I have always been intrigued by the Waldorf model of education and the depth of its holistic approach to human development. Given the uncertainty and complexity of our current COVID reality, I was wondering a few weeks ago if Steiner were still alive, “What would Steiner say that we should be doing now in our schools?”
The thought prompted me to reach out to Jack Petrash, founder of the Nova Institute and an educator with over thirty years experience as a classroom teacher. I had the pleasure of meeting Jack when we were both speakers at the #TEDxRockCreekPark event back in 2013. Jack noodled on the question and here is his reply:
Julie,
I told you that I would think about your question. I didn’t think it would happen so soon.
Well I woke up early from a dream in which I was asked a question:
“What is the value of a liberal arts education?”
The question surprised me. It seemed old and faded, almost like it needed to be dusted off.
Then I started thinking about your question. “What would Steiner say that we should be doing now in our schools?”
I believe that one of the things he would say (because he said this back 1917 in the midst of WWI) is that "we are challenged to do everything we can to encourage spiritual life as the only way of freeing future humanity from destructive forces.”
I don’t usually quote Steiner like this but I am in a book study with a couple of interesting guy friends and we just read that statement.
Spiritual awakenings are not easy to picture but I think Steiner is saying the same thing as Vaclav Havel said when he addressed Congress years back.
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, and in human responsibility.
“Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will emerge for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable.
I think it is hard to imagine how to teach in a way that brings a spiritual awakening, that leads to a change in human consciousness, but one of the principles of Waldorf Education is to connect our teaching with the children back to our understanding of the human being. This would happen repeatedly with science teaching.
So I will close by attaching a short chapter from my new short book which touches on this subject.
All the best,
Jack
Chapter Ten - Fourth Grade: After the Nine Year Change
It was the perfect fourth-grade question: “Who is the fastest runner in the class?” The hands shot up. I knew they would. Fourth graders divide their class like fractions into a wide array of categories, the fastest runner being just one of them.
“Nathan” was the first answer that came from the students, and there were nods of agreement throughout the classroom.
“Who’s second?” I asked.
“Adia is the second fastest.” Again there were nods of agreement, no dissension.
“Third?” I continued.
“Cameron,” they said.
“Okay,” I responded, “if I were to ask Nathan to stand outside the window of our classroom and, when I said, ‘Go” to run across the blacktop, touch the fence, turn around and run back, how long do you think it would take him?”
The students thought for a few seconds, and then the hands went up again.
“Sixty-five seconds,” one student suggested.
“No, that’s too long,” came an immediate reply.
“Forty seconds.”
“Twenty-seven seconds,” an exacting student offered.
I wrote all of the times up on the board and then said something that I knew would make this lesson memorable. “Nathan,” I said, “I want you to climb out of the classroom window and, when I say, ‘Go,’ you run across the blacktop, touch the fence, and run all the way back. But first, who has a watch with a stopwatch?” (There is always a fourth grade child with one of these!)
Nathan climbed out the window while envious classmates looked on. He waited for his signal and raced across the playground and was back in thirty-two seconds. Adia went next. Her time was thirty-five seconds. Cameron was third. His time was thirty-seven seconds.
Of course, I knew I was about to disappoint the rest of the class. Surely there were more students who wanted a turn, both to run and to climb out the window, but we needed to move on. I had a lesson in mind, and all of this was just the beginning.
I started my Waldorf teaching career nearly forty years ago and I can’t always remember where I get my ideas for lessons. So many conversations have faded in my memory that I have started to think that these ideas are mine. But the lesson I wanted to impart this day I knew had originated with Dorothy Harrer.
Dorothy Harrer was a master class teacher for many years at the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City back in the 1950s and 1960s. Her imaginative and effective methods of presenting the Waldorf curriculum have been preserved in a series of books on teaching arithmetic, English, history, and other subjects. The lesson I was planning to use in our fourth-grade study of the eagle came from Harrer’s book Nature Ways in Story and Verse.
Now I was ready to ask my students the next question. “Can anyone think of a way to get to the fence and back more quickly than Nathan or Adia or Cameron?” I scanned the faces of my students and I could see by the look on Steffen’s face that I had not been precise enough with my question.
“But you cannot use a machine,” I added.
Steffen sighed with exasperation. He had been thinking “motorcycle.” However, his spirits revived instantly.
“Bicycle,” he said.
He was disappointed when I informed him that the bicycle is also a machine even though it doesn’t have an engine. Now the rest of the class was puzzled as well.
Then a quiet girl, Gretchen, who sat in the back of the room calmly raised her hand. When she answered, I realized once again how perceptive and thoughtful these quiet children can be.
“With my eyes,” she said, “I can look at the fence and look back to the school instantly.”
I smiled and then said to her, “But what if I had asked Nathan to run all the way down to the hill to where the first grade plays at recess? What if I asked him to go to a place that you couldn’t see? How could you get there quickly?
There was a pause but then another thoughtful child in the back of the room, Pammy, raised her hand.
“In my imagination,” she said. “In my imagination I could go to the first grade playground and back in an instant.
Now we were at the place where we could really begin Dorothy Harrer’s lesson. I asked the children to close their eyes and to imagine that they were all outside the classroom, as Nathan and the others had been. Then I asked them to imagine themselves in the air above the school, something they had imagined when they had made their map of the school grounds during our study of local geography earlier in the year.
“And now,” I said, “picture yourself flying west above the blacktop. Look down; there are the basketball courts and the trees by the first grade playground. Let’s cross the Potomac River: Now we are over Virginia. Look up, you see the mountains in the distance. Those are the Blue Ridge Mountains. Let’s keep going.”
I continued to describe our imaginative journey across West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois – states that as I told them, we would study in fifth grade. We crossed the Mississippi River and looked down on the Great Plains. Finally, we could see the Rocky Mountains in the distance. From this point on the lesson was pure Dorothy Harrer:
Let’s let our quick, wakeful thought make its way, now in an instant, to the high mountain cliff that rises up above the prairie way off to the west, farther than the eye can see or legs can run. Let’s go to the rocky ledge, like a platform, where the storms have made the rock break away. Far below us lies the prairie. Far above rises the top of the cliff. Here on the ledge we find that a bird has its dwelling, which looks like a giant robin’s nest. Sitting in the next are three strange-looking young birds, already bigger than any robin. We hear the sound of wings beating the air. As we are here only in thought, we are invisible, and the great bird that soars down to the nest doesn’t even see us. And life goes on as if we weren’t there at all. The bird has a body almost as long as (Neal) is tall. Its wings spread out so far on each side that we could lay a yardstick down three times from one wing tip to the other. Now we know that it is an eagle.
In its great, hooked claws the eagle carries a fat, but lifeless, jackrabbit. This it lays before the young birds, who crouch and spread their small wings and utter squeals of excitement; but they still do not approach the rabbit. The mother bird then stands on the dead rabbit and with her strong, hooked beak begins to tear it into pieces, swallowing some herself and passing some with her beak to the beaks of her children. Each one of the eaglets patiently awaits his turn. It isn’t long before the rabbit has disappeared entirely.
Just as the meal is over, the father eagle soars down from the blue sky, carrying on one foot a dead mole, which he soon disposes of with a few sharp strokes of his beak. Then as the mother settles down and draws her eaglets under her great wings, the father perches on the rim of the ledge. He scans the sky as if on the lookout for any enemy that might sail down upon them. He peers downward toward the prairie as if to spy out another meal moving among the grasses below. [1]
As I describe the eagle lifting up and rising on the warm air currents, I tell the children how the eagle is a kin of the air, how it has small air-filled sacs within its body, how its feathers have air within them, how even its bones contain air. I describe how, as the eagle rises high above the land, it can with its keen vision spot prey hundreds of feet below. “The eagle,” I say to the children, “has remarkable eyesight. I have been told that if an eagle could read, it could read a newspaper from a quarter of a mile away.” When I finish saying this, I describe how the eagle draws in its wings and plummets toward the earth like a bolt of lightning, grasps its prey with those sharp talons and carries it away.
Finally, I say to the class: Do you know, children, how you are like an eagle. It is in your thinking that you can see so clearly. It is in your thinking and your imagination that you can soar to such heights and move from one place to another in an instant. It is your thought-filled, wide-awake mind that you are like eagles.
That was my moment of insight, and I wondered why it had been so long in coming. In a Waldorf school our primary task is helping children understand what it means to be a human being. We teach many subjects and develop a wide array of capacities, but understanding what it means to be human is the underlying aim. I realized that above our school entrance there hangs a sign written in invisible letters like that in Plato’s Academy: “Human Being, Know Thyself.” Of course, that is what a Waldorf School would offer its students.
I had started out to teach the children about the eagle. But, in the end, they had also learned something about themselves, that in their capacity for imagination and thought, they have the power and strength of that magnificent ruler of the skies.