Neuroscience Catches Up with Rudolf Steiner and Waldorf Education
BY DOUGlAS GERWIN, PhD, AND PATRICE MAYNARD
When Rudolf Steiner created Waldorf Education almost a century ago, several assumptions about child development were implicit or explicit in its curriculum and pedagogy:
When Rudolf Steiner created Waldorf Education almost a century ago, several assumptions about child development were implicit or explicit in its curriculum and pedagogy:
- The child matures gradually, going through discrete stages of development, and reaches full maturity only at age twenty-one or older.
- The way the child uses his brain affects the child’s development.
- Free play is crucial for the healthy development of the young child and for the development of later capacities.
- Art is vital to the healthy development of the child.
- Sleep is an integral part of the learning process.
A part of this view also is that the brain is little more than a biological computer and that education is mainly a matter of uploading data. This view is captured in a cartoon sequence in the movie Waiting for Superman, in which a cartoon teacher walks into a classroom, opens the hinged head of a cartoon student, and pours into the child’s head the contents—a mix of numbers, letters, and fluid—of a big measuring cup.
These views were around in Steiner’s time. He predicted, however, that one day science would corroborate the ideas he was using in the creation of Waldorf Education. Today that prediction is coming true.
Brain Development
Since the 1990s, new technologies, in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have permitted researchers to follow the electromagnetic patterns in the brain as a person is engaged in various activities. A growing body of research on the working of the brain has overturned conventional ideas of how the brain develops and functions—ideas that have guided professionals in child psychiatry, education, and the treatment of those who are brain damaged.
Recent studies using fMRI have determined that our brain does not complete its maturation until we are in our early twenties. The research of Dr. Regalia Melrose, a well-known child psychologist based in long Beach, California, indicates that the brain gradually matures from more primitive to higher cognitive lobes. Over time, with use and experience and the building of neural pathways, the undeveloped areas of the brain achieve higher stages of development.
At birth, the human baby uses little more than its brain stem, which understands only the language of sensation. By approximately three months, the infant begins to make more use of the developing limbic system, which processes sensations through feeling. Only by about nine months has the neocortex developed so that language can be comprehended as such.
This hierarchic maturation of the brain in the first nine months, from willing to feeling and then to thinking, is mirrored in the later hierarchic brain development during the first two decades of life. In the early years, the function of will, of movement, of doing, is primary. In the preadolescent period (eight through fourteen), the life of feeling dominates. From age fifteen to twenty-one, the intellectual function of the brain becomes most active. The correspondence of these stages of brain development to the Waldorf curriculum is striking. Just as the brain develops in three phases, so also are there three distinctive phases of child development that unfold as the child experiences the world learns primarily ithrough willing, then feeling, and then thinking.
One insight resulting from this view of the brain is that we cannot treat or speak to children as if they were little adults, with fully developed rational faculties, just because they can talk back to us in a seemingly adult way. We need to be aware that the maturation to adulthood takes time. Dr. Jay Geidd, a child psychiatrist, made the discovery about the late- maturing brain. During the 2009 conference at which he announced the discovery, Geidd remarked that for many years an entire field of scientific inquiry has been based on a false premise. He observed: “You can’t rent a car until you are twenty-five. In terms of brain anatomy, the only ones who have had it right are the car rental companies!”
Recent research also indicates that our brains are constantly rejuvenating themselves by making new pathways that, in turn, make new levels of comprehen- sion possible. The idea that the brain stays the way it initially developed—is “hard-wired”—no longer pertains. How a child—and an adult—uses his brain significantly alters his brain’s neural structure and its development.
Play
Recent neuroscientific research confirms an essential principle of Waldorf early childhood education: free play is essential to the development of the child. Children’s play promotes the healthy development of the whole brain. Play activates the entire brain, including the frontal lobes, and also results in the building of new neural pathways. Play stimulates myelination of the neural pathways in the brain. Myelination is the process by which neural pathways and connections are made permanent by being coated with myelin, a fatty substance. Myelination is an important process in brain maturation.
Free play also engages and develops the imagination and decision-making capacities of the child: “You be the mommy and I’ll be the daddy. And this is the living room and these are our children and we will build a play castle for them and I’ll go to work and when I come home we will have supper, and then . . .”
Furthermore—and this has been a surprise to many mainstream experts—research indicates that free, self-directed play in the very young child most effectively cultivates executive function (EF). Executive function enables a person to formulate a plan, set goals, make decisions, adjust to changing goals, and evaluate whether or not these goals have been met.
Art
In 2008 the Dana Foundation announced the results of a three-year study of four- to seven-year-olds. The research showed that artistic activity—in music, the visual arts of drawing and painting, drama, and dance—“lights up” the entire brain, including, most importantly, the prefrontal lobes. The prefrontal lobes are the royal chambers where creativity, thinking “out of the box,” and executive function are cultivated. Also indicated was that artistic activity and contact with nature stimulate the high levels of myelination necessary for the healthy development of the brain. It is striking that the whole brain is developed only when the arts are incorporated heavily into all aspects of education. Parts of the brain light up under the effects of common academic activities, but these activities never engage the all-important prefrontal lobes or frontal cortex.
It has also been shown that imaginative activity is a “whole brain” stimulator that builds neural path- ways in all parts of the brain through practice. For maximum development of neural pathways in all the parts of the brain, artistic and imaginative work must be included in learning.
According to the research of Dr. Elizabeth Spelke, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard, children who play a musical instrument are more capable of compre- hending and applying complex mathematical con- cepts than those children who do not. Dr. Spelke commented, at a 2009 conference on brain and child
development, that, in light of this research, she wondered if it had been wise to abandon the old idea of a well-rounded liberal education that includes the arts in favor of a narrowly intellectual one.
Sleep
Research also confirms that most of the maturing activity of the brain occurs during sleep. Children become educated during sleep through the “digestion” of learning, not during the learning itself. Sleeping promotes the growth of neural pathways, including those pathways used for thinking and memory. In sleep, the brain prunes those pathways that are not being used. Sleep also allows for the building of myelin, the substance that establishes the interconnecting neural pathways, and thus matures the brain.
While we Waldorf educators can be buoyed by these findings and may feel that we are, at last, being vindicated, the world outside Waldorf Education may not understand the evidence in the same way. A couple of years ago, National Public Radio (NPR) did a story on the relationship between free play and executive function. In the first segment, Dr. Barry Chudakov, author of The History of Play in America, said that before 1953, when Disney began advertising toys for children on its Mouseketeers television program, play was independent, free activity. From that point onward, play became something to do with a toy, a contrived object that determines the nature of the play. Dr. Chudakov lamented this shift and pointed to toy-free play as the most effective activity for cultivating EF and flexible intelligence in a child. The NPR program then interviewed a researcher who corroborated this hypothesis and who spoke of the importance of free play in the development of EF in young children. The last few minutes of the program were spent interviewing a curriculum developer who was hard at work inventing curricula that would teach children to develop executive function through free play. Thus the idea of leaving the child alone in his own free and imaginative play was buried alive by the habit of thinking that insists that a child must be taught how to do everything. The idea that children, if left to their own devices without distracting toys and instruction from adults, can play in such a way that will best serve their own development is hard for some professional educators to grasp.
Long-established ways of thinking are hard to change. To do so, we Waldorf educators must develop bridges from that older way of thinking to a newer way, using the available research to illuminate a path toward the Waldorf approach. The Waldorf pedagogy and curriculum can then be seen as sup- porting child development in a way consonant with current research.
Rudolf Steiner described the brain as an “over-rated” organ. It is designed, he said, to be an organ of reflection. Not much original work comes directly from the brain. When it is well developed through experiences and activities that create complex neural pathways and is balanced during sleep, the brain becomes a sophisticated organ of “mental digestion.” It processes our daily experiences and learning and reflects these back to us in an available form for deeper understanding.
To the contemporary psychologist or neuroscience researcher, this idea of the brain as primarily a reflective organ may seem improbable. But perhaps someday neuroscience will validate this concept as it has already validated many basic ideas of Waldorf Education.
PATRICE MAYNARD, MEd, is leader for outreach and development of AWSNA. Previously, she was a Waldorf class teacher and music teacher, taking one class through eighth grade and another through fifth grade at the Hawthorne Valley School in Ghent, New York. She is a published poet and a quilter. Her three children are all Waldorf graduates.
DOUGlAS GERWIN, PhD, is director of the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, New Hampshire, chair of its Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program, and co-director of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education. Himself a Waldorf graduate, Dr. Gerwin has taught for thirty years at both the university and high school levels subjects ranging from biology and history to German and music.