Dangermond.org

I just returned from Chapel Hill where I was attending a regional conference of Waldorf Schools, and while I went there to present on what we are doing here in New Orleans with marketing and outreach, I came away with a lot of food for thought. Waldorf is a departure from the traditional notion of education where a teacher speaks to the child’s mind, only. The Waldorf education is about teaching to the child’s mind through feeling. But it’s not a touchy feely education as some people think when they hear about an art’s based education. As a matter of fact, the early childhood pedagogy is about helping the child separate feeling from willing as that is the natural development in a nursery and kindergarden age child.

There are statistics that are cropping up everywhere now on why Waldorf works – some say that Rudolph Steiner was ahead of his time, but I say it’s more that we are very late for ours. One of the speakers at the conference, Jack Petrash, author of Understand Waldorf, Teaching from the Inside Out, quoted many books that align with Waldorf thinking. In 1995, Daniel Goleman published a book called Emotional Intelligence claiming foremost among his ideas that schools should teach emotional literacy along with regular academic subjects. In 2005, Daniel Pink wrote A WHOLE NEW MIND: WHY RIGHT-BRAINERS WILL RULE THE FUTURE and claimed that there are six ways to educate young people: Play, Art, Storytelling, Empathy, Symphonic Thinking (seeing the motif that runs through the whole of things), and finding meaning. In one word, Waldorf.

Petrash also quoted Thomas Friedman who told students in a lecture that their education had primarily developed the left-side of their brains and that if they wanted to be prepared for the future they needed to develop the right side of their brains as well. He told them to think art, to think green, to think connectedness.

I was thinking about the angst that has come from the new, new economy that I find myself in these days and how difficult it is to come up with the tuition to send Tin to Waldorf and let’s not even talk about the fact that I’m not putting money away for college. I thought about this as I was in a conversation with another mother who was saying she wanted to do this and that to make sure when she died her son had this and that – I told her, she couldn’t know what her son would want in his life so she would be better served to focus on now and not then.

I mulled over the advice I was doling out as I thought that the best education Tin could have is to develop whole brain activity that Waldorf teaches, for him to understand what it is to be a human being and to know himself. Who knows if colleges will be where children Tin’s age want to be when they get older – the world is expanding in ways we cannot even imagine and while we cling to old ways of doing things – we might be missing some clues to the big picture.

I firmly believe that my abilities as a writer, as a creative person, are what will help me narrate my life. I came to these skills over decades. If Tin could start with these skills instead, he would be in a much better place than me earlier on and isn’t that what we all wish for our child – that they do better than us?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 10th, 2013 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.