Course: Early Childhood Education"Waldorf Education is not a pedagogical system but an art - the art of awakening what is actually there within the human being." ~ Rudolf Steiner
The Waldorf early childhood educator works with the young child by creating a warm, beautiful and loving home-like environment, which is protective and secure, and where things happen in a predictable, rhythmic manner. Here she responds to the developing child in two basic ways: First, she engages in domestic, practical, and artistic activities the children can readily imitate (for example, baking, painting, gardening, and handicrafts), adapting the work to the changing seasons and festivals of the year. Secondly, the Waldorf kindergarten teacher nurtures the children’s power of imagination by telling carefully selected stories and by encouraging free play. This free or fantasy play, in which children act out scenarios of their own creation, helps them to experience many aspects of life more deeply. When toys are used, they are made of natural materials. Wood, cotton, wool, silk, shells, stones, pine cones and objects from nature that the children themselves have collected are used in play and to beautify the room. Sensory integration, eye-hand coordination, appreciating the beauty of language, sequencing, and other basic skills necessary for the foundation of academic learning are fostered in the kindergarten. In this truly loving, natural and creative environment, children are provided with a range of activities to prepare them for later learning and for life itself. |
Course Outline
Early Childhood Education 1
Lesson 1: You Are Your Child's First Teacher Lesson 2: Home Life as the Basis for All Learning Lesson 3: Birth to Three: Growing Down and Waking Up Lesson 4: Helping Your Baby's Development Lesson 5: Helping Your Toddler's Development Lesson 6: Rhythm in Home Life Lesson 7: Discipline and Other Parenting Issues Lesson 8: Reflection and Final Paper/Early Childhood Education 1 Early Childhood Education 2
Lesson 1: Nourishing Your Child's Imagination and Creative Play Lesson 2: Developing Your Child's Artistic Ability Lesson 3: Encouraging your Child's Musical Ability Lesson 4: Cognitive Development and Early Childhood Education Lesson 5: Common Parenting Question: From Television to Immunizations Lesson 6: Help for the Journey Lesson 7: Reflection and Final Paper/Early Childhood Education 2 
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What Makes Waldorf Early Childhood Education “Waldorf”?
Is there a Waldorf early childhood curriculum? Are there specific activities—puppet plays, circle games, watercolor painting, for example—that are essential to a Waldorf program? Are there certain materials and furnishings—lazured, soft-colored walls, handmade dolls, beeswax crayons, silk and other natural materials—that are necessary ingredients in a Waldorf setting? What makes Waldorf early childhood education “Waldorf”?
Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the experiences that are essential for the healthy development of the young child. These include:
• love and warmth
• an environment that nourishes the senses
• creative and artistic experiences
• meaningful adult activity to be imitated
• free, imaginative play
• protection of the forces of childhood
• gratitude, reverence, and wonder
• joy, humor, and happiness
• adult caregivers pursuing a path of inner development
Love and Warmth
Children who live in an atmosphere of love and warmth, and who have around them truly good examples to imitate, are living in their proper element. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Love and emotional warmth, rather than any particular early childhood program, create the basis for the child’s healthy development. These qualities should live between the adult caregiver and the child, in the children’s behavior toward one another, and among the adults in the early childhood center. When Rudolf Steiner visited the classes of the first Waldorf school, he often asked the children, “Do you love your teacher?” Children are also served if this love and warmth exist in the relationships between the teachers and the parents, between the early childhood teachers and the rest of the school, and in the surrounding community.
An Environment that Nourishes the Senses
The essential task of the kindergarten teacher is to create the proper physical environment around the children. “Physical environment” must be understood in the widest sense imaginable. It includes not just what happens around the children in the material sense, but everything that occurs in their environment, everything that can be perceived by their senses, that can work on the inner powers of the children from the surrounding physical space. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Early learning is profoundly connected to the child’s own physical body and sensory experience. Everything the young child sees, hears, and touches has an effect. Thus a clean, orderly, beautiful, quiet setting is essential. The physical environment, both indoors and outdoors, should provide varied and nourishing opportunities for self-education—experiences in touch, balance, lively and joyful movement, and also inward listening. The children should experience large-group, small-group, and solitary activities. The teacher, in integrating diverse elements into a harmonious and meaningful environment, provides surroundings that are accessible to the child’s understanding, feeling, and active will. The care, love, and intention expressed through the outer materials and furnishings of the classes are experienced unconsciously by the child. The child experiences the immediate environment as ensouled and nurturing. The adult shapes the temporal environment as well as the spatial. Through a rhythmic schedule, in which the same thing happens at the same time on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, the child gains a sense of security and confidence in the world. Also, the different activities of the day should take place in a comfortable flow with smooth transitions.
Creative, Artistic Experience
In order to become true educators, we must be able to see the truly aesthetic element in the work, to bring an artistic quality into our tasks. . . . [I]f we bring this aesthetic element, then we begin to come closer to what the child wills out of its own nature. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
In the early childhood class, the art of education is the art of living. The teacher is an artist in how she perceives and relates to the children and to the activities of daily life. She orchestrates and choreographs the rhythms of each day, each week, and each season in such a way that the children can breathe freely in a living structure. In addition, the teacher offers the children opportunities for artistic experiences in singing and music, in movement and gesture—through eurythmy and rhythmic games—and in creative speech and language—through verses, poetry, and stories. The children model with beeswax, draw, and do watercolor painting. Puppet and marionette shows put on by the teacher are an important element in the life of the kindergarten.
Meaningful Adult Activity as Examples for the Child’s Imitation
The task of the kindergarten teacher is to adapt the practical activities of daily life so that they are suitable for the child’s imitation through play. . . . The activities of children in kindergarten must be derived directly from life itself rather than being “thought out” by the intellectualized culture of adults. In the kindergarten, the most important thing is to give children the opportunity to directly imitate life itself. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Children do not learn through instruction or admonition but though imitation. Good sight will develop if the environment has the proper conditions of light and color, while in the brain and blood circulation, the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy sense of morality if children witness moral actions in their surroundings. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Real, meaningful work with a purpose, adjusted to the needs of the child, is in accordance with the child’s natural and inborn need for movement, and is an enormously significant educational activity. The teacher focuses on the meaningful activities that nurture life in the in the classroom “home,” such as cooking and baking, gardening, doing laundry and cleaning, creating and caring for the materials in the immediate environment, and taking care of the bodily needs of the children. This directed attention of the teacher creates an atmosphere of freedom in which the individuality of each child can be active. It is not intended just that the children copy the outer movements and actions of the adult, but that they experience also the inner attitude—the devotion, care, sense of purpose, focus, and creative spirit of the adult.
Free, Imaginative Play
In the child’s play activity, we can only provide the conditions for education. What is gained through play, through everything that cannot be determined by fixed rules, stems fundamentally from the self-activity of the child, The real educational value of play lives in the fact that we ignore our rules and regulations, our educational theory, and allow the child free rein. —Rudolf Steiner, Self Education in the Light of Anthroposophy
In a seemingly contradictory indication, Rudolf Steiner also said: Giving direction and guidance to play is one of the essential tasks of sensible education, which is to say an art of education that is right for humanity. . . . The early childhood educator must school her observation in order to develop an artistic eye, to detect the individual quality of each child’s play. —Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of February 24, 1921 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
Little children learn through play. They approach play in an entirely individual way, out of their entirely individual ways, out of their unique configuration of soul and spirit, and out of their unique experiences of the world in which they live. The manner in which a child plays may offer a picture of how he will take up his destiny as an adult. The task of the teacher is to create an environment that supports the possibility of healthy play. This environment includes the physical surroundings, furnishings, and play materials; the social environment of activities and social interactions; and the inner/spiritual environment of thoughts, intentions, and imaginations held by the adults.
Protection for the Forces of Childhood
Although it is highly necessary that each person should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years of life are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this nonintellectual way, he will rightly develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world today. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
The lively, waking dream of the little child’s consciousness must be allowed to thrive in the early childhood group. This means that the teacher refrains as much as possible from verbal instruction. Instead, her gestures and actions provide a model for the child’s imitation. Familiar daily rhythms and activities provide a context where the need for verbal instruction is reduced. Simple, archetypal imagery in stories, songs, and games provides experiences that the children can internalize but that do not require intellectual or critical reflection or explanation.
An Atmosphere of Gratitude, Reverence, and Wonder
An atmosphere of gratitude should grow naturally in children through merely witnessing the gratitude the adults feel as they receive what is freely given by others, and in how they express this gratitude. If a child says “thank you” very naturally—not in response to the urging of others, but simply through imitating— something has been done that will greatly benefit the child’s whole life. Out of this an all-embracing gratitude will develop toward the whole world. This cultivation of gratitude is of paramount importance. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Out of these early, all-pervading experiences of gratitude, the first tender capacity for love, which is deeply embedded in each and every child, begins to sprout in earthly life.
If, during the first period of life, we create an atmosphere of gratitude around the children, then out of this gratitude toward the world, toward the entire universe, and also out of thankfulness for being able to be in this world, a profound and warm sense of devotion will arise . . . upright, honest, and true. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
This is the basis for what will become a capacity for deep, intimate love and commitment in later life, for dedication and loyalty, for true admiration of others, for fervent spiritual or religious devotion, and for placing oneself wholeheartedly in the service of the world.
Joy, Humor, and Happiness
The joy of children in and with their environment must therefore be counted among the forces that build and shape the physical organs. They need teachers who look and act with happiness and, most of all, with honest, unaffected love. Such a love that streams, as it were, with warmth through the physical environment of the children may be said to literally “hatch out” the forms of the physical organs. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
If you make a surly face so that a child gets the impression you are a grumpy person, this harms the child for the rest of his life. What kind of school plan you make is neither here nor there; what matters is what sort of person you are. —Rudolf Steiner The Kingdom of Childhood
The teacher’s earnestness about her work and her serious striving must be balanced with humor and a demeanor that bespeaks happiness. There must be moments of humor and delight in the classroom every day.
Adult Caregivers on a Path of Inner Development
For the small child before the change of teeth, the most important thing in education is the teacher’s own being. —Rudolf Steiner, Essentials of Education
Just think what feelings arise in the soul of the early childhood educator who realizes: What I accomplish with this child, I accomplish for the grown-up person in his twenties. What matters is not so much a knowledge of abstract educational principles or pedagogical rules. . . . [W]hat does matter is that a deep sense of responsibility develops in [the teacher’s heart and mind] and that this affects her or his worldview and the way she or he stands in life. —Rudolf Steiner, Education in the Face of the Present-Day World Situation, Lecture of June 10, 1920
Here we come to the spiritual environment of the early childhood setting: the thoughts, attitudes, and imaginations living in the adult who cares for the children. This invisible realm that lies behind the outer actions of the teacher has a profound influence on the child’s development. The spiritual environment includes recognition of the child as a threefold being—of body, soul, and spirit—on a path of evolutionary development through repeated Earth lives. This recognition provides a foundation for the daily activities in the kindergarten, and for the relationship between adult and child. Such an understanding of the nature and destiny of the human comes out of the inner life of the adult, the life of the individual Ego. This is a realm that is largely hidden, and hence is difficult to observe directly and to evaluate objectively. Yet ultimately this realm may affect the development of the children most profoundly. It is not merely our outer activity that influence the growing child. What lies behind and is expressed through this outer activity also is crucial. Ultimately, the most profound influence on the child is who we are as human beings—and who we are becoming and how.
Conclusion
The “essentials” described here are qualitative in nature. For the most part, they are not part of a body of concrete “best practices.” Instead, they concern inner qualities and attributes of the teacher that foster healthy development in young children. These qualities can come to expression in a wide variety of ways, according to
• the age range of the children in the group and their individual characteristics;
• the nature of the particular program—a kindergarten, playgroup, or extended care program; and
• the environment and surroundings—urban or rural, home or school or child care center.
Many practices that have come to be associated with Waldorf/Steiner early childhood education—certain daily rhythms and rituals, play materials, songs, stories, even the colors of the walls, the dress of the adults, and the menu for snack—may be mistakenly taken as essentials. The results of such assumptions can be surprising, even disturbing—a “King Winter” nature table appearing in a tropical climate in “wintertime,” or dolls with pink skin and yellow hair in a kindergarten where all the children are brown-skinned and black-haired. Such practices may express a tendency toward a doctrinal or dogmatic approach that is out of touch with the realities of the immediate situation and instead imposes something from “outside.” There is a parallel concern at the other end of the spectrum from the doctrinal or dogmatic. The freedom that Waldorf Education offers each individual teacher to determine the practices of her early childhood program can be misinterpreted to mean that “anything goes,” according to personal preference and style. Here too, there is the danger that the developmental realities and needs of the children are not sufficiently taken into consideration. Each of these one-sided approaches may be injurious to the development of the children. As Waldorf early childhood educators, we are constantly seeking a middle, universally human path between polarities. Rudolf Steiner’s advice to the first Waldorf kindergarten teacher, Elizabeth Grunelius, in the early 1920s, can be paraphrased as follows: "Observe the children. Actively meditate. Follow your intuitions. Work so that all your actions are worthy of imitation." Today, those of us who work with young children in a Waldorf environment are challenged to engage in a constant process of renewal. We must actively observe the children in our care, carry them in our meditations, and seek to work consciously and artistically to create the experiences that will serve their development. Our devotion to this task awakens us to the importance of self-education and transformation in the context of community. Our ongoing study of child and human development, our own artistic and meditative practices, and our work with Anthroposophy, independently and together with others, become essential elements for the practice of Waldorf early childhood education. Here we can come to experience that we are not alone on this journey. We are supported through our encounters with one another other and with our sharing of insights, experience, and knowledge. We are helped also by those beings spiritual beings who are committed to our continued development and to the renewal of culture that Waldorf Education seeks to serve.
Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the experiences that are essential for the healthy development of the young child. These include:
• love and warmth
• an environment that nourishes the senses
• creative and artistic experiences
• meaningful adult activity to be imitated
• free, imaginative play
• protection of the forces of childhood
• gratitude, reverence, and wonder
• joy, humor, and happiness
• adult caregivers pursuing a path of inner development
Love and Warmth
Children who live in an atmosphere of love and warmth, and who have around them truly good examples to imitate, are living in their proper element. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Love and emotional warmth, rather than any particular early childhood program, create the basis for the child’s healthy development. These qualities should live between the adult caregiver and the child, in the children’s behavior toward one another, and among the adults in the early childhood center. When Rudolf Steiner visited the classes of the first Waldorf school, he often asked the children, “Do you love your teacher?” Children are also served if this love and warmth exist in the relationships between the teachers and the parents, between the early childhood teachers and the rest of the school, and in the surrounding community.
An Environment that Nourishes the Senses
The essential task of the kindergarten teacher is to create the proper physical environment around the children. “Physical environment” must be understood in the widest sense imaginable. It includes not just what happens around the children in the material sense, but everything that occurs in their environment, everything that can be perceived by their senses, that can work on the inner powers of the children from the surrounding physical space. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Early learning is profoundly connected to the child’s own physical body and sensory experience. Everything the young child sees, hears, and touches has an effect. Thus a clean, orderly, beautiful, quiet setting is essential. The physical environment, both indoors and outdoors, should provide varied and nourishing opportunities for self-education—experiences in touch, balance, lively and joyful movement, and also inward listening. The children should experience large-group, small-group, and solitary activities. The teacher, in integrating diverse elements into a harmonious and meaningful environment, provides surroundings that are accessible to the child’s understanding, feeling, and active will. The care, love, and intention expressed through the outer materials and furnishings of the classes are experienced unconsciously by the child. The child experiences the immediate environment as ensouled and nurturing. The adult shapes the temporal environment as well as the spatial. Through a rhythmic schedule, in which the same thing happens at the same time on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, the child gains a sense of security and confidence in the world. Also, the different activities of the day should take place in a comfortable flow with smooth transitions.
Creative, Artistic Experience
In order to become true educators, we must be able to see the truly aesthetic element in the work, to bring an artistic quality into our tasks. . . . [I]f we bring this aesthetic element, then we begin to come closer to what the child wills out of its own nature. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
In the early childhood class, the art of education is the art of living. The teacher is an artist in how she perceives and relates to the children and to the activities of daily life. She orchestrates and choreographs the rhythms of each day, each week, and each season in such a way that the children can breathe freely in a living structure. In addition, the teacher offers the children opportunities for artistic experiences in singing and music, in movement and gesture—through eurythmy and rhythmic games—and in creative speech and language—through verses, poetry, and stories. The children model with beeswax, draw, and do watercolor painting. Puppet and marionette shows put on by the teacher are an important element in the life of the kindergarten.
Meaningful Adult Activity as Examples for the Child’s Imitation
The task of the kindergarten teacher is to adapt the practical activities of daily life so that they are suitable for the child’s imitation through play. . . . The activities of children in kindergarten must be derived directly from life itself rather than being “thought out” by the intellectualized culture of adults. In the kindergarten, the most important thing is to give children the opportunity to directly imitate life itself. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Children do not learn through instruction or admonition but though imitation. Good sight will develop if the environment has the proper conditions of light and color, while in the brain and blood circulation, the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy sense of morality if children witness moral actions in their surroundings. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Real, meaningful work with a purpose, adjusted to the needs of the child, is in accordance with the child’s natural and inborn need for movement, and is an enormously significant educational activity. The teacher focuses on the meaningful activities that nurture life in the in the classroom “home,” such as cooking and baking, gardening, doing laundry and cleaning, creating and caring for the materials in the immediate environment, and taking care of the bodily needs of the children. This directed attention of the teacher creates an atmosphere of freedom in which the individuality of each child can be active. It is not intended just that the children copy the outer movements and actions of the adult, but that they experience also the inner attitude—the devotion, care, sense of purpose, focus, and creative spirit of the adult.
Free, Imaginative Play
In the child’s play activity, we can only provide the conditions for education. What is gained through play, through everything that cannot be determined by fixed rules, stems fundamentally from the self-activity of the child, The real educational value of play lives in the fact that we ignore our rules and regulations, our educational theory, and allow the child free rein. —Rudolf Steiner, Self Education in the Light of Anthroposophy
In a seemingly contradictory indication, Rudolf Steiner also said: Giving direction and guidance to play is one of the essential tasks of sensible education, which is to say an art of education that is right for humanity. . . . The early childhood educator must school her observation in order to develop an artistic eye, to detect the individual quality of each child’s play. —Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of February 24, 1921 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
Little children learn through play. They approach play in an entirely individual way, out of their entirely individual ways, out of their unique configuration of soul and spirit, and out of their unique experiences of the world in which they live. The manner in which a child plays may offer a picture of how he will take up his destiny as an adult. The task of the teacher is to create an environment that supports the possibility of healthy play. This environment includes the physical surroundings, furnishings, and play materials; the social environment of activities and social interactions; and the inner/spiritual environment of thoughts, intentions, and imaginations held by the adults.
Protection for the Forces of Childhood
Although it is highly necessary that each person should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years of life are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this nonintellectual way, he will rightly develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world today. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
The lively, waking dream of the little child’s consciousness must be allowed to thrive in the early childhood group. This means that the teacher refrains as much as possible from verbal instruction. Instead, her gestures and actions provide a model for the child’s imitation. Familiar daily rhythms and activities provide a context where the need for verbal instruction is reduced. Simple, archetypal imagery in stories, songs, and games provides experiences that the children can internalize but that do not require intellectual or critical reflection or explanation.
An Atmosphere of Gratitude, Reverence, and Wonder
An atmosphere of gratitude should grow naturally in children through merely witnessing the gratitude the adults feel as they receive what is freely given by others, and in how they express this gratitude. If a child says “thank you” very naturally—not in response to the urging of others, but simply through imitating— something has been done that will greatly benefit the child’s whole life. Out of this an all-embracing gratitude will develop toward the whole world. This cultivation of gratitude is of paramount importance. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Out of these early, all-pervading experiences of gratitude, the first tender capacity for love, which is deeply embedded in each and every child, begins to sprout in earthly life.
If, during the first period of life, we create an atmosphere of gratitude around the children, then out of this gratitude toward the world, toward the entire universe, and also out of thankfulness for being able to be in this world, a profound and warm sense of devotion will arise . . . upright, honest, and true. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
This is the basis for what will become a capacity for deep, intimate love and commitment in later life, for dedication and loyalty, for true admiration of others, for fervent spiritual or religious devotion, and for placing oneself wholeheartedly in the service of the world.
Joy, Humor, and Happiness
The joy of children in and with their environment must therefore be counted among the forces that build and shape the physical organs. They need teachers who look and act with happiness and, most of all, with honest, unaffected love. Such a love that streams, as it were, with warmth through the physical environment of the children may be said to literally “hatch out” the forms of the physical organs. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
If you make a surly face so that a child gets the impression you are a grumpy person, this harms the child for the rest of his life. What kind of school plan you make is neither here nor there; what matters is what sort of person you are. —Rudolf Steiner The Kingdom of Childhood
The teacher’s earnestness about her work and her serious striving must be balanced with humor and a demeanor that bespeaks happiness. There must be moments of humor and delight in the classroom every day.
Adult Caregivers on a Path of Inner Development
For the small child before the change of teeth, the most important thing in education is the teacher’s own being. —Rudolf Steiner, Essentials of Education
Just think what feelings arise in the soul of the early childhood educator who realizes: What I accomplish with this child, I accomplish for the grown-up person in his twenties. What matters is not so much a knowledge of abstract educational principles or pedagogical rules. . . . [W]hat does matter is that a deep sense of responsibility develops in [the teacher’s heart and mind] and that this affects her or his worldview and the way she or he stands in life. —Rudolf Steiner, Education in the Face of the Present-Day World Situation, Lecture of June 10, 1920
Here we come to the spiritual environment of the early childhood setting: the thoughts, attitudes, and imaginations living in the adult who cares for the children. This invisible realm that lies behind the outer actions of the teacher has a profound influence on the child’s development. The spiritual environment includes recognition of the child as a threefold being—of body, soul, and spirit—on a path of evolutionary development through repeated Earth lives. This recognition provides a foundation for the daily activities in the kindergarten, and for the relationship between adult and child. Such an understanding of the nature and destiny of the human comes out of the inner life of the adult, the life of the individual Ego. This is a realm that is largely hidden, and hence is difficult to observe directly and to evaluate objectively. Yet ultimately this realm may affect the development of the children most profoundly. It is not merely our outer activity that influence the growing child. What lies behind and is expressed through this outer activity also is crucial. Ultimately, the most profound influence on the child is who we are as human beings—and who we are becoming and how.
Conclusion
The “essentials” described here are qualitative in nature. For the most part, they are not part of a body of concrete “best practices.” Instead, they concern inner qualities and attributes of the teacher that foster healthy development in young children. These qualities can come to expression in a wide variety of ways, according to
• the age range of the children in the group and their individual characteristics;
• the nature of the particular program—a kindergarten, playgroup, or extended care program; and
• the environment and surroundings—urban or rural, home or school or child care center.
Many practices that have come to be associated with Waldorf/Steiner early childhood education—certain daily rhythms and rituals, play materials, songs, stories, even the colors of the walls, the dress of the adults, and the menu for snack—may be mistakenly taken as essentials. The results of such assumptions can be surprising, even disturbing—a “King Winter” nature table appearing in a tropical climate in “wintertime,” or dolls with pink skin and yellow hair in a kindergarten where all the children are brown-skinned and black-haired. Such practices may express a tendency toward a doctrinal or dogmatic approach that is out of touch with the realities of the immediate situation and instead imposes something from “outside.” There is a parallel concern at the other end of the spectrum from the doctrinal or dogmatic. The freedom that Waldorf Education offers each individual teacher to determine the practices of her early childhood program can be misinterpreted to mean that “anything goes,” according to personal preference and style. Here too, there is the danger that the developmental realities and needs of the children are not sufficiently taken into consideration. Each of these one-sided approaches may be injurious to the development of the children. As Waldorf early childhood educators, we are constantly seeking a middle, universally human path between polarities. Rudolf Steiner’s advice to the first Waldorf kindergarten teacher, Elizabeth Grunelius, in the early 1920s, can be paraphrased as follows: "Observe the children. Actively meditate. Follow your intuitions. Work so that all your actions are worthy of imitation." Today, those of us who work with young children in a Waldorf environment are challenged to engage in a constant process of renewal. We must actively observe the children in our care, carry them in our meditations, and seek to work consciously and artistically to create the experiences that will serve their development. Our devotion to this task awakens us to the importance of self-education and transformation in the context of community. Our ongoing study of child and human development, our own artistic and meditative practices, and our work with Anthroposophy, independently and together with others, become essential elements for the practice of Waldorf early childhood education. Here we can come to experience that we are not alone on this journey. We are supported through our encounters with one another other and with our sharing of insights, experience, and knowledge. We are helped also by those beings spiritual beings who are committed to our continued development and to the renewal of culture that Waldorf Education seeks to serve.
Early Childhood Education 2 - Lesson 6
Tasks and Assignments for Early Childhood Education 2 - Lesson 6
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Please study the study material/chapters indicated below. Feel free to use additional resources as wanted and needed. Once you feel you are sufficiently acquainted with the subject please complete the following:
1. Describe in your own words why (or why not) "conscious parenting is a process". 2. "What is needed today is not another expert, some new authority to follow or to reject, but a new way of seeing the human being." Do you agree or disagree with this statement. Why? Submit the completed assignment via the submission form or via email. 
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Study Material for Early Childhood Education 2 - Lesson 6
You Are Your Child's First TeacherCΗΑΡΤΕR 13 - Help for the Journey
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CONSCIOUS PARENTING IS A PROCESS
Conscious parenting requires keeping perspective and not letting ourselves become so bogged down in the day-to-day task of raising our children that we neglect to focus on the larger picture. Part of our task is to see the spiritual in the mundane, to recognize the inner light in a child, or to see the ways in which a child's drawing, for instance, might give us a picture of his emerging consciousness. Another part of our task is to let the events or experiences of the everyday world lead us to questions and experiences of the divine. As we come to see the relationship of microcosm to macrocosm, to "see a world in a grain of sand . . . and eternity in an hour," we will find ourselves transformed in the process.
Conscious parenting also means using the events of everyday life— including our reactions to them—as grist for the mill of inner transformation. In this sense our children are our best teachers, for they provide endless opportunities for us to grow. We all have shortcomings and failings; there wouldn't be any growth if we didn't. But we need to have patience and kindness toward our own development and not be self-critical. Practicing kindness toward one's own shortcomings is as important as developing patience with others.
Parenting takes a tremendous amount of energy. If you don't keep your energy replenished, you become frazzled, harried, short-tempered, and otherwise hard to be around. Especially while your children are young, you need to make sure that you get adequate sleep. It helps to have some kind of meditation or prayer practice, even if it is only five minutes a day, which can help keep you centered. Creative activities such as art, music, sculpture, or dance are also unique in actually replenishing the kind of energy that children demand. Being in nature does this, too. When you're taking the baby out for a walk or taking your two-year-old to the park, cherish this time as something that can renew your energy as well.
Taking parenting seriously can remind you that what you are doing is important and worthwhile. Because nurturing work is undervalued and underpaid by our society, we can fall into the same trap of undervaluing it unless we put intentionality into what we are doing. Peggy O'Mara McMahon, editor of Mothering, states very clearly:
I believe, however, that women will never be satisfied with a life that is an economic imitation of men's lives. Women must find a new way, a way of the spirit, and they must insist on an economic reality that acknowledges the concerns of the heart. If women are satisfied only to find success as men have found it, in the traditional marketplace separate from the home, we will never create a better world. When women polarize over daycare and at-home mommies, they polarize over a male model of the separation of work and family that has not worked for men and is not now working for women. It doesn't work not because we need more daycare centers, but because the current social reality we emulate has no heart.
We must seek broader solutions to the economics of family life, and we must be very careful not to fall into the trap of defining ourselves solely by the values of a society in transition. (1)
Viewing parenting as part of the path of love and service can help get you through the rough spots. Having children certainly opens your heart and makes you stretch, through constantly having to consider the needs of another person who is dependent on you—and whom you must gradually release. Parenting can be a rich source of life experiences in the course of one's development as a human being, if you use what is given to you for self-knowledge and transformation. In her article "An Ethic of Parenting," O'Mara McMahon describes the inner work of parenting as follows:
In our society, we are not accustomed to the surrender and service required by the human infant. In order to sustain an ethic of parenting that honors the necessity of surrender and service, we will have to surround ourselves with the kind of support and information that will enable us to overcome the limitations ...
Serve your child—for in serving your child, in trusting your child, you serve yourself and give yourself an opportunity to be reparented and reloved. The greatest kept secret of the world is the personal transformation inherent in developing an ethic of parenting that is truly in keeping with the nature of the child. Parenting with this type of ethic releases the full potential of the human being, a force greater than anything we have yet to see on this planet. (2)
IN CONCLUSION
All parents want what is best for their child, but most first-time parents know very little about children or parenting (I certainly didn't!). Learning as you go is often uncomfortable, but it can provide many opportunities for growth for parents as well as for our children. As our children's first teachers, we can and must provide the love and warmth, calm and rhythm, interest and enthusiasm vital to their growth. They also provide us with new areas of study, work, and self-examination as we come up against our shortcomings and the new dilemmas our children present to us.
What is needed today is not another expert, some new authority to follow or to reject, but a new way of seeing the human being that takes into account all aspects of development—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—so we and our children can meet the challenges of our changing world and fulfill the purposes of our time on earth.
We are living in a time of transition, a time in which the old patterns of society no longer hold us. We are being called upon to approach all aspects of our lives with new awareness. Life in our families, cities, churches, and schools is changing at an ever-increasing rate as we struggle to find our balance and then create something new.
We can't go back to a milk-and-cookies mentality that denies the changes that have led to the present. However, we need to recognize that the world of the young child is critically endangered today, as more and more children are placed in child care beginning in infancy and academics are pushed onto younger and younger children. It has become even more urgent that we understand that children are not little adults. They do not think, reason, feel, or experience the world as an adult does. Instead, they are centered in their bodies and in the will, which manifests in such powerful growth and the need for movement in the first seven years. They learn primarily and more appropriately through example and imitation. Repetition and rhythm are also vital elements in the healthy world of the young child and need to be emphasized by parents and others responsible for the care of young children.
The young child takes in everything without blocks or filters, and for this reason we must put special attention into the quality of his or her environment and experiences. There needs to be a balance between stimulating and protecting the baby's and young child's senses. Stimulation from artificial sources (movies, recordings, synthetic fabrics) has a different impact on the young child than stimulation from your own voice or objects from nature. Because the young child is all sense organ, we need to be selective in what we let our children experience and help guard against violating the young child's natural dreamy state.
Everything in life is taken in deeply by the young child, to be transformed and expressed later in creative play. Providing the time and appropriate materials for this kind of play helps the child work his way into earthly life by imitating, through his play, everything that he experiences. Allowing this natural impulse of creative imagination to flourish is one of the greatest gifts parents can give their child between birth and first grade.
The young child also has a natural artistic and musical ability, which can be furthered by allowing its free expression without lessons or pressure to produce something in a certain way. Songs, rhythmical movement, and circle games all speak to the magical world of early childhood.
Just as it is important that children crawl before they walk (and that they do not skip other developmental steps), it is equally important that children not be prematurely awakened from the dreamy, imaginative world of early childhood before the natural time for this, around the age of six or seven. Lessons, workbooks, and academic tasks not only take the child away from movement and valuable play, but they also accelerate the child's change of consciousness and rob him of the last valuable years of early childhood—years that are vital to a person's later physical health as well as mental and creative development. Trying to speed up development in young children places them at risk, with no apparent gain to justify such risks.
As our children's first teachers, there is a lot we can do, as well as many things that are better if we don't do! It is my hope that this book will contribute to parents' understanding of the special nature of the young child and his or her unique needs. If we can take both knowledge and practical experience into our hearts, we will have increased confidence as we develop our own ethic of parenting and make our own best choices for our children. The challenges are great, but so are the rewards!
APPENDIX: RUDOLF STEINER AND WALDORF EDUCATION
Rudolf Steiner (1861—1925) spent his early adult years preparing the scientific writings of Goethe for republication. A. P. Shepherd, a canon of the Anglican Church, says of him, "Steiner thought, spoke and wrote as a scientist. . . . Although his own investigations carried him into fields far beyond the range of physical science, he always carried into these investigations, and into the application of them to physical phenomena, the concepts and methods of scientific thought." (3)
In the early 1900s, Steiner began to lecture and write extensively, imparting knowledge about the realms beyond the physical and our connection with them. During the last six years of his life, he was active in applying his spiritual scientific knowledge in various fields such as education, agriculture, arts, medicine, theology, and so forth. To help carry on his work as a force for personal and cultural renewal, he founded the Anthroposophical Society ("anthroposophy?' comes from the roots "anthro," meaning "man," and "sophia," meaning "wisdom"). The society now has working groups and branches all over the world.
Steiner turned his attention to education after the First World War at the request of Emil Molt, who helped him found a school for the children of the factory workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919. The impulse for "Waldorf education," as it came to be called, spread throughout Europe, with the first school in America being founded in New York City in 1928.
Steiner was a pioneer in the area of developmentally based, age-appropriate learning, and many of his indications were later borne out by the work of Gesell and Piaget and by later brain research in the 1990s. In addition, he sought to develop a balanced education for the "whole child," one that would engage the child's feeling and willing as well as thinking and would leave his or her spiritual nature acknowledged but free. From preschool through high school, the goal of Waldorf education is the same, but the means differ according to the changing inner development of the child. According to Steiner, "Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings, who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives."
Because of this emphasis, the Waldorf schools were closed by the Nazis during World War Il, but they soon reopened, and they have spread in the past several decades to such troubled areas as South Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Waldorf has become the largest private school movement in the world. In 2011 there were 1,003 schools, 2,000 kindergartens, and 629 curative (special education) centers in 60 countries based on Rudolf Steiner's pedagogical impulse. Growth of the movement in America has been very rapid since 1980.
During the early childhood years, the child is surrounded by a homelike environment that encourages imaginative free play and artistic activity. Steiner recognized that the young child learns primarily through example and imitation, with an emphasis on the importance of movement, rhythm, fairy tales, and oral language. Steiner felt that it is not healthy for children to concentrate on cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and math until the body has reached a certain level of maturity, freeing the forces of growth for cognitive work. Typical daily activities in preschool and kindergarten include free play, movement games, story circles, and craft or artistic activities (watercolor painting, beeswax modeling, coloring with beeswax crayons, baking, and so forth). Puppet plays, nature walks, and celebrating festivals are frequent events throughout the year. The work of LifeWays North America took the indications of Rudolf Steiner as its foundation in supporting parents and professionals in caring for children from birth through age six.
In Waldorf elementary schools (grades one through eight), all of the subjects are presented in a lively and pictorial way, because Steiner found that children of this age learn best when information is artistically and imaginatively presented. The same teacher stays with the children from the first through eighth grade, teaching the "main lesson" subjects, which include language arts, mathematics, history, and the sciences. The main lesson is taught during the first two hours of the morning in blocks of three to six weeks per topic. Students create their own "main lesson books" as artistic records of their learning rather than using textbooks or worksheets. During the rest of the day special subject teachers fill out the curriculum with two foreign languages, orchestra, singing, arts, crafts, gardening, eurythmy (a movement art developed by Steiner), and physical education (see the following chart).
Conscious parenting requires keeping perspective and not letting ourselves become so bogged down in the day-to-day task of raising our children that we neglect to focus on the larger picture. Part of our task is to see the spiritual in the mundane, to recognize the inner light in a child, or to see the ways in which a child's drawing, for instance, might give us a picture of his emerging consciousness. Another part of our task is to let the events or experiences of the everyday world lead us to questions and experiences of the divine. As we come to see the relationship of microcosm to macrocosm, to "see a world in a grain of sand . . . and eternity in an hour," we will find ourselves transformed in the process.
Conscious parenting also means using the events of everyday life— including our reactions to them—as grist for the mill of inner transformation. In this sense our children are our best teachers, for they provide endless opportunities for us to grow. We all have shortcomings and failings; there wouldn't be any growth if we didn't. But we need to have patience and kindness toward our own development and not be self-critical. Practicing kindness toward one's own shortcomings is as important as developing patience with others.
Parenting takes a tremendous amount of energy. If you don't keep your energy replenished, you become frazzled, harried, short-tempered, and otherwise hard to be around. Especially while your children are young, you need to make sure that you get adequate sleep. It helps to have some kind of meditation or prayer practice, even if it is only five minutes a day, which can help keep you centered. Creative activities such as art, music, sculpture, or dance are also unique in actually replenishing the kind of energy that children demand. Being in nature does this, too. When you're taking the baby out for a walk or taking your two-year-old to the park, cherish this time as something that can renew your energy as well.
Taking parenting seriously can remind you that what you are doing is important and worthwhile. Because nurturing work is undervalued and underpaid by our society, we can fall into the same trap of undervaluing it unless we put intentionality into what we are doing. Peggy O'Mara McMahon, editor of Mothering, states very clearly:
I believe, however, that women will never be satisfied with a life that is an economic imitation of men's lives. Women must find a new way, a way of the spirit, and they must insist on an economic reality that acknowledges the concerns of the heart. If women are satisfied only to find success as men have found it, in the traditional marketplace separate from the home, we will never create a better world. When women polarize over daycare and at-home mommies, they polarize over a male model of the separation of work and family that has not worked for men and is not now working for women. It doesn't work not because we need more daycare centers, but because the current social reality we emulate has no heart.
We must seek broader solutions to the economics of family life, and we must be very careful not to fall into the trap of defining ourselves solely by the values of a society in transition. (1)
Viewing parenting as part of the path of love and service can help get you through the rough spots. Having children certainly opens your heart and makes you stretch, through constantly having to consider the needs of another person who is dependent on you—and whom you must gradually release. Parenting can be a rich source of life experiences in the course of one's development as a human being, if you use what is given to you for self-knowledge and transformation. In her article "An Ethic of Parenting," O'Mara McMahon describes the inner work of parenting as follows:
In our society, we are not accustomed to the surrender and service required by the human infant. In order to sustain an ethic of parenting that honors the necessity of surrender and service, we will have to surround ourselves with the kind of support and information that will enable us to overcome the limitations ...
Serve your child—for in serving your child, in trusting your child, you serve yourself and give yourself an opportunity to be reparented and reloved. The greatest kept secret of the world is the personal transformation inherent in developing an ethic of parenting that is truly in keeping with the nature of the child. Parenting with this type of ethic releases the full potential of the human being, a force greater than anything we have yet to see on this planet. (2)
IN CONCLUSION
All parents want what is best for their child, but most first-time parents know very little about children or parenting (I certainly didn't!). Learning as you go is often uncomfortable, but it can provide many opportunities for growth for parents as well as for our children. As our children's first teachers, we can and must provide the love and warmth, calm and rhythm, interest and enthusiasm vital to their growth. They also provide us with new areas of study, work, and self-examination as we come up against our shortcomings and the new dilemmas our children present to us.
What is needed today is not another expert, some new authority to follow or to reject, but a new way of seeing the human being that takes into account all aspects of development—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—so we and our children can meet the challenges of our changing world and fulfill the purposes of our time on earth.
We are living in a time of transition, a time in which the old patterns of society no longer hold us. We are being called upon to approach all aspects of our lives with new awareness. Life in our families, cities, churches, and schools is changing at an ever-increasing rate as we struggle to find our balance and then create something new.
We can't go back to a milk-and-cookies mentality that denies the changes that have led to the present. However, we need to recognize that the world of the young child is critically endangered today, as more and more children are placed in child care beginning in infancy and academics are pushed onto younger and younger children. It has become even more urgent that we understand that children are not little adults. They do not think, reason, feel, or experience the world as an adult does. Instead, they are centered in their bodies and in the will, which manifests in such powerful growth and the need for movement in the first seven years. They learn primarily and more appropriately through example and imitation. Repetition and rhythm are also vital elements in the healthy world of the young child and need to be emphasized by parents and others responsible for the care of young children.
The young child takes in everything without blocks or filters, and for this reason we must put special attention into the quality of his or her environment and experiences. There needs to be a balance between stimulating and protecting the baby's and young child's senses. Stimulation from artificial sources (movies, recordings, synthetic fabrics) has a different impact on the young child than stimulation from your own voice or objects from nature. Because the young child is all sense organ, we need to be selective in what we let our children experience and help guard against violating the young child's natural dreamy state.
Everything in life is taken in deeply by the young child, to be transformed and expressed later in creative play. Providing the time and appropriate materials for this kind of play helps the child work his way into earthly life by imitating, through his play, everything that he experiences. Allowing this natural impulse of creative imagination to flourish is one of the greatest gifts parents can give their child between birth and first grade.
The young child also has a natural artistic and musical ability, which can be furthered by allowing its free expression without lessons or pressure to produce something in a certain way. Songs, rhythmical movement, and circle games all speak to the magical world of early childhood.
Just as it is important that children crawl before they walk (and that they do not skip other developmental steps), it is equally important that children not be prematurely awakened from the dreamy, imaginative world of early childhood before the natural time for this, around the age of six or seven. Lessons, workbooks, and academic tasks not only take the child away from movement and valuable play, but they also accelerate the child's change of consciousness and rob him of the last valuable years of early childhood—years that are vital to a person's later physical health as well as mental and creative development. Trying to speed up development in young children places them at risk, with no apparent gain to justify such risks.
As our children's first teachers, there is a lot we can do, as well as many things that are better if we don't do! It is my hope that this book will contribute to parents' understanding of the special nature of the young child and his or her unique needs. If we can take both knowledge and practical experience into our hearts, we will have increased confidence as we develop our own ethic of parenting and make our own best choices for our children. The challenges are great, but so are the rewards!
APPENDIX: RUDOLF STEINER AND WALDORF EDUCATION
Rudolf Steiner (1861—1925) spent his early adult years preparing the scientific writings of Goethe for republication. A. P. Shepherd, a canon of the Anglican Church, says of him, "Steiner thought, spoke and wrote as a scientist. . . . Although his own investigations carried him into fields far beyond the range of physical science, he always carried into these investigations, and into the application of them to physical phenomena, the concepts and methods of scientific thought." (3)
In the early 1900s, Steiner began to lecture and write extensively, imparting knowledge about the realms beyond the physical and our connection with them. During the last six years of his life, he was active in applying his spiritual scientific knowledge in various fields such as education, agriculture, arts, medicine, theology, and so forth. To help carry on his work as a force for personal and cultural renewal, he founded the Anthroposophical Society ("anthroposophy?' comes from the roots "anthro," meaning "man," and "sophia," meaning "wisdom"). The society now has working groups and branches all over the world.
Steiner turned his attention to education after the First World War at the request of Emil Molt, who helped him found a school for the children of the factory workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919. The impulse for "Waldorf education," as it came to be called, spread throughout Europe, with the first school in America being founded in New York City in 1928.
Steiner was a pioneer in the area of developmentally based, age-appropriate learning, and many of his indications were later borne out by the work of Gesell and Piaget and by later brain research in the 1990s. In addition, he sought to develop a balanced education for the "whole child," one that would engage the child's feeling and willing as well as thinking and would leave his or her spiritual nature acknowledged but free. From preschool through high school, the goal of Waldorf education is the same, but the means differ according to the changing inner development of the child. According to Steiner, "Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings, who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives."
Because of this emphasis, the Waldorf schools were closed by the Nazis during World War Il, but they soon reopened, and they have spread in the past several decades to such troubled areas as South Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Waldorf has become the largest private school movement in the world. In 2011 there were 1,003 schools, 2,000 kindergartens, and 629 curative (special education) centers in 60 countries based on Rudolf Steiner's pedagogical impulse. Growth of the movement in America has been very rapid since 1980.
During the early childhood years, the child is surrounded by a homelike environment that encourages imaginative free play and artistic activity. Steiner recognized that the young child learns primarily through example and imitation, with an emphasis on the importance of movement, rhythm, fairy tales, and oral language. Steiner felt that it is not healthy for children to concentrate on cognitive skills such as reading, writing, and math until the body has reached a certain level of maturity, freeing the forces of growth for cognitive work. Typical daily activities in preschool and kindergarten include free play, movement games, story circles, and craft or artistic activities (watercolor painting, beeswax modeling, coloring with beeswax crayons, baking, and so forth). Puppet plays, nature walks, and celebrating festivals are frequent events throughout the year. The work of LifeWays North America took the indications of Rudolf Steiner as its foundation in supporting parents and professionals in caring for children from birth through age six.
In Waldorf elementary schools (grades one through eight), all of the subjects are presented in a lively and pictorial way, because Steiner found that children of this age learn best when information is artistically and imaginatively presented. The same teacher stays with the children from the first through eighth grade, teaching the "main lesson" subjects, which include language arts, mathematics, history, and the sciences. The main lesson is taught during the first two hours of the morning in blocks of three to six weeks per topic. Students create their own "main lesson books" as artistic records of their learning rather than using textbooks or worksheets. During the rest of the day special subject teachers fill out the curriculum with two foreign languages, orchestra, singing, arts, crafts, gardening, eurythmy (a movement art developed by Steiner), and physical education (see the following chart).
The adolescent's emerging powers of analytical thinking are met and developed in the Waldorf high school, where subjects are taught by specialists in their fields. The role of the teacher is seen as helping the students develop their own thinking powers. A key to this process is presenting students with an immediate experience of phenomena, such as hands-on experiments or primary sources in literature and history, instead of presenting them with predigested work from textbooks or anthologies. The rapidly changing psychological nature of the adolescent is addressed through each year's studies being tailored to the central "questions" that typically live in the hearts of students of that grade level. A complete list of Waldorf schools can be obtained from the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America at www.awsna.org.
NOTES
Bibliography - You Are Your Child's First Teacher
NOTES
- Peggy O'Mara McMahon, "An Ethic of Parenting," Mothering 47, Spring 1988, p. 6.
- Ibid., p. 7.
- Quoted in Joan Salter, The Incarnating Child (Gloucestershire, UK: Hawthorn Press, 1987), p. 146.
Bibliography - You Are Your Child's First Teacher