those teaching adolescents, a gradual introduction to more sophisticated thinking makes sense.

Interestingly, Gardner had the insight to move the synthesis required of creativity to the head of the list before a reassessment of Bloom’s research in the 1980s that did the same thing—earlier, “evaluating” was higher than “creativity.”

Our high school Core Teachers study education at each of our faculty meetings, and use the concepts outlined below in creating assignments in literature, history, science, and other subjects based on this understanding of thinking, learning, and mastery.

Ninth graders focus on accurate observation and description.
• Key words appropriate for 9th grade assignments include these: Observe, describe, note, summarize, re-tell, sequence, depict, illustrate, name, report, specify, and state.
• Questions for 9th graders might begin: What…?

Tenth graders focus on objective comparison.
• Key words for 10th grade assignments include these: Compare, contrast, difference, similarity, equation, equivalence, inequality, analogy, affinity, relationship, balance, weigh, connect, correlate, match, and proportion.
• Questions for 10th graders might begin: How…?

Eleventh graders focus on metamorphosis or transformation (building up) and analysis of a whole into parts (taking apart).
• Key words for 11th grade assignments include these: Analyze, abstract, theory, growth, transformation, metamorphosis, change, interpret (parts), make-up, essay, dissect, test, influence, involve, estimate, scrutinize, divide, and cause (and effect).
• Questions for 11th graders might begin: Why…?

Twelfth grade aims at individual synthesis; that is, forming an argument using the methods of grades 9-11 to present a coherent point of view that represents a student’s own view.
• Key words for 12th grade assignments include these: Synthesis, meaning, interpretation (whole), judgment, contemplation, reflection, integrate, assemble, combine, unite, unify.
• Questions for 12th graders might begin: Who…? (in the sense of a student’s relationship to the material; and, ultimately, who am I?)

Interpreting a Hard World

2010-11-30T08:41:00.001-05:00

When I was a child of nine or ten, the world suddenly seemed hard. I mean this literally. Not that life was hard in some metaphorical way, but that everything from the porcelain sky through the shiny leaves and silver bark of maples in summer to the granular asphalt under my feet had an impenetrable quality. I was outside this world, and I found this alarming, discomfiting, depressing. This feeling overwhelmed me at times, especially on bright days when the sun mercilessly picked out the infinite detail of the world.

That the world was this way didn’t seem like my active perception of it so much as an intrusion from “out there,” and I struggled against it, mentally trying to soften things up, to penetrate their surfaces, or, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, to become one with them again.

But there was nothing I could do, there was, then, nothing to do about it. This feeling of otherness, of separation, was simply a fact of my existence, but one that I clearly had not noticed before.

For several years—until I was 15 or 16—I could summon this feeling at will, immerse myself in it, experience it, examine it anew. But this ability faded, and now I have only a memory of it.

I forgot about all of this for decades.

And then, a few weeks ago, something about the brightness of the sunlight (the leaves are off the trees), perhaps, triggered a memory, and it all came flooding back.

As an older person, I can begin to interpret this sense I had then. Small children are connected to the world and their parents, at first literally and then, for years and years, metaphorically and, without effort to reconnect, increasingly tenuously. I believe I experienced something of my separation—from my parents and family, but also from creation at large—something of my growing individuality, in seeing the appearance of the world as so impenetrable.

That the world so all-of-a-sudden took on this hard quality implies that it wasn’t that way before this, when I was one, two, three, or eight. That is, that my perception of it was different, that what I found now, by comparison, must have been different. I can only say that the metaphorical inside of the world was still united with its outside. (For Barfield, consciousness is “the inside of the whole world.”) And then these split.

Notes on Starting a Waldorf High School

2010-11-12T14:43:00.006-05:00

What follow are answers to questions posed by Douglas Gerwin in research on starting a Waldorf high school (so far unpublished, I believe). I thank the half-dozen or so of my colleagues who helped me come up with these answers a couple of years ago.

What helped the most and least in preparation and founding?
Most:
• A years-long anthroposophical adolescence and high school study group of teachers and parents.
• Students who wanted to continue in a Waldorf school and asked their parents to help make it happen—not many, at first, but a couple with real initiative.
• Steadfast and enthusiastic parents, teachers, and trustees.
• The attitude that we’re going to do this even if we have to meet in someone’s living room to save money; that my child will be there in September even if she’s the only one.
• An experienced lead teacher to inspire students and parents (who had taught the lead class in 7th and 8th grade).

Least:
• A “wait and see” or “prove this is worthy” attitude from some trustees, teachers, and parents.
• Antagonism from elementary school parents concerned that their money would support others’ children’s high school education.
• Selfishness and resentment about “lending” elementary school teachers to the high school.
• That the elementary school had been established for more than 30 years—no pioneer spirit left.
• That the elementary school had “lost” a high school in the 1980s—had started one and then had to close it fewer than four years later.
• Presence of Hawthorne Valley School—including a Waldorf high school—c. 25 min. away. (Although we believed—and still believe—that two healthy elementary schools can support two healthy high schools; that there’s room for healthy cultural variation among Waldorf schools—more choice is better; and that, like gas stations clustered near the center of a town, people will go where the education is.)
• Culture among elementary school parents; expectation that 8th grade “graduates” will go on to prep school.

What were the big surprises, miscalculations?
• The whole thing has been a surprise... That we’re still here and have grown through the nation’s recession, that we’ve had a balanced budget for the last three years, that our students and parents are happy and that the students are accepted to excellent colleges means we haven’t miscalculated too badly...
• That we had a fantastically successful 9th grade year (first year of high school) and then were told that others had misgivings about moving ahead with grade 10. (To be precise, some of us remember agreeing to see how 9th grade went before deciding if there would be a 10th grade—like many prep schools, we could imagine being a K-9 school for a few years before moving to a full high school; others remembered an agreement that we were not adding a 10th grade, no matter what. The lack of clarity here—no minutes or written Board decision—hurt us.)
• How difficult it was to have part of a high school (9th grade, 9th and 10th, and 9th, 10th, and 11th) without a senior class. Seniors are real leaders, and the school didn’t really start to feel complete and entirely happy until spring 2006, just before our first graduation.
• Skepticism of supposedly committed elementary school teachers.
• Economic hardship—more than one teacher worked for a year for nothing. Nothing.
• Community involvement has been spectacular.
• Exceptional visiting teachers.

What were the biggest obstacles, hurdles?
• The sheer difficulty of the operation, top to bottom. The infinite detail.
• Initial lack of money and students. The high school “paying for” a crisis in the elementary school at the time of founding with reduced enrollment. Little money for PR; low visibility...
• Perception that we were “just” a continuation of the elementary school; that we would use elementary school understandings of students and teaching methods. (Which is like assuming that elementary school teachers will use early childhood understandings and techniques…)
• Perception that, because another Waldorf school is 25 min. away, our work was unnecessary or redundant.
• Faculty turn-over. Several teachers miscalculated their commitment or the difficulty of starting a school and left for greener or at least more predictable pastures.
• No tuition remission for our teachers. We couldn’t afford it. Now we don’t support it because not giving remission is a signal to our community that we’re all in this together. Teachers can enter the tuition assistance pool just like everyone else.

What do you wish you had done that you did not do? What would you do differently if you had it to do over again?
• Emphasize value of small school from the start (we spent a couple of years apologizing for our small size before our parents correctly pointed out to us the many benefits of our size): flexibility, motivation of students, caliber of work, focus, structure.
• “Sell” to students in grades 5-8. (We started with the belief that parents should make the decision about their children’s high school, even if we knew that students were making it. And we found each year that including 7th grade families wasn’t enough, nor 6th... “marketing” needs to include the whole elementary school, and targeting events—open houses, plays, etc.—needs to begin with 5th grade families.)
• Emphasize the need for confidentiality among colleagues as we go through the “birth pangs” of starting a school—specifically, for example, when we missed a pay period, it was harmful to the school (and didn’t help anyone get paid any faster) when teachers complained to parents or others.
• Establish a more structured relationship with our Elementary School to allow for greater clarity in planning for the future. We had an ad hoc joint committee of teachers and trustees, but this functioned reactively; we would have benefitted from a more durable, proactive group.
• Devote more energy to educating our elementary school teachers (especially in grades 5-8) about who we were and what we were doing. Like many parents, they assume that a Waldorf high school is “just” a continuation of the elementary school, not a transformation of it...

What are you grateful that you did do?
• That we started (instead of waiting).
• Engaged resources in the community—artists, studios, internships, Simon’s Rock college athletic center, lab, library, and, especially, the “language” trips that we instituted to Germany and Peru every other year.
• Stuck to our strong substance abuse policy. We lost a couple of valuable families by sticking to our guns, but, in the long run, we’re stronger and healthier and our enrollment has grown.

What was most helpful in generating enrollment, philanthropy?
• No annual appeal, just informative letters and requests every other month or so. Relationships with major donors.
• Success of pioneer classes—college acceptance, graduation speeches, general student presentation convinced many parents and students that we were worthwhile.
• Positive student attitudes and supportive students (and these developed more strongly from our 4th year on...)

What best persuaded 8th graders to join high school?
• Visiting days. Skeptical students were usually “wowed” by spending a day with us. Even those who went elsewhere recognized the quality of the school.
• Our annual play, too.
• And the possibility of travel and exchange.
• Also our flexibility—willingness to add courses or, for example, a darkroom and photography to curriculum based on student requests.
• The high quality of our teaching—a Core Faculty experienced in Waldorf schools; 2 PhDs; four of six Core Faculty members attended Ivy League schools and the others are also exceptionally well-educated.

What is essential in starting? What can you do without?
• At least one “real” Waldorf high school teacher, whatever that is, and enough committed families to create a pioneer class—our smallest number in the school has been 12 (our smallest class has been 3, if you don't count the year we had senior class of 4 and a junior class of zero).
• Passion, unity of purpose, and a mission shared among colleagues.
• Everything else, we’ve demonstrated so far, is extraneous, or at least can be jerry-rigged year-to-year.

How did you handle elementary school anxieties?
• Primarily by incorporating separately, not because we wanted to, but because it was the only way we could continue.
• Openness—willingness to meet, to answer questions, to allow visitors to classes, board meetings, etc., etc.
• As more and more nearby Waldorf schools founded high schools, however, the argument that, although it is risky to start a high school, it may be riskier not to, gained some traction among thoughtful parents and trustees.

How did you seek and secure “buy in” from community?
• By quietly representing ourselves openly and honestly. We had open board meetings from the start (and were followed a year later by our elementary school!).
• We try, with limited resources, to make sure that all our families, high school and elementary school, get the student newsletter, our fundraising letters (which we try to make as “meaty” as possible), etc.

Threefold Social Organization and Waldorf School Governance

2010-11-08T10:28:00.001-05:00

According to Rudolf Steiner, social organizations should have three cooperative but independent administrations—one to administer economic functions, one to administer rights and responsibilities of members of the organization, and one to administer what he calls the spiritual or cultural functions—he uses these words interchangeably in discussions of social questions—of the organization. These three administrations scale to cover the smallest institutions and the largest social groups. One administration may consider itself more central than the others to the mission of a particular organization, but all must balance if the organization is to maintain itself in health. A school, for instance, could mirror a theocracy if educational concerns are used to trump or bully the genuine concerns of the rights of its consumers.

This example points to the intuitive correctness of Steiner’s view. Take the opposite view; do we believe that justice should be bought and sold, or that the state should govern religion? For those seeking a more conventional (but no less difficult to comprehend) statement of a view of the theefold structure of society, Jurgen Habermas’s concept of a “lifeworld,” discussed in detail in the second volume of his Theory of Communicative Action, outlines a view that is essentially the same as Steiner’s. For Habermas, every communicative act—asking a question, making a statement—expresses all three of the human subsystems of thinking, feeling, and will. (That is, the most rigorous thought is still communicated with some emotional investment and some intention of will; the most emotional outburst still gives evidence of a thought and an intention, and so on.) Further, every communicative act, in that it is directed from one person to another or to a group of others, extends the human capacities of thinking, feeling, and will into a social interaction. Thinking extended into social interaction we may call culture; feeling extended becomes politics; and will extended concerns economic relations.

For Steiner, an economic administration should function according to a principle of solidarity (Steiner says “brotherhood,” but we should update this) through an “association of producers, distributors, and consumers.” For a school, a child’s education is a product in the economic sphere. It is more than this, but it is also this. Hence, a school should have an administrative body that is comprised of producers—representatives of teachers and staff—and consumers—representatives of the parent body as proxies for their children. Such an administration, to ensure that its work is legal and effective, will also require legal and financial expertise. (Introducing expertise of any kind, we should acknowledge, introduces something from the spiritual-cultural sphere.)

The work of this administration is to balance the needs, desires, and resources of producers and consumers to produce a budget and to plan for the future. Clearly, this administrative body may be identified with a school’s board of trustees.

An administration of the spiritual-cultural area of a school functions according to a principle of freedom, and so—despite tradition and received wisdom—it is difficult if not impossible to say how this administration will or should be governed. It might operate as a so-called College of Teachers that uses a consensus decision-making model, but, in freedom, there is no requirement that it do so.

Steiner did not specify a decision-making process for cultural organizations (and, if he did, we would still have to decide for ourselves whether or not we agree with his statements), and, in fact, in the meetings to reorganize the Anthroposophical Society in 1923-1924, stated that the process mattered little and should be left up to individual groups. One group might choose to function aristocratically, another more democratically. His position was that the structure mattered less than the persons involved, and that those chosen to carry out a task be given the freedom to do it. I believe his views here on constituting the administration of branches of the Society are directly applicable to constituting the administration of a Waldorf school. And, in the first Waldorf School, Steiner was the Director, appointed by acclamation (not by vote).

A spiritual-cultural administration consists of the teachers in the school, regardless of how they structure their governance or decision-making. As Steiner said, “no one who is not a teacher is to have anything to say [about how education is conducted].” Powerful words, if true. Of course, visiting teachers—consultants, mentors—and doctors and therapists who work with the students in a school may be included. But that’s about it. In a Waldorf school we may call this group the College of Teachers, the Core Faculty, the Council, or something else. We may worry that it is too small and too exclusive (and then work to make it larger and more inclusive—there are many ways to do this), but this is the body in most Waldorf schools that corresponds to the free administration of the spiritual-cultural life of a school.

And the work of this administration is the education of students.

A third administration, an administration of rights and responsibilities, which functions democratically according to a principle of equality, should clearly include representatives of every constituency of the school community, anyone who has any rights within the organization, anyone who has any responsibilities to the organization. Here we include students, parents, teachers, staff, alumni, retired faculty and staff, and even donors. All have some number of rights and responsibilities to the organism of the school. These include legally recognized rights, and so this administration requires legal representation, if not at every meeting, at least as a resource on-call.

(I use “rights and responsibilities” because I believe that to be a more revealing phrase in this context than “politics,” a word that is tainted in contemporary colloquial use, and more revealing than “legal,” which doesn’t go far enough to describe what I’m talking about. And I include “responsibilities” because these are clearly conceptually necessary, with rights, to describe what I’m talking about. Steiner includes them, although this is often overlooked or forgotten. To call it a “rights” administration alone indulges a kind of knee-jerk American selfishness—I’ll insist on my rights—and ignores the obligations that we owe each other in social interactions.)

Rights are myriad. Perhaps they begin with clear legally recognized rights, but they also include the policies and procedures of the school. Among other things, for instance, applicants have a right to a clear response to their application in a reasonable time. Responsibilities, too, are myriad. Parents must pay their bills. Teachers must engage in appropriate professional development. Breach of rights or responsibilities is reason for discipline or termination.

Policies, procedures, working conditions, contracts, all belong to this administration. Its work is to set and negotiate the boundaries within which the human beings in the organization conduct their work.

Often, it seems, this work is fragmented in Waldorf schools, is not given to one administration. The Board sets its own policies and procedures, as does the College of Teachers or Council. The support staff (administrative staff) may do the same. A Human Resources committee may assume responsibility for some aspects of this work.

This fragmentation may lead to confusion and miscommunication among parents, teachers, and board members. Dysfunction in this area seems to plague Waldorf schools, and I would say that this is, in part, because schools are clear about the function of a Board and a College but remarkably unclear about the function of this third administration—in fact, there is usually no single name we can use to designate it in a Waldorf school, and there is no single administrative body that consists of representatives of all the constituencies of the school.

(In many schools, the Board may see this administration as part of its legal function, but may then micromanage, fail to distinguish properly between economic concerns and those of rights and responsibilities, or fail to constitute and empower a committee that can take full responsibility for this work. Similarly, Colleges of Teachers may fail to distinguish their appropriate educational function from that of a separate rights and responsibilities administration.)

Schools would undoubtedly be stronger if there was a single administrative team, constituted according to correct principles, that oversaw this work. As it is, too often, policies are weak or incomplete, forgotten or ignored, or simply absent, sending persons of otherwise good will up a wall and out of a school.

As a test case, we might ask first about a clear process for terminating a teacher who is not fulfilling her responsibilities to her students or the school. Schools accomplish this, but often with far greater ill will and rancor than sister institutions (that don’t claim to have such an idealistic view of the world but that function with better management and clarity). And as a second test case, we might ask about a clear process and procedure for terminating this person if she is the Faculty Chair or other person who might otherwise be central to the termination of another colleague. Is there a safety valve or a back door?

Democracy here does not imply voting, or not voting alone. Dewey’s broad definition of democracy as “conjoint community” may point us in the right direction. Decision-making may be democratic and consensus-driven (within legal boundaries), or it may be representational and use some other decision-making process. The point is that all voices are heard and considered.

(I am indebted to my students at Sunbridge Institute for helping me clarify several aspects of this article; it attempts to summarize a week of work in an intensive course on school governance.)

Bad Teachers Teaching Badly

2010-10-15T09:12:00.004-04:00

About a year ago, for reasons now lost, my students and I started a running list of things bad teachers do, or bad teaching techniques.

We have derived a lot of amusement from creating this list, although seeing it typed out gives me pause—I see my own imperfections and those of my colleagues. Although my students and I may have been chuckling as we added another item to the list, I also see how pernicious and destructive bad teaching can be.

(I remember Mrs. C, a 6th grade teacher in a public school I attended. She accused me of something I hadn't done and required me to stay after school to write 100 times that I wouldn't do it again--I don't remember what it was. When I tried to protest, she brow-beat a false confession out of me. I still can't believe how easily I capitulated. After school, while I was writing, she accused me of giggling when I sighed, and added another 100 repetitions. Almost 40 years later, I can't believe how worked up I can still get about all this.)

A list of things bad teachers do throws into relief what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might avoid and suggests what a decent, not to say, good, teacher might do.

Feel free to add to this list in Comments.

Insult your students.
Threaten your students.
Use physical and psychological aggression to punish and humiliate your students.
Show off in front of your students.
Indulge any digression you feel like in front of your students; allow yourself to be continually distracted.
Ignore student questions.
Get angry when students ask questions.
Repeat answers to questions even when it’s clear that they don’t understand the answer you are giving.
Encourage students to bully and tease each other.
Arrive late to class, or don’t come at all.
Play favorites in a class and treat students unfairly.
Compare one student with another, favorably and unfavorably, especially with regard to older siblings you have taught in the past.
Punish a whole class when one student deserves discipline.
Indulge horseplay.
Teach wrong or outdated facts. Make up answers when you don’t know them.
Spend the class talking about yourself and your conspiracy theories.
Teach the same thing every day, day after day.
Yell.
Comment on your students in a way that will embarrass them.
Give them nicknames that they don’t want and don’t appreciate.
Show movies.
Fall asleep in the back of the class during student presentations.
Call students by the wrong names.
Lose students' work after they hand it in, then claim you never received it and accuse them of lying if they insist that they handed it in.
Don't return students' work.

Model Teachers

2010-10-14T09:43:00.000-04:00

Our most highly paid, most highly regarded teachers have no training in education. None. They don’t have education degrees, teaching certificates, or even, at least at first, any teaching experience. They’re professionals in their fields, but amateurs in the field of education, even the best ones, and, for good reasons, no one seems to think this matters.

I’m talking, of course, about university professors.

What do they have going for them? They have great educations themselves—the hiring process ensures that those offered jobs and then tenure generally have the best credentials, have gone to the best schools—and they are experts in their fields.

But back up one year, from freshman year of college (where your teacher is likely to be a lowly Teaching Assistant, not a professor) to senior year of high school, and requirements and expectations alter radically. Your best high school teacher was likely a union member with a master’s degree in education and a teaching certificate, an amateur in the subject she taught but a professional teacher.

Should our goal in improving teaching then be to require more credentials and certifications, to professionalize something that we don’t really recognize as a profession? Or would we be better off if we figured out how to take what works in universities and make it work for younger students?

The Opposite of an Ancient Egyptian

2010-10-08T10:28:00.001-04:00

Like many, I often go to bed too late, reading by the bedside lamp, then awake, groggy, to an alarm clock, drink too much coffee, eat too much sugar, and, during the day, pay too much attention to those athletes, movie stars, and musicians whom we pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars to distract us, for an hour or two, from our actual lives. And, like you, I live in a world that for the past hundred years or so has erected curtain-walled towers that reach toward the sky and that consist mostly of air, a world that has learned to fly and then raced to the moon.

Our feelings of heaviness, of tiredness, which we combat with levity, with stimulants, with distraction, and with structures and endeavors that soar (yes, the dream of flight is ages old, but not in the context in which we experience it now), present a configuration unique to our age. Undoubtedly those hundreds of historical generations that lived before the electric light, the professional musician, the can of caffeinated sugary soda, did not suffer as we do (not that they didn’t have suffering of their own).

Take the Egyptian pyramids, almost five thousand years old, built in a creative burst of no more than a couple of hundred years. They are virtually solid mountains of stone. Imagine standing in an inner chamber, any shaft to it sealed off, in the blackness. Above, below, and all around you are hundreds of feet of solid stone. Feel the weight, the claustrophobic pressure. This is not a modern structure.

Or look at an Egyptian sculpture or relief or painting of a pharaoh. Notice the too-large, flat feet, almost pyramid-shaped, loving attention given to each toe.

The Egyptians, too, created much of their artwork for the afterlife, to be sealed in tombs, not to be seen by human eyes again; they did not open museums and galleries and invite the public. They mummified bodies and sealed them away. (We, apparently, plasticize them for display and ship them around the world.)

Perhaps the Egyptians, like young children, felt, relative to grown-ups of today, too light, too disincarnated, too disconnected from the world around them. Not too heavy and tired, but buoyant. So, rather, than seeking levity and stimulants, they sought gravity and weight. Rather than a focus on the here-and-now, a focus on the hereafter.

The Egyptian experience, I propose, was the opposite of our levity, our tiredness, our materialism and our concern for this life, now.

Perhaps it’s no accident that, a short while later, Greek drama was born as tragedy.

Waldorf Schools and Political Bent

2010-10-07T09:26:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine in liberal Massachusetts recently asked his fiscally conservative Republican father (who lives in a different state) to support his grandchild's Waldorf school. My friend described the school and the exchange as follows (I’m quoting him but I’ve changed things a bit to make them more generic):

“There is a strict dress code—no logos or camouflage. Not too much skin. There are haircut rules. Good manners and respectful behavior are taught and expected. Mornings begin with handshakes and eye contact. The day ends the same way. Cell phones are prohibited. Personal music devices are prohibited. Don’t even ask about computer games. Preschoolers cook or bake their own natural snacks daily, and say a blessing before lunch. All children bring lunch. There is no cafeteria. There are no vending machines. There is no soda or junk food. Students spend eight years with the same teacher. The curriculum includes Bible stories (Old and New Testament) in grades 2 and 3. Security measures at the school consist of the front desk. The front desk is also the infirmary. There is no teachers' union. Teachers work there because they love to. There is no state testing. There is no standardized testing. The curriculum is not determined by the government. (Neither is the lunch menu.) Full tuition is about $14,000 per year. About 70% of students receive tuition assistance. The average expenditure per student is about $9,000 per year (vs. $15,000 at public school). Parents pay for the school for the same reason teachers teach there. Parents also pay for public school through income and property taxes.

When I was through, my father said: ‘Sounds like a truly great school. What kind of school is it?’

A Waldorf school.

Clearly the values and practices of the school support responsible parenting, teaching, and learning, regardless of lifestyle or politics.”

It may be tempting, based on stereotypes, to categorize all those associated with Waldorf schools as politically, socially, and fiscally liberal, but this would be a mistake.

And, at least in the United States, what we mean by these things has changed significantly over the past decades, both within Waldorf schools and out in the wider world. For those old enough to remember, don't you now find John F. Kennedy, the Cold Warrior, a Democrat, more conservative than your may have believed at the time? And doesn't that old conservative Republican Richard Nixon appear more liberal than he used to? Socially? Economically? Opening China?

In the 1940s and 50s, many of those in American Waldorf schools supported the American consensus--anti-communist (although not rabid McCarthyists), pro-capitalist, and even pro-Vietnam. They also lobbied--quietly and ineffectively--for the separation of school and state. After all, the longest running socialist program in the U.S. is our system of public education.

Small School, Big World

2010-10-06T08:55:00.001-04:00

A smaller world threatens to be a more provincial world. For all that the Internet and the century of technology behind it have shrunk the world, if my “experience” of those around the globe comes through a glowing screen—images and sounds, but no real contact—and I never leave the comfort of my study, I may never really be touched or reached by those far away.

Lowell Monke (author of Breaking Down the Digital Walls: Learning to Teach in a Post-Modem World), then teaching in an urban high school in Iowa, describes his AP students leaving a computer lab—this was the 1990s, before laptops and wireless Internet—after “conversing” with students around the world. The door across the hall opened, and international students poured out of an English as a second language class. Monke watched in disbelief as his engaged, intelligent, sensitive, worldly students ignored every one of the living, breathing foreign students who were now walking down the hall with them, side by side. Monke, a believer in the educational power of technology, became older and wiser in that instant.

If the real world is a butcher, the Internet gives us plastic-wrapped, bloodless, odorless fillets with all the fat trimmed off.

The students at the high school at which I teach have spent three weeks every other year in Peru or Germany—our small size allows us to fundraise effectively so that the whole school can do this.

Travelers to Peru visited Machu Picchu; a women’s shelter in Cuzco, where they made adobe bricks for new construction; and the Waldorf school in Lima. Students got lost and were confronted by armed guards; they got sick and rode in taxis through foreign cities to seek treatment; they helped those who live happy lives that are far different from our lives in the wealthiest nation the world has seen; they formed friendships with those they hope to see again on exchange next year or the year after. Travelers to Germany saw the Bavarian alps, Munich, Salzburg, and Berlin, three centers of world culture that make the oldest buildings in North America look new. They played in the English Garden, saw remnants of the Berlin Wall, and lived and traveled with Germans whom they hope to see again, here or there, in the next few years.

Our students returned full of stories and enthusiasm—all have stories to last a long time. You can imagine it took a couple of days for everyone to settle down to the routine of school. For some, this travel and a view of the world and people outside the United States will change the course of their lives. They will choose different majors in college than they might have done, they will volunteer to help those less privileged, they will travel with confidence, or they will simply conduct themselves with greater empathy and humility. The Internet is a great tool and resource, but there’s no substitute for actual experience.

I Compute

2010-09-17T09:10:00.000-04:00

We talk--sometimes with hope, sometimes with fear--about computers learning to think. Regardless of our emotions around the topic, it seems less and less likely that "strong" artificial intelligence is a real possibility.

What we don't talk about, however, is the danger that in our rush to embrace technological fixes for the problems of education, of the environment, of voting, we will forget how to think.

Computers are unlikely to become too much like us.

We are more likely to become too much like computers.

The Evolution of a Disregard for History

2010-09-03T10:18:00.002-04:00

Do we assume that we are smarter than those who lived before us? Do we assume that if only they could have thought of the automobile or the ballpoint pen or derivatives they would have invented them?
It seems to me that elements of this argument contain truth—our knowledge of mathematics increases; things that were long unproved get proved. Our technology is greater than that of any earlier peoples, so far as we know. But perhaps this is all to say that we’re cleverer, not necessarily smarter. Or smarter in a way that’s important to us but simply may not have been to earlier people.

Certainly Archimedes had a genius for invention, but declined to share much of it with the world, disdaining application and deciding that it was unethical to perpetuate some of his creations. Was he a crackpot, or did his view represent the views of others in the ancient world?

We could as easily turn the argument around, at least in thought, and take the part of some ancients. In the last four or five hundred years, they might ask, have you written epics and plays as sturdy as the Odyssey or Oedipus? Do your buildings rival the pyramids, or the cathedrals of medieval Europe? Are you closer to Nirvana than we were?

The difference, it seems, is not a difference of intelligence, it’s something else—priority, focus, mentality, or consciousness.

When Allan Bloom asks, obnoxiously, where is the Zulu’s Plato, he’s narrowing the question too much, unbalancing the scale (and assuming that he in 20th century Chicago is somehow closer to Plato than a Zulu, simply because he participates in an academic tradition that honors Plato…).

The question, perhaps not one we have the historical knowledge or understanding to answer, is, what was as important to the ancient Zulus (or their ancestors) as philosophy was to Plato, and how did they manifest this? To assume that because we don’t know about it, it didn’t exist is just an error of logic.

And to assume that our priorities or mentality are superior to those of the ancients according to arbitrary rules that favor us before the competition is announced is just unfair. Worse, it leads to a disregard for the possibility of seeing the world in a different way, to a devaluing of history, and to a narrowing of each of us who thinks this way.

Anxiety Dreams

2010-08-20T13:04:00.000-04:00

Many teachers suffer anxiety dreams in August, and I'm no exception. I used to think they would abate as I became a more experienced teacher, but, entering my twenty-sixth year of teaching, they really haven't. I take this as a good sign, although I don't welcome the dreams. I hope it means that I'm still interested in doing my job well, that I'm not burning out or drying up.

Anxiety dreams aren't nightmares, exactly, they're just unpleasant.

The most memorable comes from August 1988, before the start of my fourth year of teaching, probably around the time I started to think of myself as a teacher and not as someone passing time, trying to figure out what to do with my life.

We had had a rough 11th grade the year before, and it was hard to imagine these trouble-makers as seniors, student leaders. Two stood out, in particular, jokers and clowns.

In my dream, I had class with them in the school library, for some reason. I was dressed in a blazer, shirt, and tie, but had nothing on from the waist down (maybe shoes and socks; that wasn't my focus). They didn't notice my nudity, but I was acutely aware of it, and just wanted to find some way to leave in order to put on some pants. The students wouldn't settle down, though, and the two I was most concerned about were front and center. I walked over and slapped each across the face, hard.

That's the dream. But it doesn't end there. They returned to school as seniors a couple of weeks later and were one of the better behaved, more dynamic classes I have taught. And the two subjects of my concern remain among the staunchest supporters of the school, decades later.

This summer I've had a series of anxiety dreams, none particularly noteworthy. I believe I'm getting used to them.

I also get a knot in the pit of my stomach before the first day of school, as I did as a student, and I get nervous before the first day of any new course, even one that starts midyear.

Once we get going, however, that all melts away. I can't wait.

"The" Scientific Method? Not So.

2010-07-31T13:33:00.000-04:00

"The" scientific method? What do theoretical physics, biochemistry, geology, and sociology share? Is this it?

1.Define the question
2.Gather information and resources (observe)
3.Form hypothesis
4.Perform experiment and collect data
5.Analyze data
6.Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7.Publish results
8.Retest (frequently done by other scientists) (from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method.)

Comparing methods as diverse as extrapolations from observations in geology, mathematical modelling in theoretical physics, genetic testing, instrument-guided observation, personal experience, and statistical analysis of, say, questionnaire data, it's fair to say that there is no such thing as "the" scientific method. There are, really, roughly as many methods as there are sciences.

More important, perhaps, is the observation that scientific methods are not a beginning to a creative process but a conclusion that, if wrongly conceived or taught, overlooks the actual creative work of a scientist.

Creativity in science can enter the process at any one of the eight seemingly algorithmic steps quoted above. At any moment, novelty in data, creative insight, unanticipated results, a new concept, a new formulation, a chance conversation or event, can provide an inroad to new science.

The danger in teaching science, especially to middle and high school students, especially by those who are not themselves scientists, is that we will teach dogma--"the" scientific method--that closes our students to the possibility of a creative encounter with science.

Student Ingenuity, Student Gullibility

2010-07-07T23:26:00.000-04:00

Part of what I love about teaching is the endless amusement that students provide, deliberately or inadvertently.

School rules required a shirt with a collar. Robert showed up in a blue sweater with a clean white dress shirt visible at the neck. He went from class to class, polite and calm--which wasn't normal. At the end of school, as he shook my hand good-bye, he pulled on the collar and, surprise!, it came out from around his neck in one long piece. He had torn the collar off a shirt and worn it--just the collar--tucked carefully into the neck of his sweater. "What do you say about that, Mr. Sagarin?" he asked. I say, Robert, thanks for entertaining me.

Back when subway cars in New York had conductors who made actual stop announcements--not the audible but impersonal pre-recorded voices of today--at least one conductor, on arriving at Times Square, would announce, "Times Square. 42nd Street. Center of the Universe," giving that location its due in the imagination of the world. I was telling this slightly amusing story to a seventh grade class, when I saw Emma's eyes grow wider and wider. "Mr. Sagarin. Is Times Square REALLY the center of the universe?" she asked. Thanks, Emma. Now I'll never forget it.

Rigidity and Dogma in Waldorf Schools--Some Theories

2010-06-28T13:18:00.003-04:00

Let’s face it. Here is a question central to the practice of Waldorf education: Why are some Waldorf schools and Waldorf school teachers so rigid and dogmatic?

I have five operating theories and would be glad to hear more, so long as they’re sincere and expressed politely. Here they are in the order in which they occur to me:

1. Do we express the zeal of adult converts, treating a method of education as a religion, confusing method with world-view?

2. Do we suffer from insecurity because none of us can measure up to our image of Steiner’s expectations and, perhaps, we believe our colleagues will criticize us if we appear to think too strongly for ourselves?

3. Do we allow “lowest common denominator” extremism in so-called consensus decision-making (those who feel most strongly about an issue forward their views or block others and receive little opposition from those who don’t feel so strongly)?

4. Is a rigid, dogmatic, literalist attitude toward the world a default position of our modern mentality, one that doesn’t cause us trouble when we’re washing the car or watching a movie, one that is disguised by the ease with which we can get through each day but which confronts us when we try to participate in the life of an idealistic institution like a Waldorf school?

5. In the absence of a clear culture of our own—distancing ourselves, for better and worse, from our own American culture—do we unknowingly perpetuate and assimilate to a culture that, prior to the loosening and opening of the last half century (civil rights, women’s rights, the environmental movement, the democratizing influence of television and the Internet), simply was more rigid and dogmatic—I mean, particularly, German culture in the 1920s, when Waldorf education got its start?

Where do your Congressperson's children go to school?

2010-05-25T13:03:00.002-04:00

It doesn’t seem right that lawmakers take lots of money from teachers’ unions, write laws (America 2000, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind…) that mandate dehumanizing standardized tests that don’t really help children learn or tell us much of anything about their schooling, pass and then don’t fund mandates, politicize schools and budgets, and then neatly sidestep the mess they’ve created by sending their own children to private schools where such tests, unfunded mandates, and politicization are non-issues.

Nationwide, about 11% of families send their children to private schools. We can guess that this number would be higher if more of us had greater means.

In Hawaii, about half of state representatives send their children to private schools. (Hawaiian Lawmakers' Children) In Florida, the number is about 40%, and “the rate climbs to 60 percent for lawmakers on education committees that make key decisions about K-12 policy and funding.” (Florida Lawmakers' Children) I don’t know how representative these numbers are, but to say that state lawmakers send their children to private schools about 3-4 times as often as you and I do sounds about right.

The numbers are the same for Federal lawmakers, between 40 and 50% (Congressional School Choice).

We may assume that almost all of these families, too, live in the best public school districts.

I’m not writing against private schools—I’ve taught in them virtually my entire career (there was that semester I taught at the City University of New York, 140 students in one class with no teaching assistant…). I chose to send both my children through private schools.

I’m not writing against public schools. I went to a few for ten years, had some excellent teachers, married a public school teacher, and I know and have known many, many remarkable persons associated with public education.

I’m not writing against politicians’ choices as parents. They have, like anyone else of means, the right to choose the best schools for their children.

I am writing against the mix of money, influence, and politics that allows teachers unions to have such unfair and detrimental influence on education in the U.S. And I am writing against the hypocrisy of politicians who—ignoring or rationalizing their own educational choices for their own children and ignoring what we actually know about good schools and good teaching—bow to this influence and make schooling worse rather than better.

Fruit and the Fall: Metaphor and Fundamentalism

2010-05-18T16:39:00.001-04:00

Owen Barfield tells us, “The besetting sin today is the sin of literalness or idolatry…” (Saving the Appearances, 161-162)

By “sin,” Barfield means not a shame-inducing act but a mental habit of which we are guilty and for which we suffer.

By “literalness or idolatry,” Barfield means, at least in part, what academics have come to call “reification,” our ingrained tendency to mistake abstract or metaphorical words, ideas, or concepts for reality.

A prime example from the last century is the suffering inflicted on the world by our belief—perhaps now overcome, or in the process of being overcome—that “intelligence,” because we had a word and, we believed, a meaning for it, was an actual, unitary “thing” that could, because it existed, be measured, say, by an IQ test.

Another current example of literal-mindedness, it seems clear, is what in other contexts is called fundamentalism, taking a religious text as literally true. But, as Douglas Sloan has pointed out, a fundamentalist attitude does not belong to the religious alone. Atheists, scientists, economists, anthroposophists, anthroposophical critics, anyone who takes a dogmatic attitude with regard to a set of assumptions or beliefs may be called a literalist or fundamentalist.

Anyone who asserts truth without remaining open to contradiction or the possibility of being proved wrong may be called a literalist or fundamentalist. This does not mean that the claims of fundamentalists—religious, scientific, economic, anthroposophical—are wrong. They may be—and probably often are—true in any number of ways. But the assertion of truth, the close-minded, hierarchical, smug sense that one knows better than another (even if presented in the guise of open-minded, democratic, and humble discourse) AND the simultaneous assumption or assertion that the truth exists beyond any method for discovering or proving it, adds to conflict, strife, and suffering in the world. What else can fundamentalist assertions do but compete blindly and, in the end, meaninglessly?

Literalness goes even deeper than reification or fundamentalism, and the consequences are profound. Perhaps the most egregious of these is this: When we lose what we might call our “sense of metaphor,” our sense that reality stands behind our symbols (that symbols—words, concepts, works of art or technology—in and of themselves have no particular value), when we mistake symbols for reality, we cut ourselves off from creation. We suffer, again, a fall.

We eat the fruits of the tree while denying the existence of the tree that produced them. But trees need tending, and a tree that we ignore may grow in strange ways, produce strange fruit, or die.

Finally, Barfield goes beyond identifying the sin of idolatry to its consequences: “It will, I believe, be found that there is a valid connection, at some level, however deep, between what I have called literalness and a certain hardness of heart.” (He also addresses a remedy to idolatry, but that’s for another time.) The years between the time Barfield wrote this and the present—a period that saw the rise of fundamentalism in the world—demonstrate exactly this.

No Smoking

2010-05-12T08:32:00.000-04:00

August 1984, Florence. Around 10 p.m., on the Ponte Vecchio, I walk up to a dark, slender, bearded man who is leaning against a wall, smoking. He is dressed from head to toe in loose red clothing. I have seen persons dressed like this all over Europe, and I want to find out what's up.

“Pardon me,” I ask him, “Um, I’ve seen people dressed like you all over the place. May I ask, um, why?”

“Sure.” He says. “We’re followers of Sri Rajneesh. He’s a great man. He’s our guru.”

“So, uh, what’s involved in, um, following him?”

“Well, we seek enlightenment. We meditate… And we live a simple life. Like, we’re forbidden from drinking alcohol, or having intercourse, or smoking.”

My eyes focus on the tip of his cigarette, and my brain hiccups. “But,” I say, naïve American that I am, “you’re smoking now.”

He looks me right in the eyes, infinitely cool, completely sincere. “No. I’m not.” And takes a drag.

I don’t remember how we part.

I do remember the aerial photograph, a few years later, of Sri Rajneesh’s 72 Rolls Royces, gifts of his non-smoking followers, parked in a muddy field in Oregon.

Who Needs School?

2010-05-08T11:20:00.000-04:00

“Mom, I don’t feel like going to school today.”

“Okay. Do your chores and we’ll go to the beach (or the museum, or the zoo).”

Chores were huge in my house growing up, three boys and a single mom. Muck and feed the chickens, all-male killer geese, and duck (only one, I forget how). Stack firewood. Mow the lawn—three hilly acres with a 20 inch push mower. Turn the soil in the organic garden. Weed. Weed. Weed. But we agreed, Mom called the school, we did the chores.

And then we packed a picnic and piled into our green Pinto wagon or our gold VW 412 wagon or our blue Chevy Cavalier wagon—we had a succession of some of the worst cars ever made—and drove to the beach. During our years in upstate New York, the “beach” was Lake Taconic; later, on Long Island, it was Field 10 at Jones’ Beach. We ate, read, swam, and built sand castles, school a distant memory. (Far earlier, living with my grandparents in the New York City suburbs, we skipped school to go to the Bronx Zoo, or the Botanical Gardens (boring), or the Museum of Natural History.)

Mom knew, intuitively, that what are now called “mental health days” were as much a part of childhood as days behind a desk in a string of mediocre public schools. And, knowing that we didn’t “have” to go to school made it less onerous actually to go. (Going to school, for years, involved bus rides each way of an hour and a quarter over rutted back roads, obtaining from an early age an informal and unreliable education regarding sex, foul language, alcohol abuse, drug experimentation, things with engines (mostly snowmobiles and motorcycles), dysfunctional family dynamics, fighting, stink bombs, and practical jokes, an education that remains more vivid than many classes in school. The Internet? Who needed it. We had the older kids at the back of the bus.)

These memories return when I think of a former student—I’ll call her Zephyr—who simply didn’t go to school (except for an experimental semester here or there in Scotland, or Russia) between 5th grade and 12th grade. Zephyr came from an eccentric family—single mom, again—that simply up and left, traveling the world and, well, living. Around the age of 17, Zephyr decided that she’d like to graduate from an actual high school, so she called us, from Nepal, to see about applying.

How do you apply to a school when you have no transcript? You write a letter describing your life since you left school. You include a list of the books you’ve read—an impressive, extensive list. You list the languages you’ve learned during your travels. And the school takes a chance on you.

Zephyr showed up in September, cheerful, intelligent, and game. She moved, with great equanimity, at her own pace. She agreed that she was ignorant in science and math, and set out to correct this deficiency. She had read most of the books in our curriculum, so she would sit in a corner while the other students were reading, say, Moby Dick, and study geometry. She found geometry easy, and decided to catch up in algebra and other topics in order to join her class in calculus. It took her about a month.

Looking back on her year with us, I’m impressed by how quickly someone of normal to high intelligence who decides to learn something can learn it.

I used to say, somewhat tongue in cheek, that no one should start school until the age of 16 or 18. I guessed that you could learn what you need to know—reading, writing, math—more quickly as a more mature person than you would if you were forced to inhale it, like dust, slowly, year by year by year from the age of 6 or so on. Zephyr was schooled through 5th grade. And she came from an attentive, literate family. And she had travel experience at a young age that few of us will obtain in a lifetime. Regardless, I believe she’s part of a proof of concept that schooling is overrated.

As John Taylor Gatto says, good basic literacy requires only a couple of hundred hours to acquire. Why do we sequester students for twelve years of schooling? The answers may be too unsettling to confront—we’ve created a world in which children are extraneous, even an irritant. We need to “dumb them down” in order for the “establishment” to perpetuate itself. And so on.

My focus here, however, is not on conspiracy theories or the unintended consequences of bureaucracy in education. It’s on the amazing power of the human being to learn. And, from at least one point of view, school just seems sort of beside the point.

Educating the Minimally Whole Child

2010-04-27T13:31:00.002-04:00

For a school to advertise that it teaches the “whole child” is virtually meaningless. What school would aim to teach only a part of a child?

The issue is what we mean by wholeness. And it’s clear that there may be radically differing conceptions of wholeness. To a materialist, teaching the whole child may involve little more than sophisticated programming and manipulation; what else are we to do with matter? On the other hand, a radical spiritualist, who sees the physical world as an illusion, or even as evil, may ignore a child’s body and may ignore engagement with obviously material aspects of the world.

Scott Forbes argues, in “What Holistic Education Claims About Itself,” “that holistic education has as a goal that students develop to the highest extent thought possible for a human (Ultimacy), and that to achieve this a kind of knowledge associated with wisdom (Sagacious Competence) needs to be learned.” (Forbes: What Holistic Education Claims About Itself)

So when I read in Education Week that the “Needs of ‘Whole Child’ May Factor in ESEA Renewal: Wide Range of Supports, Services, and Enrichment Seen as Vital but Costly” (EdWeek: ESEA Renewal), I’m interested to see what this means. And what it means is this: schools should find ways to “…include dental and mental health, as well as programs aimed at providing prekindergarten and library services, summer and after-school enrichment, mentoring, college counseling, and increased parent and community involvement. The whole-child concept can also refer to making sure schools attend to students’ nonacademic interests, through programs such as the arts and physical education.”

Wow. Although each of these things is probably good for education, they hardly rise, collectively, to the level of Forbes’ argument or to what almost anyone actually means by or thinks about the “whole child” or holistic education.

It may look like I’ve jumped from “wholeness” to “holistic education,” but, according to EdWeek, “witnesses at last week’s ESEA hearing argued that programs aimed at a ‘holistic approach’ to education have to be part of the mix if schools are truly going to boost student achievement.” In the context of the article, it’s clear that “holism” has here been reduced to children’s health and social needs.

ESEA, by the way, refers to the Congressional Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the most recent version of which is known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The Act is up for renewal. Inclusion of larger concerns than standardized test scores and academic achievement is clearly in the best interests of students, teachers, schools, and society. But to blur the line between healthy things like libraries, physical education, and dental care and deep educational questions about what it means to be a complete human being does service to neither the whole child nor holistic education.

Good Brain Science, Bad Brain Philosophy

2010-03-30T12:36:00.001-04:00

Heard on NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125304448): “A person's moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Disrupting or altering a brain process apparently causes adult moral reasoning—which takes both intention and effect into account in forming moral judgments—to become effectively juvenile, taking into account only effect.

One interpretation of this result? "Moral judgment is just a brain process," says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. "That's precisely why it's possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain."

Another interpretation might be that this research points to a view that moral judgment involves perception, is linked to our senses; when perception is disrupted, the conclusion—as in an optical illusion, perhaps—is faulty.

On the other hand, "the fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait," Greene says. "If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul."

It's probably correct and healthy not to view morality as lofty and immutable--that sounds like the beginning of fundamentalism. But that hardly leads to the conclusion that it's purely mechanical, which is simply the assertion of speculation as truth. And isn't that... fundamentalism?

How often do we have to repeat “correlation is not causation” before even Harvard psychologists will begin to separate science from opinion and belief?

Great Teaching

2010-03-24T08:58:00.006-04:00

Amanda Ripley’s article in The Atlantic (Jan./Feb. 2010) examines data on thousands of teachers from “Teach for America” to shed light on what makes a teacher great (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/). The findings?
1. “First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students.”

2. [Great teachers] “were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when [Steven] Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: ‘They’d say, “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.’ Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”

3. Great teachers “avidly recruited students and their families into the process;”

4. Great teachers “maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning.” “For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.”

5. Great teachers “planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome;”

6. Great teachers “worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”

Some of the findings may appear counterintuitive: “Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.” Presented with Farr and Ripley’s list, however, a lot makes sense. Who could really argue?

I don’t want to argue with the value of such a list, but I do want to point to its limits. Isn’t there—shouldn’t there be—a significant difference between helping “a new teacher achieve success” and achieving “greatness” as a teacher? Ripley—and, I assume, the “Teach for America” data—simply don’t make this distinction clear. Are we examining master teachers, or are we finding statistical correlations among practices regarding really good new teachers and other, not-so-good new teachers?

More important is the distinction between a great teacher as found in statistics and an actual teacher facing an actual student. What this research defines as a “great teacher” is one who assists a class in achieving better scores on standardized, grade-level assessments than other, less great teachers do. This is beyond reproach. Although standardized tests are execrable political tools and standards themselves are often very low (in order to allow a significant percentage of students to pass them), who wants a teacher who can’t do a good job of this? But is this measure enough to define greatness?

I had a few great teachers. One was my high school German teacher, Dr. Macht. He was a low-key raconteur, easily distracted. He was a World War II veteran, and chose to study German on the G.I. Bill in order to read Nazi documents in order to understand the atrocities he had witnessed. He had endless interesting stories about the war and his life. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he’d begin, looking out the window. And that was that. No more German grammar or vocabulary for that day. But, in the end, I learned a tremendous amount from him, and received my highest achievement test (now called an SAT II) score in German. My point here is twofold. First, a lot of students didn’t think he was a very good teacher, often for the very reasons I liked and appreciated him. And, second, on the list of six qualities from “Teach for America,” he probably scores well below 50%. He was great for me, not so great for others, and, statistically, maybe not that great.

Another teacher, Mr. Tomlinson, a science and math teacher, was frequently acknowledged to be a great teacher, but I just never found that I learned that much from him. He was likeable and clear, but also slow-paced and methodical. For me, any sense of the value of the study as a whole, how the parts fit together, was largely missing. And yet astronomer and professor William Kaufmann III so loved Mr. Tomlinson that he dedicated his book, Discovering the Universe, a well-known astronomy textbook, to him. Another student, a highly successful lawyer, now retired, credits Mr. Tomlinson with literally saving his life as a teen, giving his life sufficient meaning at a time when he was seriously contemplating suicide. Mr. Tomlinson certainly scores more highly on the “Teach for America” criteria than Dr. Macht would; I’d give him, minimally, a strong 4 out of 6. But, for me, he wasn’t that great.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about a third great teacher, Howard Gruber (see "Howard Gruber, Practical Idealist”). But the man whom I met as a great teacher, toward the very end of his career, endlessly frustrated other students with his repetition and with his (beautifully) open-minded refusal to define things too clearly that he believed should not be defined too clearly. Great for me—top two or three—not so great for some others.

My main point is that, as a student, it simply doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else—or some set of statistical criteria, however accurate and admirable—define a particular teacher as “great.” Malcolm Gladwell, in “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), based on research from the University of Virginia, describes the importance of an emphasis on teaching instead of an emphasis on schools. (“Your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”) Amanda Ripley writes about great teachers according to valuable statistical correlations. But we can go further, at least in our imaginations and in our ideals, and picture not some abstract “great teacher,” but the teacher who will be great for us, or great for our children, who will help them set their lives on course, or, sometimes, save them.

Electrochemical Superstition

2010-03-18T07:54:00.006-04:00

No parent would want a teacher to teach a science course using a textbook from, say, 1910.

And, in 2110, no parent will want a teacher to teach science using today’s textbook.

In teaching science, then, to avoid a version of the presentist fallacy, it’s important to retain a sense for what is fact—and how we know it’s a fact—what is supposition or hypothesis, and what is plain unquestioned assumption (which, pejoratively, we may call superstition). And textbooks are generally not good at this; they too often present science not as a creative process, but as a finished product, as dogma.

Here's one example. If I had to vote for the greatest illusion or superstition of our age, I would say it’s the illusion that the brain thinks. (Not that you don't need a brain in order to think, but that you think; the brain is an instrument. And a metaphor.)

Assume everything we know of the brain and neurons and neural activity is true—it isn’t, it can’t be, and there’s a lot we just don’t even pretend we know. Picture a vast network of electrochemical activity among neurons, impulses racing this way and that. Picture it down to the smallest activity of an ion across a membrane. Picture it in its trillion-connection complexity. And realize that, if you want to find, say, a thought or an emotion, there’s no there there.

Eventually, for instance, if only in a thought experiment, we could draw all the connections and interactions in a brain, down to the molecular, atomic, or subatomic level; give us a whiteboard large enough, sufficient time, and any tools we need. (Yes, indeterminacy and entanglement might make our comprehension impossible, but these just substitute scientific magic for the old fashioned kind.)

Let us chart the “action potentials” of neural impulses, and the movement and effects of neurotransmitter fluids. (Did you know that the impulse along an auditory nerve is the same—exactly the same—as the impulse along an optic nerve? Watching the impulse pass, you simply cannot tell if this chemical activity relates to vision or to hearing; the impulse is void of quality. Why do we suppose that following it down the rabbit hole of complexity into which it vanishes will yield insight?) What we won’t find is a single thought, emotion, or memory, although—and even this is supposition—we may find the correlates or material or organizational traces of these. We may well be able to look at a configuration of neurons or molecules or particles—now represented in marker on our whiteboard—and correlate some brain configuration with some emotional state or thought, but it should be clear that the configuration is not and can never be an emotion or a thought or anything else that is fundamental to human experience or value.

(We can successfully perform this same thought experiment, however, with a computer. In the computer, if we know how to read the code, we can discover exactly what’s stored there, what’s calculated there, and so on. That’s because the computer isn’t conscious, isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling, isn’t anything but an apparatus, despite our science fiction fantasies. What’s in the computer is what we put there. The computer’s “activity” may yield startling and counter-intuitive results; it may “solve” problems of complexity beyond that of smart human beings in many lifetimes. But the thinking behind this work doesn’t reside in the machinery. It is available through the ingenuity and creativity of the programmers.

When we say that the brain is a computer—unless we are speaking metaphorically—we are not only making a category error, we have things exactly backward. One aspect or set of aspects of the brain is computer-like, but let’s not forget that minds and brains existed for a long, long time before the computer, and that the computer existed in the work and minds of those, like Charles Pierce and Charles Babbidge, who imagined the computer before the technology existed that could bring it to reality.)

I’m not disputing the association and correlation of brain activity with thinking, perceiving, emoting, breathing, heart-beating, or running. You need a brain to do brain-associated things. A pianist needs a piano, and preferably a well-functioning one. But when we say, for example, that “the brain thinks,” we indulge a supposition that not only has not been demonstrated, we irrationally indulge a view that loads what is essentially an electrochemical flowchart with impossible hopes, dreams, and assumptions.

The consequences of this thinking—or should I say, this lack of thinking, this assuming—are dire. Where, in fact, are consequence, morality or ethics, creativity, or humanity in this picture? The answer is, nowhere.

None of this is to argue against brain research. Far from it. Someone near to me is recovering from a closed head injury, and I am in awe of and grateful to the doctors and researchers who have helped with his recovery and helped us to understand what has occurred and what is occuring. I wish them all speed and good fortune in learning more and more about how the brain works and, when necessary, how to help it heal. But medicine is not (or not necessarily) meaning.

To bring this back to the education of students in a school, we have to acknowledge that we do not serve them well if we freight them with our superstitions, no matter how fervently we believe them.

Contradictions, contradictions

2010-03-17T08:07:00.000-04:00

I sip my coffee watching Morning Joe on MSNBC. A couple of mornings ago, within the space of two breaths, Joe Scarborough lauded a plan to nationalize math and reading teaching--"national textbooks" in these subjects--and blasted a politician who opposed the creation of more charter schools in New York.

Huh?

Doesn't he see that charter schools succeed--when they do succeed; it's not a given that they will--by not following the path that leads to a national curriculum?

Or that a national curriculum in a nation as diverse as the U.S. is senseless?

But, I fear, his views represent too many of us.

More on Administration...

2010-03-10T14:57:00.003-05:00

The following entry is in response to this comment:

Dear Steve, I came across your blog for the first time today and was impressed by [the] exchange on school governance. A writer myself, I am very interested in education and foundation lessons, which really get to the heart of the matter. I really responded to your words and was curious to know your specific thoughts on Administration, and what advice you would give to others on best practice.

In this piece, you also talk about structure, and I wondered what was lightest possible administrative structure you've encountered or could envisage?
Yours most warmly,
Nicola

First (I’m assuming you have some familiarity with Waldorf schools; if not, I’d be happy to answer questions), Rudolf Steiner never said that Waldorf schools should be “faculty run;” the phrase he used was “self-administered,” by which I believe he meant “not administered by the state.” Which is to say, much more the case for U.S. schools than for most European schools—we have always enjoyed greater local control and freedom in how we educate our youth than have nations with more powerful ministries of education. (I’ve read that the Federal government provides roughly 10% of educational funding in the U.S. and 90% of the—mostly unfunded—directives and mandates.)

Given this, it’s really tough to say that a good administrator in a Waldorf school should be somehow different (beyond her commitment to the mission of the school) from an administrator at another school. In my experience, the toughest part of the administrator’s job is gaining the trust of the teachers. For this reason alone, it may be good for Waldorf schools to select an experienced teacher to hold this position. The problem is that it’s a rare teacher who can be a good administrator. And if the administrator is seen by parents as being partial to teachers’ points of view, trust erodes quickly.

On the other hand, the peculiar structure of Waldorf schools requires any administrator to adapt to the school. By this, I refer primarily to the tension that often exists among parents, boards, and teachers’ councils or colleges, especially when times are tough. Most Waldorf schools, by bylaw or practice, for example, simply don’t give the power to hire and fire to one person. So an administrator, then, becomes a diplomat—lots of responsibility, little authority—carrying messages from one camp to the other, attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement.

When you ask about minimal structure, I think of the school at which I currently work. I’m a full-time teacher and the only (part-time) administrator. We have an office manager/assistant here three mornings a week. We have an off-site, hourly bookkeeper, and a volunteer treasurer. Teachers pitch in to help with admissions events, open houses, and so on. Trustees (volunteers) handle fundraising. Our Core Faculty (about 7 teachers) meets weekly. Our Board meets monthly. We have as close to no administrative structure as it’s possible to have, I believe.

By contrast, I know a school that was advised by a highly paid professional to hire a full-time fundraiser. The school did this and, three years in, has yet to raise close to the cost of the fundraiser’s salary and benefits. And I don’t believe this is a comment on the fundraiser’s ability—more on the school’s inability to see that their situation, despite the recommendation of a consultant, simply doesn’t warrant one full-time person devoted to development.

In creating structure, it’s too easy, I believe, to copy what everyone else does—admissions officer, development, business manager, administrator, etc.—even when the numbers don’t justify it.
This brings up another point, which is that of scale. Small schools can break even; large schools can break even. Smallish schools that act like large schools, however, will lose money. And no private school can afford to do that for long. And there is a “deadly middle ground.” For many private schools, it occurs between roughly 60 students and 150-200 students. This middle ground is precisely where many Waldorf high schools find themselves, unfortunately.

In growing from a small school to a larger school, schools add administration as they grow, and are happy for the increase in students. When, a few years later, perhaps, enrollment declines, rather than facing the actuality of the situation (there was a time when they would have been overjoyed to have as many students as they are now groaning about), they often freeze salaries, cut salaries, add to workloads or otherwise diminish the morale of the school.

Which brings up another point: When schools act like their real business is providing support for a community of like-minded adults, rather than doing all they can to educate the children in their care as well as possible (and, in the process, spend the parents’ tuition dollars as wisely and efficiently as possible), they quickly lose their way, creating a vicious spiral that leads to further loss of enrollment…

I don’t know if this addresses your basic questions; sorry if it contains too much opinion or too many digressions…

The Word "Waldorf"

2010-02-25T13:11:00.003-05:00

I don't know where the phrase comes from, but let's "stop the insanity." For a couple of years, I've been collecting uses of what I call the free-floating "Waldorf." That is, the word Waldorf attached to some other word or concept in order to give it some (Waldorf) meaning, whether it deserves it or not, whether it actually means anything or not. (For those who don't know, the word Waldorf in Waldorf school comes from the Independent Waldorf School, founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919. It was so-called because it was, initially, a school for the education of the children of the employees of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory, although it quickly outgrew this clientelle. And, yes, the owners were the same family as the owners of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC. So, in the end, Waldorf salad and Waldorf school are, indeed, loosely connected.)

Here's the list. Feel free to add other examples in Comments, and I'll update periodically.

Waldorf Administrator

Waldorf Advocate

Waldorf Alliance

Waldorf Alumni

Waldorf Answer

Waldorf Approach

Waldorf Art(work)

Waldorf Child(ren)

Waldorf Crayon

Waldorf Critic(ism)

Waldorf Curriculum

Waldorf Development

Waldorf Doll

Waldorf Education

Waldorf Emphasis

Waldorf Family

Waldorf Festival

Waldorf Fundraising

Waldorf Furniture

Waldorf Grace

Waldorf Graduate

Waldorf History

Waldorf Home

Waldorf Homeschooling

Waldorf Initiative

Waldorf Inspired

Waldorf Kindergarten

Waldorf Library

Waldorf Life (skills)

Waldorf Math

Waldorf Method

Waldorf Movement

Waldorf Music

Waldorf Mythology

Waldorf Oriented

Waldorf Painting

Waldorf Parent

Waldorf Pedagogy

Waldorf Philosophy

Waldorf Prayer

Waldorf Pupil

Waldorf Resource

Waldorf Ritual

Waldorf Room

Waldorf School

Waldorf Science

Waldorf Student

Waldorf Treasure

Waldorf Trustee

Waldorf View (point of)

Waldorf World

What’s Another Trillion?

2010-01-27T13:29:00.000-05:00

All this talk of a trillion dollars.

There are 309 million people in the U.S.

A trillion divided by 309 million yields roughly $3250 per person, or $13,000 for a family of four. This is a lot of money. It’s a bit more than a quarter of what the average U.S. household earns in a year. It’s a down payment on a house, it’s the price of a decent used car. It’s the kind of debt families take on all the time, but not every year. And it’s amortized, like a mortgage, over many more years than an auto loan. Which means we’ll pay more but have longer to do it.

It’s about half what we already owe on houses, credit cards, and autos.

It’s about one fourteenth of the U.S. government debt, which is growing but which is still only a fraction of what it was after WWII (as compared to GDP). And as a fraction it’s not much: we safely borrow 2.5 times our income to buy a house, admittedly a once- or twice-in-a-lifetime debt.

Interestingly, it’s also about one fourteenth of the U.S. GDP.

The point, to me, is not really the size of a trillion dollars, which is substantial but not outrageously so, but how it relates to our health and life as a nation. To borrow this much money means little to a young, healthy family with two working parents. It means a lot more to someone about to retire on a fixed income, or to someone who has just lost a job.

The question may be put as an analogy: How old are we as a nation? Are we young and strong, facing a growing income and years to pay off our debts? Or are we old and weak, facing years of declining income with little time left to pay off our debts?

It seems to me that the safe assumption is neither of these. We shouldn’t assume growth that we can’t verify, but, within the bounds of conservative estimates, we shouldn’t assume that our days in the sun are numbered or over. We should assume that our income and expenses last year are a good predictor of what they will be next year and for the foreseeable future.

From this point of view, it seems clear that a trillion dollars is not an amount we can borrow every year, but, compared with our GDP and existing debt, it’s just not that much. Assuming we’re borrowing it for the right reasons.

After all, we spend less than 7/10 of a trillion dollars a year on educating every single child in the United States.

Teaching for Freedom

2010-01-07T14:13:00.003-05:00

Just before our last performance of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," I gathered the cast in a circle, the way I had seen other directors do it. I gave a few notes, and then I gave the best advice I could think of: "Once you're on stage, you can do whatever you like. You can say whatever you like. No one can stop you." The kids knew their lines, the blocking, the set changes. We'd rehearsed and rehearsed, and this was the last performance. I'm not exactly sure what I was after, but I wanted the students to play the play, or at least to know that they could. For weeks, we had adhered to lots and lots of rules and drills and agreements, and now it was time to let all that go, if possible. In earlier performances, I had played with the play in order to make the students do it. Now I wanted it to be their turn.

In the first scene, Ernest has to look for his shoes. I didn't want him just to "act" like he was looking for his shoes, so I had the prop master put his shoes in a different location for each performance; he actually had to look for them. Under the sofa? Under the side table? Where?

Before Aunt Augusta arrives, Algernon has to eat all the cucumber sandwiches. For one performance, I had the students secretly prepare twice the normal number of sandwiches. We all got to watch Algie squirm to get them down--he ended up sneaking a few between the couch cushions for later.

The play started, line after line, just as rehearsed.

The butler appeared, unscripted. Without a word, in the background, he picked up Ernest's discarded bathrobe, put it on, poured himself a sherry from a bottle on a side table, and left the stage. No one in the audience knew that we had never planned nor rehearsed this whimsy. They were amused, we were beside ourselves. (For the record, the boy who broke the ice was--and is--about as taciturn as any high school boy can be, reserved and observant, but also a determined, solid character. It was no accident that he was the first to test this ice of improvisation, and it was no accident that his improvisation was silent.)

From that moment on, this last performance gathered steam. Not every actor dared to break the boundaries of the play as rehearsed--these were high school students. But many did, in character, and the play went on, richer than it had been, richer than we had imagined it.

Afterward, one of the dads--a real actor-director, not an amateur stepping in to fill a need, as I was--said, "...they were free." And he meant it. After hours and hours of rehearsal, lock-step performances in which they tried to "get it right," some of them dared--within the confines of the play--to improvise.

The risk, the giddiness, the creativity, the responsibility, all spoke to them more plainly and more boldly than any classroom lecture or discussion could about the real preparation for freedom, the responsibility of freedom, the possibility of freedom, and the reward of freedom.

Sometimes, the best things we teach, we teach unconsciously, inadvertently, and we only recognize them in hindsight.

Waldorf School Governance

2010-01-05T13:34:00.003-05:00

The following questions and answers come from an email exchange regarding school governance and administration. I have removed all references to specific schools, places, times, and individuals.

1. How do “Waldorf schools” tend to be governed? What does it mean to have a style of governance that is consistent with and reflects Waldorf principles?

My view is that most Waldorf schools are not governed well. The 3 “spheres” to which Waldorf schools frequently refer—cultural, economic, political—exist in all schools, Waldorf and not. And these are not reflected, in my opinion, in bodies of the school--teachers, parents, trustees--that others claim correspond with Steiner’s ideas of a “threefold” social or institutional organization. What Steiner envisaged was three cooperative administrations—one for cultural (i.e., educational) questions (the faculty or college of teachers or council); one for economic questions (an association of producers and consumers); and one for legal or political questions and questions of rights (including expertise in this area and representing the rights of all—children, parents, teachers, admin., and trustees in a school…). I know of no Waldorf school that well represents this picture. To equate a group—say, trustees—with a “sphere”—say, legal/financial—is to confuse this picture (legal questions are separate from financial considerations, to a degree) and, in practice, to exclude other community members or stakeholders who have an interest in these areas. Steiner is clear in his writing on this question that each of us is an integral part of each administration, although we may have a greater personal stake in one or another. You have a chance to do it better!

2. How do other schools draw boundaries—or do they?—between decisions that are the purview of the faculty and those that are the purview of the Board? (And if overlap is recognized, how are decisions reached?) The decisions that have recently caused distress within our school have been ones where it seemed that there is inevitably an overlap between pedagogical concerns and concerns relating to such practical matters as enrollment, marketing, and tuition schedules.

Just as a brain that consists of working neurons needs an adequate blood supply, and muscles and bones need nervous apparatus to operate, there really are no decisions that belong to one group alone—ideally, a faculty group could have board representation (which would promote a better understanding between the 2 groups) just as boards often have teachers on them. (Emil Molt, who acted in the role closest to that of a trustee in the first Waldorf school attended faculty meetings.) The Board generally delegates day-to-day operation to the Faculty, but has a right—and need—to be informed of processes and decisions.
Decision-making is a stumbling block. Steiner didn’t care how decisions were made—aristocratic, democratic, or republican. He was concerned that those who were given responsibilities were given freedom to fulfill them. Most faculties in American Waldorf schools use some form of consensus decision-making process, but could do better to understand and refine this process. It seems to break down in the face of hard decisions, when, in fact, here it should be most closely followed. Boards often use Robert’s Rules or something similar. I believe this is fine; I do not favor consensus decision-making for Boards, which rely on the legal and financial expertise of their members.
I believe the most important principles include: 1.) joint decision-making between Board and Faculty, most especially when there is a need to make a tough decision; 2.) Clarity regarding process and personnel—who gets to make a decision and how the decision will be reached—prior to engaging the issue; 3.) Transparency to the community about the process and personnel (and timeline). Community members don’t need to have confidential conversations rehashed for them, but they have a right to know that a clear process was followed and to know who was involved in reaching the decision.

3. I am interested in the role of parents, or parent bodies, in Waldorf school governance—I hear reference to three groups (faculty, board, and a parent body) and I don’t know what they are each responsible for.

Parents are the economic engine of the school. Their tuition and fees provide the economic foundation for the work of the school. I don’t believe Waldorf schools acknowledge this simple point frequently enough. (Yes, individually we all understand this, but schools are not organized in a way that fully acknowledges this.) It is appropriate to have parent representation on the Board.

4. One of the things that has come to seem significant to me is that we have very different “cultures” in our faculty and board—faculty members see each other regularly, meet once a week, and share philosophies and professional common ground, and they operate on a consensus basis. Our Board overall has a certain common interest but much more diverse professional backgrounds than the faculty (we don’t even know what everyone does, for example), much greater diversity in our understanding and embodiment of Waldorf philosophies, we are very limited in our time together, and we operate in a rough sort of Roberts Rules format with majority rule. How does this “fit” the model offered by other schools? Is this desirable? Sustainable? Consistent with other Waldorf precedent?

I believe it fits with what other schools do. I believe it’s sustainable. It’s not undesirable, and you could change it over time to suit the needs of your community if you wanted to. Most Waldorf school boards micromanage (often in the absence of good clear management from the teachers/administration) instead of focusing on strategy, planning, budget, fundraising, etc. Board and faculty should meet socially at least twice a year (I’m basing this on experience; there’s no rule); they should meet to make joint decisions when necessary; and they should meet at least once a year to discuss vision, mission, etc. (more if they haven’t been engaged together in the past or, like your school, if you face major changes).

5. What might we expect over time? That is, are there special needs or challenges that are specific to our early stage (i.e., things that need special consideration now but that will pass), and what might be the things that are “permanent” or more specific to the future more mature stage?

Structure is necessary, but shouldn’t be confused with organization, which is living and changes as the needs of the school community change. Too often we believe that changing a governance structure will change an institution; if the same persons are involved in the work of the school, however, structural changes are unlikely to produce real change. Not to say that some structures aren’t better or more suitable or more efficient; there’s always room for improvement.

Managing cultural change is the necessary challenge, and requires greater ethics, communication, attention to process, willingness to compromise, transparency, etc. I believe one or a very small group can gradually change the culture of an institution, although it’s not easy. For one thing, it’s easier to change when times are good, although the incentive to change more often arises when times are tough. Getting agreement on a clear process (for example, by what process are new teachers hired?) is easiest in the abstract, not when a rift exists over the hiring of a particular candidate.

I believe the job of the administrator is to be a watch-dog and “connector” between others on these issues (ethics, communication, attention to process, willingness to compromise, transparency, timeliness, etc.)—she or he should, ideally, sit on the Board and College (and HR committee or other “rights” group of the school), as either voting member or ex-officio. She doesn’t belong only to one group, but serves them all. When I was a school administrator, I believed I was doing my job if the teachers believed I was listening too much to the parents and the parents believed I was listening too much to the teachers. (I worked with a particularly supportive board, but the same trust applies here, too.) Community trust in my ethics, compassion, communication, etc., was my only basic currency. If I was seen as partisan, I was ineffective.

Teaching and Research

2009-12-30T12:10:00.004-05:00

It’s true that you don’t need a master’s degree to teach in a Waldorf school (not that this is necessarily a good thing). Having an advanced degree does not make you (necessarily) a better teacher.

The common wisdom, however, that, at the university level, professors with advanced degrees are so distracted by research that they don’t or can’t really teach, is false. Research by Robert McCaughey, chair of the history department at Barnard College, across a number of universities shows the strong correlations among research, advanced degrees, recognition from colleagues, and great teaching. The best teachers in universities, as ranked by their unforgiving students, are those who have contributed to their fields, obtained the highest degrees, and kept open and alive their commitments to research and to teaching—these are, at a high level, one and the same.

I believe the same could apply to high school, elementary school, and even early childhood teachers.
Let me examine briefly what it takes to get a master’s degree.

You start with some ideas about graduate school and a fear of formal writing. You haven’t been in school in years, maybe decades. You don’t know how to cite a reference according to the Style Manual of the American Psychological Association or the Modern Language Association. Until now, you have had better things to do.

You want to write a thesis that will change the wacky Waldorf world, bite off a big piece of research and chew it well. Colleagues will read your work and recognize your expertise. Journals will seek you out. Young children with wide eyes will ask for your autograph. You also want to graduate on time.

Your advisor and your cohort help you find and hone some topic in which you’re interested, something not too large or too small. About 45 pages worth, give or take. You talk through topic, questions, methods, literature with your advisor. You badger your spouse and colleagues. You can’t sleep. You pile books on a table or nightstand. Good job. As my wife says, if you buy the fabric, you’ve made the quilt.

You type the title page, including the statement at the bottom, “Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements…” You feel like you’re halfway there.

You write a sentence, a paragraph. You type quotations into a laptop or, like me, you stick an army of post-its into your books. Progress.

Gradually, you steal hours here and there. Your husband take the kids to his parents for the weekend and, after watching five hours of television, folding all the laundry, and cleaning the kitchen, you start to write. As David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, says, “everyone knows it takes eight hours to write for two hours.”

In Milan, a monk complained that Leonardo da Vinci, who was supposed to be painting “The Last Supper,” spent too much time sitting in front of the painting doing nothing. Who knew? Leonardo wasn’t just a painter and an original thinker. He was a graduate student. Really, of course, like you, he was deep in contemplation.

Gradually, your work takes shape. You fill it in like a puzzle: A bit of chapter three, some more in chapter two. It hurts, but you throw away whole paragraphs that no longer fit. If you’re like me, you cut these but you can’t stand to see them go. I paste them, in order, at the end of the paper. Sometimes what I end up with is shorter than the unused paragraphs stuck at the end, waiting in vain for their moment. I wrote them. They must mean something.

You start talking nonsense, a sign of regression in normal people, but not you; you’re a graduate student. You believe you know what you mean when you type something like, “hermeneutic contemplation and theoretical misgivings in the Weltanschauung of the Zeitgeist.” I gave my wife a few pages to edit. She said, “I don’t understand a word of this.” “Good,” I said, “my education is working.”

You’ve never interviewed anyone in your life, but you do it. You draw up a list of questions, make an appointment, and, before you know it, you’ve completed an interview of an hour and a quarter. Interviews are easier after this, although why do people insist on talking about what they want to talk about instead of what you want to know about?

Or you write a questionnaire and mail it out. A few people even send it back. But instead of filling in the ovals you’ve provided, they’ve written comments in the margins. Or circled two answers where you asked for one. You are learning to collect and interpret data.

Things take shape. When ninety percent is complete, you’re halfway there. You track down those missing references. You try to write a conclusion that’s not just a re-statement of your introduction. Despite the demands of job and family, you make progress. Wallace Shawn, the actor and playwright, when asked about his life between performances said, “You know, I have a second career running errands.

You get emails from the college with forms A through H attached. These supersede the old forms A through H you got last semester, and they have no relation to the handbook you got when you started this work.
You stay up until four one morning, putting on the finishing touches. You email a draft to your advisor and then wait weeks… and weeks. You’ve taken years to do this, but you want a response immediately.

You finally get your paper back, and then you get to comb through to remove the passive voice, rewrite the introduction, cut unsupported statements, trim and groom your baby.

The great day arrives when your thesis is approved. You feel like you lost fifty pounds, like an astronaut on the moon, like a childhood dream of flying. And then you eat half a pound of pepperoni from the little zip-loc baggie, inhale a pint of Chunkie Monkey, and take a nap.

What did you learn? You learned a lot, but I’m not talking about your topic.

Here are some of the things you learned:

To think clearly and contemplatively.
To speak meaningfully.
To write well.
To read with interest and intelligence.
To have a sense of scale and proportion.
To appreciate objectivity as a goal, if not as an absolute.
To adapt to changing circumstances.
To synthesize disparate and unanticipated results and points of view.
To interpret.
To judge.
To persevere.
To compromise.
To find and create a community of support in which to accomplish all this.

These are qualities I would like to see in all teachers.

And, you’ll notice, I haven’t even mentioned the thesis topic. From this point of view, the topic, the form, the content, the results are all beside the point. No one else will ever read your thesis. Your husband and your second reader and your advisor read it because they love you. And because they had to. These things are not mutually exclusive.

The point is the capacities that you have to exercise and develop in order to complete a degree. Yes, some of it is inherited from the Middle Ages, the caps, the gowns, the inquisition. And perhaps those parts are what people object to when they say you don’t need a master’s degree to teach in a Waldorf school.

I don’t mean to minimize the research that goes into this work. But to be a researcher does not always mean to write formal papers, although these are an accepted medium for such work.

To conduct research is to be alive to possibility, to believe that there’s truth beyond simply the truth that I know today, and this is one of the highest qualities that we can ask for in a teacher, a quality that makes teaching so creative and so difficult and so humbling.

Teachers are researchers. They conduct action-research and longitudinal studies as participant-observers with sample sizes of a couple of dozen over years. They discuss findings with colleagues and fellow-researchers from next door and down the hall. (What they often fail to do is synthesize and interpret their results.) And the better prepared they are to conduct their research, the better for our children.

What is Waldorf Education?

2009-11-30T11:58:00.018-05:00

The following essay appears in slightly different forms and with slightly different titles as the introduction to a brief collection of Rudolf Steiner's lectures, What is Waldorf Education? as part of a chapter of my dissertation, Promise and Compromise: A History of Waldorf Schools in the United States, 1928-1998, and as an article in the Research Bulletin for Waldorf Education.

To the degree that this essay appears complete or polished, it masks the process by which I arrived at its conclusions. I set out to define Waldorf education simply by evaluating what Rudolf Steiner and others had claimed it was. At that point, I didn't realize that a ready, decent definition didn't exist. But the more I looked, the less I found.

I was simultaneously reading Owen Barfield and others, working toward an understanding of what Barfield calls "objectifying consciousness." And, one day, it struck me: to speak of "Waldorf education" is to indulge objectifying consciousness.

This realization led me to the following essay; it sent me on a search for what Steiner didn't say (see "Playing 'Steiner Says'"); and it led me to attempt to distill or characterize what it is that we mean when we talk about something called Waldorf education (see "What Makes Waldorf, Waldorf?"). These three essays constitute a whole; the other two appear here already, and this, the first, completes the group.

Introduction

Waldorf education does not exist. It is not a “thing,” and it cannot necessarily be distinguished from good education anywhere. Because it does not exist, it cannot be found in the boxes we call Waldorf schools. To narrow its definition to identify it with schools named Waldorf or Steiner schools, or to identify it with a particular curriculum or technique is to reify Waldorf education in a way that may describe part of what is but necessarily ignores what may also be. What we call Waldorf education may perhaps be found in any school, or anywhere that teachers teach and students learn. There is no characteristic or quality that is unique to what we call Waldorf education that cannot potentially be found somewhere else. Waldorf education, as an idea or set of ideas, slips through the cracks of any structure erected to define it.

Just as Waldorf education has no definite boundaries, it also has no definite origin. We may describe Waldorf education, for example, as arising from the educational conceptions of Rudolf Steiner. But many (most? all?) of these conceptions--for example, the idea that, culturally, at least, “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (the development of an individual mirrors in microcosm the development of the species)--may be shown to be older than Steiner and therefore not to originate with him. (Beyond inferences from Steiner’s work, the idea that “the” Waldorf curriculum must include Norse myths in fourth grade or Greek history in fifth grade--curricular practices common in Waldorf schools--is difficult to discover. It’s not in well-known lecture cycles that he gave on education, nor is it in The Study of Man and its correlates, nor may it be found in Stockmeyer’s or Heydebrand’s well-known descriptions of German Waldorf school curricula.) In particular, for the United States, the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson contain in prototypical form many of Steiner’s ideas about education.

Emerson and the Waldorf Curriculum

Emerson’s essay “History”, for example, presents an encapsulated curriculum that mirrors closely the general curriculum of many Waldorf schools. His language, too, mirrors Steiner’s in addressing the intellectual and emotional maturation of one person as, in part, a recapitulation of the intellectual and cultural developments to be found in human history.

The following quotations from “History” demonstrate the correspondence that Emerson finds between history and individual growth and development. This evolution of ideas is presumably based on knowledge of ancient cultures or at least exposure to them. Someone who had never heard of the Greeks, nor been exposed to their cultural influence even in a dilute or adulterated form, could not be expected in ontogeny to recapitulate this aspect of a cultural phylogeny. On the other hand, as Emerson implies at the end of the first two quotations, the state of being Greek, in the sense of “the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body,” may be universally human even for those who do not name it by the same name as Emerson:

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the senses—of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. (123)

In many Waldorf school fifth grades, when teachers claim students have achieved a grace and harmony of body and spirit that will soon be disrupted by the travails of puberty and adolescence, the class holds a Greek “Olympiad,” competing for laurels in javelin, discus and running races, striving as much for form and beauty as for victory. As well, Greek myths make up a significant portion of the literature of the fifth grade in many Waldorf schools.

The comparison between Emerson’s writings and Steiner’s is a study in itself. One more example will suffice here. For both Steiner and Emerson, the study of nature can guide and give meaning to personal experience. Neither means by nature what we might call “environmental studies,” although these would not be excluded; each means that symbolic meaning may be found in the reflective examination of the world around us.

It is essential that the secrets of Nature, the laws of life be taught to the boy or girl, not in dry intellectual concepts, but as far as possible in symbols. Parables of the spiritual connections of things should be brought before the soul of the child in such a manner that behind the parable he divines and feels, rather than grasps intellectually, the underlying law on all existence. “All that is passing is but a parable,” must be the maxim guiding all our education in this [elementary school] period. (Steiner, 1965, 33)

Here is Emerson on the same topic:

I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul. …Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and the forest, of the earth and the waters that are under the earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven-facing speakers. (127)

Steiner’s thinking is often prefigured in Emerson’s, but this is not to say that they are the same. Toward the end of his essay “Education”, Emerson (1966) tosses in a towel that Steiner held onto like a bulldog: “I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching.” (225) Steiner, in concert with Emil Molt and a host of others, set out to reform our ways of teaching in a myriad of concrete ways. But, while broad and systematic, few or none of these ways were as original as we might believe, nor were they meant to be particular to some schools and not others.

A Unique Method?

Separate from the ideas in or behind Steiner’s conception of education, we might describe Waldorf education as a particular method. When we define method, however--and certainly in the case of Waldorf education we are not talking about a collection of techniques or a bag of tricks, but a method in a larger sense--we omit important elements of Steiner’s thinking. As Michael Lipson, recent translator of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, put it, somewhat cryptically, Steiner’s method is a “methodless method” that must be continually re-invented by each teacher for each student in order to be valid (Private communication, November 20, 1999). And if we use a more mundane definition of method, and speak of a particular curriculum or set of teaching techniques, Waldorf education still eludes capture. Schools that are not Waldorf schools and teachers who are not Waldorf teachers use, perhaps increasingly, techniques and conceptions of education identical to those propounded by Steiner, even though many of these teachers may never have heard Steiner’s name. “Looping,” in which one teacher stays with a particular class for several years, and block scheduling, in which one subject is studied intensively for a relatively brief time, are two such techniques. While no other school of which I know even approximates the curriculum found in a typical Waldorf school, there is nothing to prevent such adoption.

The Doctor Didn’t Say

One step toward recognizing that there is no such thing as Waldorf education is to realize that Rudolf Steiner himself rarely spoke or wrote about Waldorf education. The annotated bibliography of his collected works lists only a handful of references to “Waldorfschulpaedagogik,” “Waldorf School pedagogy.” He did speak and write at great length about education; how children grow and develop and learn, and how teachers may teach them. Further, in his work, Steiner claimed no particular originality. He did not see a discontinuity between what came before him and his own work. In his seminal pamphlet, The Education of the Child (1965), for example, Steiner quotes Jean Paul approvingly and at length. The sense one gets reading Steiner’s work, and this applies as well to his writings and lectures on matters other than education, is that ideas, like apples, lead an objective existence, and may be plucked by anyone. We might say that the “method” of Waldorf education is to learn to pluck these apples for oneself, as student or teacher, and not to rely on the authority of Rudolf Steiner to hand one already-picked apples. The analogy holds in that we may no more reify Waldorf education than we may divorce apples from the tree, sun, soil of their birth. Ideas, like apples, exist in and arise out of a context.

Staking a Claim

While I dispute the existence of “Waldorf” education, I do not dispute the existence of a group of schools that have chosen to identify themselves with the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart by calling themselves Waldorf schools, or to identify themselves with statements about education made by Rudolf Steiner by calling themselves Steiner schools. These schools have had a life of their own for more than seventy years in the United States, and have made a powerful claim on the ideas lumped under the term “Waldorf education.”

I cannot define or describe Waldorf education well, but I can investigate how others have defined or described it. I will begin outside the United States to include some of what Steiner himself said about what we now call Waldorf education. I will then focus on the strategies that writers and teachers in the United States have used to write about Waldorf education. (To see how Steiner’s conceptions of education made their way from Germany and Switzerland to the United States, see Ida Oberman’s study, 1999. Not available, unfortunately, is a similar account of the influence of British Waldorf schools and teachers on the United States. This is a study waiting to be written.)

Compromise

Moreover, I should like to point out to you that the real aim and object of our education is not to found as many schools as possible… but our education concerns itself with methods of teaching, and it is essentially a new way and art of education, so every teacher can bring it into their work in whatever kind of school they happen to be… and I have declared that the methods can be introduced into every situation where someone has the good will to do it. (Steiner, R. The Roots of Education, p. 30)

Some will acknowledge the validity of this passage but insist on a distinction between those who employ a “compromised” version of Steiner’s method (“Waldorf-inspired” schools or teachers) and “real” Waldorf schools that have deliberately dedicated themselves to this method. I maintain, however, that all manifestations of Rudolf Steiner’s educational ideas are necessarily compromised. Schools that see themselves as pure because they are independent of the potentially corrupting influence of government money may be compared with schools, like the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School, a choice school within the Milwaukee public school system, that have made overt compromises to meet present requirements regarding the separation of church and state. (One of these compromises has been to eliminate the word “God” from a verse that children in the school say each morning.) The Milwaukee school’s compromise is a deliberate choice made in order to facilitate other educational objectives, especially the education of relatively poor urban children. Independent (non-public) Waldorf schools, on the other hand, have clearly chosen, if not so deliberately, not to serve poor and near-poor students like those who attend the Milwaukee school. This choice is also a compromise.

Three of a Kind: Strategies and Descriptions

A First Strategy: Waldorf Schools ARE Waldorf Education

Existing descriptions of Waldorf education can be characterized according to three strategies. The first and simplest is to let Waldorf schools stand for a description; what goes on in Waldorf schools is inferred to be, by definition, Waldorf education. Ida Oberman’s otherwise excellent history, Fidelity and Flexibility in Waldorf Education, 1919-1998, slips into this mode, examining the histories of Waldorf schools in Germany and the United States, implying that these add up to a larger history of Waldorf education. To further her discussion she uses the concept of a “cultural field,” a metaphorical container for Waldorf education. Just as the field is a metaphor, so too is Waldorf education.

Stephen Talbott also uses this first strategy in an appendix to the also otherwise excellent book The Future Does Not Compute. He asks, “What is Waldorf Education?” and answers with a description of the founding of the first school and a description of a generalized curriculum. (424)

If Waldorf education were a consistent and prescribed method and curriculum, these analogies might suffice--although their definition is circular. But what goes on in Waldorf schools varies from place to place and time to time. There is no single characteristic, in fact, without which a Waldorf school cannot exist, nor that defines a school as a Waldorf school. Mentally erase beeswax crayons, or a eurythmist, or even the morning verse. A school without these items could still fulfill Steiner’s wishes for the education of children, I believe. Waldorf education simply cannot be seen as the accumulation or collection of some (even infinite) number of defining characteristics. To indulge such a fragmented view is to give credence to a reductionism that Waldorf education stands against.

A Second Strategy: Pigeonholes

The second strategy is to pigeonhole Waldorf education according to some cultural or historical characteristic that, while real enough within a particular context, may not be necessary or sufficient to describe something larger called Waldorf education. Waldorf education is defined only partially if it is defined as a reform movement, for example. To the extent that authors acknowledge the contingency of such synecdochical definitions (definitions in which the part stands for the whole), they may be serviceable, if incomplete.

Henry Barnes and the Movement

Henry Barnes, author and long-time history teacher and faculty chairman at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, characterizes Waldorf education as a particular movement: “As one of the most rapidly growing yet least known independent, nonsectarian school movements in the free world today, Rudolf Steiner or Waldorf education should be brought to the attention of all serious students of education.” (323) This may be true, but Waldorf education is only “independent” [of public education in the United States] and only a “movement” in the here and now.

Barnes writes, “This article will briefly outline the history of the Waldorf movement and seek to give an introduction to the philosophy and methods that underlie it.” (323) Philosophy and methods sound promising; they may extend beyond consideration of Waldorf education as a movement. For Barnes, the philosophy is based on two major principles or insights. The primary or defining principle of Waldorf education is an image of the human being:

Behind the Waldorf curriculum, its methods of instruction, and all the many practical aspects one thinks of when one thinks of a Waldorf school today stands the idea of man and of child development from which they all spring. It is this idea that gives them meaning and, in the end, is the basis on which the [Waldorf education] movement will have to be evaluated and judged. (326)

To speak of the education of a child necessarily implies a concept of what or who this child is. Historical examples abound, including Locke’s “tabula rasa,” Rousseau’s good “natural man” Emile, Jonathan Edwards’ very different “natural man” in original sin, and Dewey’s concept of the child in community. For Barnes, Waldorf schools attempt to educate according to Rudolf Steiner’s image of a human being:

In Steiner’s view, the human being can never be fully understood in terms of his heredity and the impact of his environment. Beyond them lies the essential core of human individuality, which cannot be defined in material terms. That central entity, the human ego, is perceived by Steiner to be supersensible and eternal, revealing itself by reflection in the personality who is active here in time and space. It is the educator’s responsibility to help this personality to develop in such a way that it can become a fitting vehicle through which the real ego can express itself. (326)

Note that Barnes refers to “educators” in the last sentence quoted, not to “Waldorf educators.” The virtual brand name “Waldorf” is a label attached after Steiner, not by Steiner. The label “Waldorf” represents an increasing objectification of ideas that were initially less defined and therefore more open to play and experiment than they often seem.

The words “in Steiner’s view” and “perceived by Steiner” are almost extraneous here. Steiner is certainly not the only nor the first person to speak of a human being as more than the sum of genes and environment. If he, and others who find the world this way, are correct, then inferences regarding education follow not from authority but from a perceived reality. Where reference to Steiner should be inserted in the quotation above is in the last sentence. “[For Steiner,] it is the educator’s responsibility...” Even here, Steiner is not unique, although his lectures and writings certainly constitute the most thorough and systematic approach to education from this perspective.

Barnes’ point is that the “supersensible and eternal” incarnate in the world, according to Steiner, gradually and in a specific fashion. Education, therefore, should be conducted in accordance with what is known about this process of incarnation. Hence, the methods and curricula derive from this view.

For Barnes, a second principle grows from the first; because the human self is seen to incarnate over a period of years, education must address this development, which is seen to occur in three broad stages lasting roughly seven years each. (Many writers on Waldorf education treat these as if they were universal, when Steiner himself made it clear time and again that he was describing something that was historically and culturally true, not true everywhere and for all time.) The method and curriculum similarly derive from these principles, and provide the particulars visible to any visitor to a Waldorf school, including instructional materials and subject matter. These will likely include relatively featureless rag dolls, beeswax crayons, watercolor paints, colored chalk, stories of Christian saints, Norse and Greek Myths, and any number of other things. But the rhetorical question still begs, does any of these make a Waldorf school?

Barnes’s consideration of methods and philosophy extends his definition beyond the merely synecdochical, but his discussion here speaks best to education in general, not to “Waldorf” education.

Oberman’s Objectification

Ida Oberman’s history of Waldorf education also offers an objectified view. For her, “Waldorf” is a “unique” “German” “progressive” “alternative” “reform initiative” or “institution” which has “embedded” in it “an ideology, a belief system called Anthroposophy.” All of these descriptions may apply to “Waldorf education,” but each could change radically without disturbing Steiner’s contributions to ways of teaching.

Oberman locates sources for the curriculum of the first Waldorf school in Steiner’s intellectual biography, but, having shown its somewhat contingent nature, then treats it as an object to be relocated wherever “Waldorf” roots. Oberman shows how different people—Hermann von Baravalle, Marie Steiner and Ita Wegman—and different schools—the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, the Kimberton Waldorf School, and the Sacramento Waldorf School—adopt different strategies (“purity,” “accommodation,” and “evolution”), but not how curricula reflect their origins in Steiner’s work and in the time and place of their implementation.

Among the evidence for this point of view is Oberman’s insertion of the bracketed qualifier “Waldorf” into a quotation in which it did not formerly appear: “The faculty now active at the school have proven...their willingness to continue this [Waldorf] work, which represents the noblest of German cultural life for all to see.” (1999. Emil Molt and Duke Fritz von Bothmer, p. 134) It is clear that Oberman sees the work as “Waldorf” work, but this is her own objectification.

A Third Strategy: School Functions

A third strategy involves some function or group of functions that Waldorf education performs (is claimed to perform). If the difficulty of the last definition is that it is too narrow—what is does not define what else may be—the difficulty of a functional definition is that it is too broad. Good education of any kind will necessarily perform certain functions that cannot simply be claimed for, let’s say, Waldorf education. Waldorf teachers are not the only teachers to claim a developmental view of their students, nor the only to find some aspects of human individuality that cannot be attributed solely to the interaction of heredity and the environment. Further, it does not appear that there is some unique set of functions that only something called Waldorf education performs.

Eugene Schwartz’s Functionalism

For Eugene Schwartz, Waldorf education is a method, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, who “begins with a qualitative intelligence that is unitary and suggests that the task of education is to multiply it. If [Howard] Gardner’s theory concerns itself with ‘multiple intelligences,’ then Steiner’s approach might be called ‘intelligent multiplicity.’” (151)

Further, Schwartz describes Waldorf education as a “‘will first’ pedagogy” or “methodology” that aims to “educate the child in accordance with principles that ask us to honor and work with the soul and spiritual nature of the youngster.” (157) While this sounds vague, it is only his introduction into a more specific examination of methods and techniques that teachers may use.

As for setting these ideas in a context as large as that of Barnes or Curran (see below), I don’t believe Schwartz sees this as a helpful goal; his more immediately practical goal is to show how Waldorf education can function to address the needs of children in a particular place and time. That is, he is concerned with the “will” education of children in wealthy industrialized countries.

A Look at the Map

Eugene Schwartz also approaches the function of Waldorf education by analogy. Like a map, Schwartz posits, a curriculum can be understood on three levels. The first, a global, geophysical map, remains valid for centuries. For Schwartz, Steiner’s description of child development is such a durable aspect of Waldorf education. Development itself may change, but only slowly. School subjects—history, math, and so forth—change more rapidly, and have been modified significantly over the decades since Waldorf education began. These are akin to a political map, which may change more rapidly. An up-to-date road map, however, must “come alive every day.” The clear advantage of Schwartz’ analogy is that it neatly allows for both relatively unchanging and continually changing aspects of Waldorf education. One danger of this view, however, is that agreement on the unchanging aspects of the map may be perceived as dogma—unchanging and therefore unquestioned. The history of geology shows, however, that while the earth appears to change slowly, our views and interpretations of that change can be revised radically from one year to the next. The notion that Waldorf education is a thing, however immaterial, has developed so surreptitiously over the past decades that we have not noticed the change. Our map has not changed much, perhaps, but we may be in danger of mistaking the map for the thing itself.

A Quality of Education

Each of the strategies outlined above makes Waldorf education into a thing, whether a material thing like a school, or an ideological thing like a movement, or a mental thing like a function. Not all writers on Waldorf education, however, resort to these three strategies. Those who perceive Waldorf education not as a thing but as a quality of education demonstrate a different possibility for description.

Peter Curran on Waldorf Education

Peter Curran, graduate of Bowdoin College and long-time history teacher at The Waldorf School of Garden City, adopts a strategy similar to Barnes’s in describing Waldorf education, but then ventilates it immediately to include, potentially, all schools, not a particular subset. Following his retirement in the late 1980s, Curran set down some of his ideas about Waldorf schools. Particularly, he believed that there were four “essentials,” “without which no school (by whatever name) is a Waldorf School and with which any school is a Waldorf School.”

I. …As each child’s consciousness matures, it recapitulates the cultural epochs of all Mankind. Waldorf education agrees with Emerson when he says that all children go through a Greek period and a Roman period, etc. There is, then, a proper time and method for particular subjects to be taught.
II. Since no one destroys what one loves, reverence, awe and respect for the Earth should be fostered. An inkling of the spirituality of the Earth then comes into being.
III. The qualitative, as well as the quantitative, in all things should be equally developed.
IV. Above all, Man is known as a spiritual as well as a physical being.

Curran’s statement poses a realism to Barnes’s nominalism in that the enactment of these principles does not depend on the presence or absence of the name “Waldorf.”

Of Curran’s four principles, the first and last are potentially controversial, while the middle two may be found in many classrooms and schools. The first, the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” statement, is probably the least familiar to most educators, and it may be the most dated, arising out of Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being”. (See, for example, Lovejoy, 1936 and 1964) Few, if any, schools other than Waldorf schools today organize themselves around such a principle. Still, there is nothing to prevent them doing so if they choose. (Nor, if Waldorf schools found a different central metaphor, would they necessarily cease to be good schools.)

Last, some contemporary interpretations of the anti-establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution might prevent Curran’s fourth principle from being overtly applied in public schools, but the concept is hardly unique among independent schools. Some Waldorf teachers may argue that principle four may be found in many schools, but that Waldorf schools mean something different by “spirit”. I’m not convinced of this, however, and, in any event, it needn’t be so.

Douglas Sloan’s “Education of the Imagination”

Douglas Sloan, retired Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, NY, worked diligently through writing and teaching to present an open-minded approach to Waldorf education. In Insight-Imagination, he describes Waldorf education sensitively in his discussion of a larger “education of the imagination.” (211)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964) wrote of the “primacy of perception”: “all consciousness is perceptual, even the consciousness of ourselves… The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” (13) For Sloan, the faculty of “imagination” necessarily accompanies perception, without which we would live in William James’ “buzzing, blooming confusion.” For Sloan, imagination is not simply one faculty among others—empathy or cognition, say--to be strengthened through an enhanced curriculum. Imagination is the necessary wellspring of human experience of the world:

…it is only through imagination that we have any knowledge whatsoever. …The imagination, the image-making power of the mind …shapes our everyday perception of the world, for there is no perception separate from interpretation. (140)

Similarly to Barnes, Sloan describes Waldorf education according to a conception of educational stages. After briefly examining Piaget with regard to stages, however, Sloan qualifies his statements: “Any conception of educational stages must… stand constantly ready to be reevaluated and revised in the light of new evidence from any field of research….” (212) For Sloan, Waldorf education does not approach a faith, nor was it created ready-made by Rudolf Steiner, to be preserved in perpetuity like a Colonial reenactment. “Such a conception of education must as a whole remain open and subject to revision….” (212) Waldorf education is an evolving model of educational thinking, research and practice, and must be created anew in each application if it is not to devolve into prescription or dogma.

Nancy Parsons Whittaker’s Open Door Policy

Nancy Parsons Whittaker is a translator of Steiner’s work into English and a founder and administrator of “www.bobnancy.com”, a website devoted to Waldorf education. The paragraphs that follow do not set forth a thing-like definition, but attempt to throw open the doors of a somewhat cloistered “movement”:

I believe that the educational movement Steiner founded drifted very far from its source the moment [the act of] founding schools became more important than examining the quality of education the children were receiving and working to really convey the approach to other teachers in all manner of schools and situations. What we call “Waldorf Education” has largely come to mean a set of curricula and specific ways of introducing specific subject matter. This has nothing (in my opinion) to do with the original intent, which was to convey the attitude, the viewpoint toward the children and toward society (any society) with which a teacher could fully meet the physical, mental and spiritual needs of both the students and their community.

Any school is a Waldorf school if the intent of Steiner’s pedagogy is being met within its halls. What was the intent? The intent was to offer an education in a way that gave each child a fundamental, true introduction into the foundation of his or her society while at the same time enhancing that child’s ability to accurately perceive life around him or her without damaging the child’s innate capacity to be sensitively aware of the Creative Love behind the visible world (whatever that capacity might have been, whether large, small or nearly nonexistent—the teaching was not intended to train a student’s spiritual vision, just not to damage what already existed). The education was not intended to found schools separated from their society at large nor was it intended to model a particular belief system.

These goals can be met in a wide variety of settings, with an infinitely wide possibility of curricula, through the myriad possibilities of human personality.

A Necessary Lack of Definition

I used to have a bumper sticker that read “Waldorf Education” on two lines, “Waldorf” above and “Education” below. I returned to long-term parking after a research trip to discover that someone had neatly sliced off the word “Waldorf”, who knows why, leaving a narrow bumper sticker that read simply: “Education”. I started to remove it but stopped. It’s still on my car.

Those who aim deliberately not to objectify Waldorf education can avoid the pitfalls of reification, synecdoche, or function. These writers necessarily leave Waldorf education undefined, and characterize it in refreshingly open terms. Waldorf education becomes not a thing, not a kind or brand of education, but a quality of education. And qualities, like colors, like the warmth of a heart, may expand boundlessly.

Conclusion

Steiner relates the following anecdote about his time in the Waldorf School: “Whenever I come to Stuttgart to visit and assist in the guidance of the school, I ask the same question in each class, naturally within the appropriate context and avoiding any possible tedium, ‘Children, do you love your teachers?’ You should hear and witness the enthusiasm with which they call out in chorus, ‘Yes!’ This call to the teachers to engender love within their pupils is all part of the question of how the older generation should relate to the young.” (1995)

We are all older than some and younger than others; we learn from some and we teach others. If we foster the relationship Steiner describes here, then we participate in an education that honors the memory of Rudolf Steiner.

References

Barnes, H. (1980) An introduction to waldorf education. In Teachers College Record, 81 (3), Spring 1980; pp. 322-336,
Curran, P. (1990) Unpublished typescript.
Emerson, R. (1966) Education. In Emerson on education: Selections, H. Jones (Ed.). Teachers College Press: New York.
Lovejoy, A. (1936 and 1964) The great chain of being: A study of the history of an idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964) The primacy of perception and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics, J. Edie (Ed.) Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Oberman, I. (1999) Fidelity and flexibility in Waldorf education, 1919-1998. Ann Arbor: UMI Dissertation Services.
St. Charles, Dorothy, interview by Alan Chartock, WAMC radio, 90.3 FM, Albany, NY, April 1994.
Schwartz, E. (1999) Millennial child: Transforming education in the twenty-first century. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Sloan, D. (1983) Insight-Imagination: The emancipation of thought and the modern world. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing.
Steiner, R. (1965) The education of the child in the light of anthroposophy, G. & M. Adams (Trans.) Rudolf Steiner Press: New York.
Steiner, R. (1995) The fundamentals of waldorf education. November 11, 1921. In Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1: Nine Public Lectures. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Steiner, R. (1996) Why base education on anthroposophy? June 30, 1923. In Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 2: Twelve Public Lectures. Anthroposophic Press: Hudson, NY.
Talbott, S. (1995) The future does not compute: Transcending the machines in our midst. O’Reilly and Associates: Sebastopol, CA.
Whittaker, N. (2001) Post to subscribers of the list server Waldorf@maelstrom.stjohns.edu., Feb. 11. Subscribe at http://www.bobnancy.com. Quoted with author’s permission.

Growing a Small School and Avoiding the Deadly Middle Ground

2009-11-20T15:00:00.008-05:00

I'm often asked how we can keep our tiny high school going--23 students this year, our largest number in our eight years. We have no capital, no cash reserve, and no primary source of funding other than tuitions.

The answer has a few parts. First, we're not paid much. Our salaries are based on $40,000 per year, and all teachers (except me) are part-time. I'm full time but, for now, taking only a part-time salary. Our teachers are sometimes shared with our local elementary Steiner School, each school contributing part of a salary and benefits (we don't offer any benefits through our school; we can't yet afford to). Through our brief history, we have been fortunate to find teachers who are willing to work for less than they're worth; in at least three cases, teachers have donated a year of teaching time.

Some of these teachers will move to full-time when numbers of students and numbers of dollars allow this, but many will continue as part-timers, and that's the way we have planned it. Our potter and our blacksmith, for example, work as professionals most of the year and take time out a couple of afternoons a week for part of the school year to teach our students. These men are not art teachers in the conventional sense; they're working professionals who enjoy teaching what they know to adolescents. The students respect their skill and knowledge, and look forward to their classes.

Second, we use community resources. We're an academic school from 8 a.m. to 12 noon most days, and then a "school without walls" in the afternoon. Students head out to Dan Bellow's pottery studio, John Graney's blacksmith's shop, "Mixed Company" theater, Berkshire Pulse dance studio, Mike Bissaillon's BizFit gym, Simon's Rock College library or chem lab or athletic center--Simon's Rock has been extraordinarily generous, allowing us to use facilities for little rent. To rent or pay community use fees or have these venues donated saves a bundle. How much does it cost to build and maintain a studio or a library or a gym? A lot more than the hourly fees we contribute to most of these places. (It has long struck me that we build and operate tremendous facilities for our public and private school students, and then they sit unused most of the year--school is in session about 180 days, and facilities may be used only a few periods of each of those days. It seems so wasteful.)

Third, we combine classes. We believed initially that mixed-age, mixed-ability classes were a necessary compromise to keep the school going. Now, although we may grow, we will work to maintain at least a few combined classes. Older, more advanced students help younger, less advanced students. Class distinctions blur; the artificial divisions of age--where else in your life except a school classroom do these things matter so much?--recede. Math classes--math is sequential and cumulative, no matter how you teach it--are not combined. But all other classes are likely to be, including English, foreign languages, history, science... This requires us often to teach a curriculum over two years--a course offered one year is not repeated the next; something else is taught in its place. But, over the course of four years of high school, each student receives each required course, often in the company of students older or younger than he or she.

We are growing and we plan to grow--we are in the second year of a five-year plan to grow to 40 students, and we may reach our goal early. We grew this year, in a year when most private school enrollments decreased. And interest for next year is already greater than ever before. About half our new students come from a Steiner or Waldorf school background, and about half come from prep school, public school, or homeschool.

We broke even last year, for the first time, with 20 students. We won't show a surplus this year because we will use any extra revenue to improve our program.

We won't grow too large, however, even if we receive more applicants than we plan for. According to our analysis and our methods, a school can make money up to around 60 students. It can also make money with, let's say, 180 students. Between these rough boundaries, however, lurks a "deadly middle ground," in which a school requires facilities and resources that would enable it to educate larger numbers but that cost more than the revenue it generates. It's interesting to us that many Waldorf high schools fall in this middle range.

We plan to cap enrollment at 56 students--that's four classes of 14 students each, exactly enough to fit in a 14 passenger school bus. And a 14 passenger bus is the largest that a teacher can drive without a commercial license. A full enrollment of 56 would allow us to send each class to a different location each day, each in its own bus. More than that, and we'd have to add teachers and resources (including a bus) that would cost more than they're worth.

Kindness in School

2009-11-17T12:29:00.003-05:00

According to Henry James, "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind." If this were simply a sentiment striving for power through repetition, it would be worthy only of a Hallmark card. But there are at least three meanings of the word kind. The first and most common is as a simple virtue—sympathy, friendliness, or tenderness. We may practice simple virtues.

Kind also means alike or without distinction. When we draw invidious distinctions between parents and teachers in a school, or between those on the Board and those on the Council or College, or between those who are teachers and those who aren’t, or even between friends and critics, we indulge a harmful fiction. We are alike. We are one kind, and we do our best work when we take this likeness as a given.

Kind also means natural, innate, or native. In this sense it has the same derivation—and is spelled the same—as the German word “Kind,” child. “Except as ye… become as little children, ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” For teachers, this entrance is a blessing and a curse. Teachers can more easily become as children—open-minded, reverent, and playful; they live with the best possible examples. They can more easily become childish, too. Teachers are those who have chosen to spend most of their time with children. They sometimes treat adults as they do students. (Parents often act like their children, especially within the walls of a school—petulant in preschool, aggressive in middle school, but that’s a different topic).

So Henry James’s injunction can be taken in its repetition in three ways: Be kind. Be one. And be as little children.

Ancient history, Language, and Meaning

2009-11-13T13:27:00.006-05:00

One of the greatest challenges in teaching or studying ancient history is to develop, even to a small degree, an appreciation for the consciousness of those who lived in ancient times. They simply didn't mean the same things we mean when they used (in their ancient languages) words like the words we use now.

Take any modern abstract word, as my dear friend Owen Barfield pointed out, and you will find an earlier concrete meaning. "Spirit," for example, which means hardly anything anymore (that is, it means lots of different things to lots of different people and is, consequently, difficult to use with meaning), used to refer to "breath." So the ancients had a concrete, literal consciousness where we have an abstract one.

But that's too easy. Take any modern concrete word, and you will find an earlier symbolic or metaphorical meaning. "Heart," for example, refers to a muscular chest organ, and, more strongly in the past, to qualities associated with heart--sympathy or courage, for example. So the ancients had a symbolic consciousness where we have a literal one.

This reversal is also too easy. Because it's not as if they weren't fully aware--even more aware than we are, as herdsmen, warriors and butchers--of the concrete meaning of heart, as well. So, in ancient times, the symbolic and literal meanings of words were more closely related than they are now. "Heart" meant simultaneously the organ and its associated qualities.

Now, we attach somewhat less meaning to each of our many words but speak our meaning more clearly. We are rarely confused, we are rarely required to examine our sense of ambiguity, when we hear the word "heart."

The ancients attached more meanings to far fewer words--the world was simpler, working vocabularies smaller. This simultaneous simplicity of language and concentration of meaning allowed them to tell and to write stories that were accessible on many levels, for example, stories to which a child could listen but that a wise man could ponder.

The facts of the physical evolution of human beings become ever clearer. But it may be erroneous--and it is certainly a logical fallacy--to believe that this physical evolution must necessarily be accompanied by an evolution from a brute lack of intelligence--a la the cavemen in all the cartoons--toward whereever it is we are now.

If we take seriously a movement of language and meaning back through time from more words and less meaning to fewer words each with more meaning, we may imagine an arrow pointing to the prehistoric past. This arrow points in the general direction of a word containing all meaning, if you will. And "In the beginning was the word."

The Futures of Waldorf Education--Part I

2009-10-30T15:13:00.001-04:00

There are roughly 53 million K-12 school children in the U.S.

Of this number, 44 million (83 %) attend public schools.

A few more than 6 million (11 %) attend independent (private) schools.

Approximately 1.5 million (3%) are homeschooled, a number that has grown significantly in the past decade and that continues to grow. Homeschooling, however, seems generally to be a reaction against available options—public or private—rather than a positive choice in itself. Can it represent a viable future for educating children in the U.S.? I don’t believe so.

About 1.1 million (2%) attend charter schools, a number that is growing but, given the grassroots energy required and the opposition of school districts and teachers' unions, also seems unlikely to be a route to the solution of educational ills in the U.S.

Finally, lumping independent and public/charter Waldorf school students together yields a number around 30,000, or 1/18 of 1 percent (.06 percent) of students in the U.S., and perhaps 1/2 of 1 percent of private school students. [The post just previous to this says 25,000, but, as comments point out, I neglected some early childhood programs. Either way, the order of magnitude is correct, if not the number itself.]

The number of independent Waldorf schools, which grew at a rate approximately doubling every ten years from the 1930s through the 1990s, appears to have plateaued. The curve is sigmoid; such a curve is sometimes called a saturation curve. That is, given the configurations of people's lives across roughly the past century, the demand for small, independent, relatively expensive, alternative Waldorf schools may be reaching its limit. Waldorf schools of this type may have saturated their possible markets.

(It also seems like the failure rate for Waldorf schools--which was low--a handful of schools--through the first six decades in the U.S., is increasing. I don't have hard numbers here--I'm working on that. But it does seem like the conditions for the growth of new schools has changed. Maybe they're being founded in some new, less hardy way. Or maybe the climate--cultural, economic--has changed. Or maybe the way they represent Waldorf education has become unpalatable. Regardless, it’s certainly true that service industries—like education—can’t benefit from economies of scale; hence the increasing cost of all education.)

This is not to say that new private Waldorf schools won't continue to be founded, but that their survival will be less assured, their road to sustainability harder. But, without some fundamental change in how Waldorf schools see themselves and conduct themselves--or without some fundamental change in the conditions in which they exist--their growth will be arithmetic, let's say, not geometric.

If the path to the future includes growth, it is likely not private school growth. Perhaps it’s public school growth. There are between 30 and 40 Waldorf charter schools (some call them “Waldorf inspired,” but I don’t care for this distinction) in the U.S., and the number is likely to continue to grow as the charter movement grows. But for how long will this be true? What is the saturation of charter schooling in the U.S.? Urban districts can absorb charter schools, but rural districts cannot. Charter schooling seems not to be a panacea for public education in the U.S., and therefore not a permanent growth area for Waldorf schools.

Homeschooling, too, is burgeoning, and many homeschoolers receive an education that is based on Steiner’s educational ideas. How many homeschoolers use Waldorf methods, and how they interpret them, is impossible to say.

Altogether, however, charter schools and homeschoolers represent fewer than 3 million school-age children. We may estimate that, like private schools, they represent a higher percentage of Waldorf methods than public schools—say 1/2 of 1 percent versus 1/20 of 1 percent, roughly an order of magnitude. If these numbers grow significantly, and if Waldorf methods grow as a constant percentage within this growth, they may represent the most significant possibility for the growth of the number of students receiving an education based on Steiner’s ideas.

In the long run, however—the next decade or beyond—it seems unlikely that charter schools and homeschoolers offer real solutions to whatever ails U.S. education. These movements exist within the framework of intractable teachers’ unions, increasing education costs, and pressure toward standardization from Washington that seems not to change from administration to administration.

How many Waldorf School students are there in the U.S.?

2009-10-19T18:56:00.003-04:00

My estimate is around 30,000--about 150 independent schools of approximately 150 each plus another few thousand charter school students. Maybe a few more--if you count homeschoolers, especially--maybe a few less.

Given that there are roughly 50 million K-12 school students in the U.S., that means that about 1/16 of 1 percent are in Waldorf schools of one kind or another. That's a tiny number. To a large, 200 pound person, 1/16 of 1 percent is 2 ounces--a gulp of water, a fish stick. If you make $50,000 per year, 1/16 of 1 percent of that is about $30, barely a tank of gas or a movie night. To put it in further perspective, New York City public schools educate about 1 million students per year, or 33 times as many Waldorf school students as there are in the U.S.

Iron Forging and Metaphor

2009-10-02T09:41:00.004-04:00

In his first class, John Graney (http://www.graneymetaldesign.com/) gives each student a length of square iron stock and teaches how to round, taper, flatten, bend, and drill it to form a hook. He also teaches how to maintain a coal fire at the right temperature, and how to tell by color the temperature of the metal.

In two hours, students go from complete novices to novices who have learned a lot, taken a few steps on a path to discipline, and been shown a door through which they may glimpse mastery.

We call blacksmithing a "practical art" in our curriculum, but not because we expect that students will become blacksmiths or because we believe these skills are practical in today's world.

Blacksmithing is practical in a metaphorical sense. It teaches care and balance and consequence--each blow of the hammer impacts the world, literally, as each human thought and action does metaphorically. Light blows don't work and heavy blows damage the work. Rhythm guides the work, and an arhythmic approach fatigues. Cold metal won't forge, and too-hot metal is weak and won't hold its shape. A careless touch leads to a burn, not soon forgotten.

The more I live and teach, however, the less I believe that such work is merely metaphorical. Who is to say that the experience of working with hot metal and a hammer isn't internalized directly, that physical, outer experience doesn't become inner experience, literally? That the lessons of the hand and body don't become lessons of the mind?

If this is so, the reverse is likely so, too. Lessons of the mind become lessons of the body--what we think or have thought visible in the ways we move and work.

C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image

2009-08-05T14:16:00.006-04:00

I picked up C.S. Lewis's The Discarded Image because I read A.N. Wilson's excellent biography of Lewis this spring, and a mention there made me think I'd like to see it. I'm glad I did.

The "discarded image" to which the title refers is the worldview of human beings in the western hemisphere--Greek, Roman, Jew, Arab, European (heavy on the Europeans--this is C.S. Lewis, an Englishman, and what we may call the Middle Ages happened largely in Europe)--between, say, Homer and the Renaissance. Lewis's argument is that in order to understand Medieval literature, it helps to understand the worldview from which it springs. No doubt. And, in going through the literature, brilliantly--is there anything Lewis hasn't read and digested?--and adroitly--his style as a writer is lucid, charming, and respectful--Lewis paints a picture of a world so different from ours it's hard to imagine.

But the task he has set himself is to imagine this world as he discovers it in literature, and he shows us how we may do the same. This, then, is as much an exercise in history and appreciation of historical difference as it is an introduction to literature. The literature becomes the lens through which we see the Medieval mind.

Lewis's tour of the heavens (imagine looking up into a bowl of beautiful, meaningful actors, not out into unfathomably empty space), the earth, and its inhabitants leaves me yearning not to return to those violent, muddy, ignorant times, but to achieve with the benefits of modern consciousness the same relationship to a meaningful world.

For those who find Rudolf Steiner a crank, idiosyncratically spouting nonsense about the spiritual world, The Discarded Image shows, by inference, that Steiner's attempt was not to inject ignorant fantasy into the hard realities of the modern world, but to recover the meaning of spirit, soul, and cosmos as they were understood in earlier times. Read Lewis's exposition of Vegetable Soul and Sentient Soul, based in several Medieval works, and see how these relate directly--they're talking about the same thing--to Steiner's concepts of etheric and astral lives. Find threads going back through the Middle Ages to Aristotle, Plato, and Herodotus that illustrate what Huston Smith calls "the perennial philosophy."

Lewis is not espousing one view over another. He's not seeking a return to older ways of thinking and knowing. He acknowledges that the medieval view of the world is largely and fundamentally wrong, or that it contains many untruths.

But he is clear that medieval thinkers were sensitive to the limits of their knowledge, acknowledging the tentative, theoretical or hypothetical nature of their concepts. Toward the end of the book, he contrasts this openness and sensitivity to the insensitive way in which we approach the apparent "reality" that we perceive given not only our scientific knowledge but also our unacknowledged, unquestioned assumptions about the world we believe we live in. In a nod to his friend, Owen Barfield, Lewis notes that the change from the ancient to the modern world is not so much a change in the facts of the world as it is a change in our understanding of what is meant by a theory.

Lewis is clear that much of what Medieval people believed was factually wrong--we needn't quibble about that--but their appreciation for logic, fact, and theory was more highly developed than ours is.

A Dissent on the Wall of Laptops

2009-08-03T15:38:00.005-04:00

In the summer of 2000 I walked into a class for the first time to encounter what I came to think of as the Wall of Laptops. Two dozen doctoral students sat around a large conference table, and all but one or two had their laptops proudly open before them. We started class, and it was clear within a few days (maybe within a few minutes to more sensitive types) that this wasn't working. The core of my teaching, based on the methods of the best teachers I had in graduate school, is presentation and discussion. With the Wall of Laptops, presentation became a PowerPoint flogging, each bullet point another not-memorable nail in the coffin of engaged thinking. And discussion became a sort of lobbing out of the foxhole, then back to email checking or whatever went on back there behind the laptop. I put up with it as long as possible, giving the new technology time to work itself out. Then we derailed class for an hour to sort it out. Fortunately, these were adult students who quickly realized what they were doing to themselves and each other. The wall folded and humanity returned.

The following summer, I was pleased to have Ian Parker's "Absolute Powerpoint" from the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/05/28/010528fa_fact_parker) to wave when I requested in the first class that laptops generally be left closed. Here are the first few paragraphs of that excellent article:

Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little
like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the
lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living
in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren’t
listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So,
one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft’s PowerPoint
program, and typed:
FAMILY MATTERS An approach for positive change to the Wyndham
family team
On a new page, she wrote:
·Lack of organization leads to confusion and frustration among all family members.
·Disorganization is detrimental to grades and to your social life.
·Disorganization leads to inefficiencies that impact the entire family.
Instead of pleading for domestic harmony, Sarah Wyndham was pitching for it. Soon she had eighteen pages of large type, supplemented by a color photograph of a generic happy family riding bicycles, and, on the final page, a drawing of a key—the key to success.
The briefing was given only once, last fall. The experience was so upsetting to
her children that the threat of a second showing was enough to make one of the
Wyndham girls burst into tears.
PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.
But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost
surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an
opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think.
It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize
information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.

I was reminded of this story today when I read "When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom," by Jeffrey Young in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/) The second paragraph of that article reads:

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from
using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a
crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for
discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures
online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on
their college years later in life, they're going to remember challenging debates
and talks with their professors. Lively interactions are what teaching is all
about, he says, but those give-and-takes are discouraged by preset collections
of slides.

Hear, hear.

And all this reminds me of a conversation from earlier in the summer regarding the high school at which I teach. A dad asked his son, a student who could have attended any high school he wished, more or less, private or public, but chose our small Waldorf high school, why he made the decision he did. His son answered something like this: "At every other school I visited, the teacher stood in the front and lectured the kids, who sat there with textbooks. I don't want that kind of learning. At the Waldorf High School, the students sit around conference tables with the teachers and have real discussions. You can ask real questions and get real answers."

I don't know that other Waldorf schools teach this way, but I'm clear that this is a good way to teach. We live in the information age; access to information, for me or my students, is simply not an issue. Conversation, interpretation, and discussion. Listening, thinking, speaking, and writing. These are the roots of engagement with the world, in a classroom or outside it.

For that matter, when I read Rudolf Steiner on education, I picture a much more collegiate model of education than I find in most schools, Waldorf or otherwise. In the U.S., perhaps largely for economic reasons, we have adopted what I call the "Mother Hen" approach to education (this might also be called the "Martyr" approach), in which teachers spend so much time in class, on the playground, at lunch, and even after school with students and colleagues that their focus narrows and so does their engagement with the world. To perpetuate this nurturing-to-the-point-of-smothering model, especially in high school, simply doesn't serve students, parents, or teachers very well. For a high school teacher to model herself after a college professor (the best college professor, that is)--engaged with students and subject and world, not one at the expense of the other--and to bring that engagement in a mature manner to her students, that's educational.

Love and Critics

2009-08-03T14:52:00.004-04:00

I have spent some brief time on the Waldorf critics list (if that's what it's called) recently, and I have engaged in a couple of exchanges that I intend to continue when I have time. It is stimulating and challenging to enter a discussion that involves different points of view.

It seems to me that some of the Waldorf critics, at least, actually love Waldorf education and anthroposophy, that the tension between the highly imperfect practices of Waldorf schools and Waldorf teachers and the high ideals that they espouse drives a desire for criticism. As a noted anthroposophist told me once, "I love Waldorf education; it's just the schools I can't stand." Tongue-in-cheek, but, all too often, understandable.

What I mean, for example, is this: I have no interest in astrology. When people at a dinner party start talking about it, I tune out. When I come across references to it in my reading, anthroposophical or otherwise, I tend to start skimming. Astrology may be total bunk or it may contain great truths of which I will remain ignorant. But I just can't bring myself to be bothered. I recognize that others take it seriously, on the one side for its apparent value, and on the other for its apparent idiocy. But to have a stake in a discussion about it is beyond me. And I recognize that I could only have strong feelings about it if it connected to my life somehow. I do not embrace it and I am not critical of it; I am indifferent.

If I grow, eventually, through interest, to love it, fine. If I grow to hate it, however, I must recognize that beyond the hatred is love for something that I wish to see born. In the phenomenon from which I distance myself is a kernel of truth that draws me. (Similarly, as the rabbi said to the atheist, "The god you do not believe in, I also do not believe in.")

To turn this around, if I experienced astrology as connected to my life, I would have strong feelings about it. So, in manifesting strong feelings, great interest--many of the Waldorf critics are as well read in Steiner as any anthroposophists I know--Waldorf critics demonstrate the connection of Waldorf education with their lives.

Unfortunately (from my point of view), whereas my education in a Waldorf school (after nine years in three mediocre public schools) and my experience as a teacher lead me to see great value in it, the experiences of many critics is the reverse. They or their children were wronged by someone or something in Waldorf schools--dogmatic teachers, heedless governance, even educational malpractice. Rather than writing off this experience, however, as we all do with wrongs done to us every day (unless we aim to carry a lot of baggage wherever we go; fewer than one child in one thousand is educated in a Waldorf school in the U.S.; if our primary motive is improving education, there are better ways to spend our time...), some Waldorf critics have engaged with it, in part through their on-line list or group.

Their motives, even if they seek to destroy Waldorf education, are beyond reproach. They aim (as I do) to make the world a better place, and what, in the end, is more loving than that?

Similarly, we may disagree, even after long conversation, but if we shun each other we exclude the possibility of mutual understanding. And there's no love in that.

So-Called "Spiritual Science"

2009-07-27T13:41:00.002-04:00

We may swoon with delight or crinkle our noses in disgust at the term "spiritual science," but we should know its origins before we embrace or discount it.

If your daughter told you she was studying humanities in college could you imagine having the same reactions? "Geisteswissenschaft," literally, "spiritual science," refers in German universities to what we call the humanities. It's that simple.

Some claim that Husserl and Steiner, among others, use the term in a "new way," but I would argue that, if anything, they're actually reclaiming its older sense. That is, they aim to understand literature, philosophy, history--the humanities--as clearly and objectively as natural scientists aim to understand the natural world.

Whether or not they succeed, whether or not we agree with their method or findings, this was their project. Owen Barfield sometimes described his work in history and philosphy as aiming at a "science of meaning." I believe this is exactly what Steiner meant by spiritual science, and what we (used to) mean when we studied the humanities.

What are the alternatives to a science of meaning ("science" derives from Latin for "knowledge")? Accept the universe as meaningless? Teach that we each "create our own meaning"? I know it's wimpy not to accept these hard "truths," but, of course, they're not truths, they're assumptions. And I will hold them as such--possibilities not demonstrated--while I pursue the humanities.

Synesthesia, Eye, and Mind

2009-07-09T19:44:00.006-04:00

Rudolf Steiner describes beautifully the way a child who wants a sweet wants it with her whole being; that it, we see her desire in her expression, her body, her fingers, her bouncy toes. (We reserved adults have learned to be more circumspect; only our salivary glands might give us away.) It is as if she can already taste the sweet, and, not only that, she experiences this sweetness not just on her tongue or palate, but throughout her being. Her senses are unified in anticipation of sweetness.

Doesn't this remind us of synesthesia, the condition in which a sensory perception produces an automatic, involuntarily perception via another (or more than one other) sense? Those with synesthesia may see colors when they listen to music. They aren't just imagining them, as I might; the colors are diachronically consistent; that is, if you ask the synesthetic person to describe them, record this impression, and return months later, the reaction to and description of the colors for the same piece of music will be virtually unchanged.

This is similar, in fact, to a common test for synesthesia: If you suspect you're synesthetic (many creative persons--Duke Ellington, Wasily Kandinsky, Richard Feynman--have been), write down the digits 0 through 9. For each, record the color impression that each creates in your mind when you look at it. (If this baffles you, you're not synesthetic; stop here.) Put it away for a few weeks or more. Seal it in an envelope, say. Before you open the envelope, write down the same digits in a different order. Record again the colors you associate with each. If you're synesthetic, you should be able to open the envelope and discover a remarkable consistency between your previous perceptions and your current ones.

Even those of us who are not synesthetic have experiences that are similar to this. Most of us experience colors as "warm" (orange, for example), or "cool" (blue, for example). If asked to name an abstract spiky shape, we might choose a name like "Kiki," that has a "spiky" sound; for a rounded blob, perhaps "Bouba." (This is the so-called "Bouba/Kiki effect," and it's been researched.) Even the words "spiky" and "blob," even the letters "B" and "K" record our associations of sound and shape--and these are robust across languages.

Regardless, relating experiences of synesthesia--possibly the most remarkable case is that described by Luria in his famous The Mind of a Mnemonist, about an anonymous, illiterate Russian synesthete with a prodigious memory--common metaphorical experience, and observations of children, isn't it reasonable to say that all of us come into the world synesthetic, our senses undifferentiated? It's only over time, perhaps, the first months or years of life, that our senses differentiate and compartmentalize themselves. We grow into our perceptions and our very way of looking at--and therefore thinking about (remember Merleau-Ponty's The Primacy of Perception) the world. If we speak a different language, use our senses differently, have different adults to emulate and imitate, we'll grow not only to think differently and speak differently, but, literally, to perceive differently.

To think that our senses are "objective" apparatuses like cameras or tape recorders is to make a category mistake. Our eye isn't "like" a camera; a camera is like highly sophisticated, mechanically complex aspects of our eye. Our actual living eyes perceive not because they are cameras, but because, as research increasingly demonstrates, of the mind behind them.

(Much more to say; to be continued...)

Mencken, Mencken, Mencken

2009-06-29T09:59:00.004-04:00

A former student, who irreverently refers to me as "Big Ass"--I'm large, and this nickname evolved from "Big S," for me and the first initial of my last name--just sent me this quotation:

"The average schoolmaster is and always must be essentially an ass, for how
can one imagine an intelligent man engaging in so puerile an avocation."
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

Mencken's right, but he doesn't go far enough. It's not just schoolmasters who are essentially an ass; just ask Dogberry ("Much Ado About Nothing"): "But, masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass..." Sheriffs, too, and all the rest of us--what do we think of bankers at the moment? --are an ass.

To call teaching "puerile" is simply to name an occupation by its inescapable preoccupation.

But to call teaching an "avocation" demonstrates the difference between Mencken's time and ours, or Mencken's mind and mine. I am not an ass avocationally. I am called to be an ass.

Beware "First Grade Readiness"

2009-06-23T15:34:00.002-04:00

This post may strike some readers as a minor, picayune point, but to others it may go to the core of their trouble with Waldorf school ideologues.

Many Waldorf schools leave it to kindergarten teachers to determine which children are "ready" for first grade. Parents are told, following assessment, whether or not, in the eyes of these teachers, their child is ready for first grade.

Often, assessments don't take place until late spring, leaving parents anxious and wondering--if my child isn't "ready," will I still have time to get him into another local private school's first grade? Parents may use this waffling to look around. And get excited--or see their children get excited--about the green grass on the other side of the fence.

You see, for parents, the issue is often NOT whether or not the child is "first-grade ready," but whether or not the Waldorf school will promote him. A child judged not to be first-grade ready, in my experience, is more likely to leave the school for first grade somewhere else--another Waldorf school, the local public school. It's relatively rare that parents are so committed to the school or to Waldorf education at all costs that they'll bow to the teachers' judgment in this case.

I'm not saying the teachers are wrong, I'm just saying that the language and process they use can unnecessarily alienate parents. A goal for a school could be to have any family that leaves--after being denied admission or after being counselled out for any reason--to wish fervently that they could have obtained the pearl they sought. Somehow, Harvard manages to do this and Waldorf schools don't.

And isn't such a process like leaving high school admissions to the 8th grade teacher? Or college admissions to high school teachers? Yes, teachers should take into account the recommendations of previous teachers--8th grade, kindergarten--but determination should rest with the school or class or grade the child is entering, in almost every case. "First-grade readiness" should more accurately, less politically, less ideologically, more politely, be called "elementary school admissions."

Most children are simply ready for first grade, anyway, based on "normal" development and birthday. Yet, often, a whole class of parents is held hostage to assessments made late in the kindergarten year. Wouldn't it make more sense to alert the few parents of children for whom there's an issue--a true developmental delay, a real concern over birthdate--and let the others breathe easy? Shouldn't these parents know long before the spring of kindergarten rolls around that there may be some developmental or educational issue that they and their teachers may wish to address?

When children are assessed in the spring of their kindergarten year for admission to elementary school the following fall--half a year away--they still have almost ten per cent of a life to lead! Lots can change...

Another point: Often, children apply directly to first grade, having attended another (non-Waldorf) early childhood program. Are these children shipped to the kindergarten to be assessed? No! They're interviewed by the first grade teacher or her proxy! Why the special treatment? (Really, why the normal treatment?)

I understand that I'm writing about unusual circumstances. But, as a former school administrator, I know that it only takes one angry parent every other year or so to make a school's life really difficult. And don't forget that the early childhood program is the base on which the whole school is built. Small kindergarten? Don't expect a large first grade. Shrinking kindergarten? Your operating budget for the foreseeable future is in jeopardy.

Also, the solution--changing the way we talk about things and not using the phrase "first-grade ready;" talking directly to parents as partners in education; and acknowledging that, after all advice and recommendations, it's up to the elementary school to select the students it can teach--is so easy.

High School Matters: Turning Convention On Its Head

2009-06-12T18:32:00.004-04:00

Conventional wisdom around Waldorf education is this: Early childhood "matters" the most--if all you can afford, let's say, is an EC program, that's great. Elementary education "matters" next most; if you can afford to get your children through eight elementary grades at a Waldorf school, you've given them an immense blessing. And, especially given the small number of Waldorf high schools, it's okay for those who can afford it or who are so zealous about the education that they'll make it work for another four year, but it's somehow not essential to the humanizing, imaginative, creative promise of Steiner's educational ideas.

But, when I think of those I know who are active in Waldorf education as teachers, parents, or trustees, and who themselves attended a Waldorf school, I reach a surprising conclusion: High school matters most. At the two Waldorf schools closest to me, of those involved who attended a Waldorf school, almost all attended at least one year of high school. They may have attended elementary school, too. But those who attended only through eighth grade are virtually absent and uncounted. When I think of those I correspond with at other schools who attended Waldorf schools, they, too, overwhelmingly, were present for high school.

I had lunch with a former (Waldorf high school) student of mine today who had this to say: If he had been given the choice in 8th grade, he would have chosen public school for social reasons, primarily. Looking back--he graduated three years ago--he not only recognizes the value of his high school education, but is interested in discussing how such an education can be made available to more and more students. He went through 14 years of Waldorf education, by the way, and recognizes that it was only in high school and afterward that he became conscious of its work on him. He went so far as to say that he believed it was "lost" on many of those who left after eighth grade.

I don't mean at all to demean Waldorf elementary school or those who leave after eight years of it. Far from it; my wife and I sacrificed a lot to make sure our children received this benefit. But there is no way, in my experience, in that of my children, in that of my former student, and in that of many friends, that the full benefits of a Waldorf education are reached after elementary school alone.

Class Size

2009-06-10T09:51:00.001-04:00

What’s the ideal class size? Parents in independent schools turn purple and yell if there are too many students in a class—more than 12, 15, or 24. Public schools are under constant pressure to reduce class sizes, and we’re supposed to be outraged that poor-performing districts pack more than 30 children into one classroom.

But parents will do almost anything—and pay twice as much, sometimes—to get their children, the very next year, into universities in which introductory class sizes run in the hundreds!

One of the best graduate students I have had, an articulate and well-educated young woman from India, during a discussion of class size, announced calmly, “Well, my smallest elementary school class was 65 students.”

Research may show that there is some ideal class size (maybe it’s a class of one… Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great). But any ideal class size likely depends on how education is conducted. If we assume that education must consist of 45 minute periods followed by a bell and a change to some unrelated activity (regardless of where we were in the previous class), taught from a textbook in which every fact sits next to every other fact, meaning drained by sameness, taught by a teacher specialist who doesn’t really talk to other teachers, who sees students a few periods a week for a year and then no more, who doesn’t know her students from the local community because she can’t afford to live there and commutes from another town, then we may well scream when class sizes get “too big” and performance fades. If education is an agribusiness, then the efficiencies of agribusiness will apply.

If education is more successfully like organic farming, however, then different values and different efficiencies will apply, and what we think we know of class size may have to be tossed.

Current research points more to SCHOOL size as a factor in educational success—the best schools are those in which each teacher can know each student’s name (and vice versa). And there’s a rush to carve up large schools—following a misguided century of centralization—into smaller “learning communities” of between 200 and 300 students. But the same arguments about agribusiness and organic farming apply here, too—it’s in the system we’ve got that schools perform best at this particular size.

We need to examine the fruits of our system—do we really want a bland, easily shipped but juiceless harvest, disaffected and genetically modified? Thankfully, the harvest is our kids, who grow up to thank us—or rebuke us—for the way they were raised. Everything we need to know is right in front of us.

Crisis Hunting

2009-05-29T15:11:00.004-04:00

If you type "united states," "education crisis," and any year from the 1840s--the beginning of compulsory education--to the present, and spend some time sifting through results, you'll quickly discover that education--mostly public primary and secondary education--has been in crisis since its inception. Which raise the question, when will we recognize that to perceive (public) education as perpetually in crisis serves interests--cultural, political, and economic interests--that are not necesarily the interests of children?

Irish Catholic immigrants landing in Boston? Education crisis! Just ask Horace Mann. Soviet satellites orbiting? Education crisis! Just ask Dwight D. Eisenhower. Crises in between, crises since. "Why Johnny Can't Read." "A Nation at Risk." "The Digital Divide."

If you have an ax to grind or a textbook or computer or software to sell or a vote to get, point to the schools and criticize what's going on.

Meanwhile, education hasn't changed that much since Plato sat in the woods with Socrates, since Charlemagne founded Cathedral schools... In "Tinkering Toward Utopia," Larry Cuban and David Tyack show how, despite a century of efforts at school reform, what happens in classrooms remains relatively unchanged.

That's because some ideas that are in the box belong in the box.

Locked in

2009-05-26T16:50:00.004-04:00

Paying for (public) education by taxing property, which seemed like a good idea long ago, now appears to be the immoveable object that hinders any real progress in addressing inequity in educational opportunity--and the actual education of real, live children and students--in the United States.

Forget "No Child Left Behind" (which is just the latest manifestation of Republican and Democratic "solutions" to education--remember Reagan and "A Nation at Risk?" Bush the First and "America 2000"? Slick Willy, who simply changed the name of America 2000 to "Goals 2000"?). Federal government money does not pay for education in this country. Neither does state money. Your property taxes, district by district, fund your schools. Nationally, the Democrats are in the pockets of the teachers' unions, and the Republicans all send their children to private school. (Well, when you come to it, so do the Democrats--as soon as they rise high enough to afford it. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

I assigned Emerson's essay "Education" to a class of school administrators at Teachers College. Its fundamental humanity and insight are inspiring. But, as one of my students, an administrator in the Boston public school system said, "Every word of it is true. But what the fuck am I supposed to do?"

The United States has long enjoyed local control of its schools--through school boards, for example--far more than any European education ministry allows. Given the vicious triangle of teachers' union, school board, and textbook manufacturer, however, "local control" usually just means local politics, choice within an increasingly narrow range of tacitly approved options, and unquestioned assumptions about what a curriculum looks like.

Trying to do anything about this nasty property-tax situation brings out the selfishness in any community. Think of Jim Florio, one-term governor of New Jersey, or the fate of Act 60 in Vermont, which simply demonstrated that wealthy ski towns and the novelist John Irving can't think beyond their own green pastures.

I used to teach on Long Island, where some of New York's best public schools--Garden City--live right next door to some of its worst--Roosevelt. The differences? Skin color and tax base. Or, should I say, tax base and skin color.

There's lots of research to show that funding doesn't determine education outcomes--the manicured lawns and swimming pool of the Great Neck public schools cost a lot but don't improve SAT scores, I guess. But a linear analysis is the wrong way to go. Surely there is some minimal or foundational amount per student, separate from administration and building maintenance and bus and cafeteria costs, that ensures a good-enough education, and above which there are perks but diminishing returns.

Then there's James Traub's view the "schools are not the answer," that to expect schools to address society's ills and then to blame them when they fail is a losing game (but one that we keep on playing).

If you've read this far, you will be disappointed to read that, like everyone else, I have no solution to offer. I believe that human beings are inherently good and creative and generous. I believe that education should not be the province of politicians or businesspersons. I believe that someday enough of us will be right-minded enough to make sure that every student receives a good-enough education. But, for now, too many just suffer.