A NEW LEARNING CENTER FOR CHILDREN FROM AGE 5 TO 11 YEARS
School Project
À long terme, nous envisageons une école. En voici ci-dessous déjà les principes, car ceux-ci nous guideront tout le long.
In the long term, we are planning a school. Here are already the principles, because these will guide us all along. The first principle is an education based on epistemology, that is to say, based on an act of knowledge and perception, an understanding, shall we say, on the part of the teacher towards the student. This one is dynamized and widened according to the Steinerian principle, which means a knowledge that understands itself. Thus, where the thinking activity that illuminates the world of the senses is itself perceived. This direct perception reveals that the human inner world is not a production of the brain, but a spiritual, subtle reality in itself. |
Today we are speaking to the children and young people of the first generation of the 21st century; where are we in the schools, in social life? Fear of life, fear of death, fear of change, fear of the other, all these fears colour our emotional life and play an important role in our social life, in our capacity to meet others, to meet the world, seriously endangering the resilience of the human being; more and more young people are particularly affected. There is an urgent need to give back to the teacher, the educator, full and complete moral responsibility in the accomplishment of his task with children; and this means freedom, but freedom in the sense that Steiner speaks of it, which implies great professional ethical rigoUr, development of moral awareness and self-education.
CLASS WORK RESONATES
WITH THE ENTIRE SCHOOL
The work that teachers develop with their students must be able to resonate with students in other classes, with all their colleagues, which means an autonomous organization of the school, carried out and managed by free and autonomous teachers themselves, with requirements that can sometimes, or often, contradict other requirements of a political and social nature.
SCHOOL, A REPUBLIC OF TEACHERS
The school is conceived as a company of colleagues, that is to say, of people who have the same common objective: to educate and teach for the total development of the human being. In order to achieve this goal, the school organization becomes "a true republic of teachers". Therefore, to organize the school according to republican principles, it is no longer a question of wanting to set up a governance based on a hierarchical structure of functions, but of teachers who will administer the school. To organize the school in this way is to set up an administration that gives everyone freedom of initiative and full responsibility for what they have to do. What then will make the coherence and cohesion of the group? The very substance that is born of a human reality that is constantly observed, understood, cared for, together or individually, from the field of experience of each one, enlightened by the always renewed study of human nature. This means, therefore, that it is the training of teachers and their work of awakening the faculties of imagination, inspiration, and moral intuition that makes possible the realization of such a "republican" vision of the school.
THE TEACHER COLLEGE, SHARING TO LEARN
La responsabilité de l'école devient en effet une responsabilité partagée par tous les enseignants qui se constituent en un collège et se réunissent chaque semaine pour gérer, partager l'ensemble de la vie de l'école. Ces rencontres sont d'une part l'occasion pour les enseignants d'approfondir leurs connaissances dans et par le partage des expériences de chacun, de recevoir le support, les conseils ou la collaboration des autres collègues; d'autre part, dans ces rencontres afflue tout le flot de la vie des différents secteurs de l'école. Le collège des professeurs est ainsi le cœur vivant de l'organisme de l'école tout entier; c'est là et par là que bat la pulsation de l'âme et de l'esprit de l'école dont le flux se répand dans tous les aspects de la vie.
The responsibility of the school becomes a shared responsibility for all the teachers who form a college and meet every week to manage and share the life of the school. These meetings are, on the one hand, an opportunity for the teachers to deepen their knowledge through the sharing of each other's experiences, to receive support, advice or collaboration from other colleagues; on the other hand, in these meetings flows all the life of the different sectors of the school. The teachers' college is thus the living heart of the entire school organism; it is there and through there that the soul and spirit of the school beats, the flow of which spreads to all aspects of life.
WORK AT THE COLLEGE GUARANTEES QUALITY
This pedagogical work of the College of Teachers is at the same time what continually energizes and stimulates the work of each one with the children, while at the same time guaranteeing its quality. For Steiner, the College of Teachers is the central and vital organ of the school's being: a central organ that pulses with the life that springs from pedagogical practice and helps the teacher to maintain its freshness and vitality. [...] These meetings enable the teachers to maintain their inner vitality instead of becoming old men, in soul and spirit.
RESPECT BETWEEN TEACHERS AND CHILDREN
Such a commitment of teachers to carry the whole life of the school with a strong sense of responsibility contributes greatly to the respect and warm authority that the children, but also the parents, give them. The children love and respect the teachers because they love them and they work to weave this envelope of warmth within the school so that everyone feels the joy of growing and blossoming together. ALL TEACHERS KNOW AND DEVELOP A BOND WITH ALL THE CHILDREN IN THE SCHOOL AND VICE VERSA.
CHAOS ENGENDERS NOVELTY
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A PLACE OF RESEARCH
A PLACE OF RESEARCH The teachers' meeting, says Steiner, must have the quality of a graduate school, a research seminar for the teachers; it must enable them to make constant discoveries and research concerning the knowledge of the human being. This is what keeps the blood of the school flowing, he says, and when the blood flows there is something fresh, something alive that comes to refresh you; everything psycho-spiritual in us is rejuvenated.
Being engaged in inner development work
A community of individualsA community holding the future is not a set of small groups but a large community of individuals who perceive together what is to be realized so that what comes from the future can be embodied. This is not easy to achieve. There are fundamental conditions to be fulfilled to make it indeed possible.
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INNER DEVELOPPEMENT
A) SELF-EDUCATION |
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The first of these conditions is self-education; we come back to this again of course. For Steiner, if a teacher has not engaged in the work of inner development, it is not legitimate for him to be there. Steiner assumes that each teacher will strive to develop this meditative consciousness and a year later, he returns to them with four conferences on The Knowledge of Human Nature elaborated meditatively. He then makes the transition from the study of human nature to the meditative knowledge of this human nature and then to the pedagogical action out of this meditative knowledge of human nature, thus tracing the working stages of the teacher's self-education:
1) study;
2) the meditative elaboration of knowledge;
3) the implementation of knowledge in practice.
B) TRESHOLD AWARENESS |
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The second condition is the development of what Steiner calls threshold consciousness, a particularly keen attention to the turning points of consciousness, in the overcoming of self, the overcoming of the polarity sympathy, antipathy, attraction, repulsion. When I cross the threshold of the classroom, the threshold of the Teachers' College room, I can no longer be just the man in the street that I also am; an attitude of inner elevation must gradually set in, because I establish myself in the calm, inner silence and attitude of benevolence, qualities of the soul necessary for the development of consciousness.
C) FAITHFILNESS TO THE ANTHROPOSOPHICAL VISION |
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The third of the conditions necessary for the proper development of the work of the College of Teachers, after self-education and awareness of the threshold, is undoubtedly the oath of fidelity that one makes to oneself, in view of what Steiner has placed on the altar of humanity as an "act of culture", for the present and future times. To remain faithful to this vision of the human being, of his development, of his education is to transform, little by little, one's life, one's private behaviour in the light of an ideal. It also means being ready to renounce many things for this ideal; but this strength of renunciation becomes strength for the College of Professors itself. Something irreversible happens naturally, but it changes life because it no longer follows the thread of everyday life, of the chain of desires and personal impulses. However, it is also necessary to learn to have a lifestyle that can create a balance between school and home.
D) ORDINARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS |
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In his book How to Acquire Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, Steiner indicates seven necessary conditions to be fulfilled by those who undertake a path of development of consciousness, each of these conditions corresponding to one of the constituents of human reality. 1) "one must take care to maintain one's good bodily and spiritual health".528 2) "[...] to feel oneself as a link in the whole of life".529 3) "[...] to be able to rise to the conviction that one's thoughts and feelings are as important to the universe as one's actions".530 4) "[...] to be able to see oneself as a link in the whole of life. 4) "...to acquire the conviction that the authentic essence of man is not outside but within".531 5) "perseverance in carrying out a decision once made". 6) "the development of a feeling of gratitude for everything that happens to man" 532. 7) "all the conditions mentioned," says Steiner, "must come together in a seventh: to conceive life without ceasing in the sense required by these conditions" 533
Relationship to society
The Waldorf School, a new social paradigmNow if the school and the way it is administered were to offer the optimal conditions to nurture the child-teacher relationship in the right way, it was also, for Steiner, to play the role of a precursor that prepares the change of social paradigm that is necessary in the future in order to be in tune with the development of the soul of consciousness and its transition towards the realities of the spirit. In this Steiner and the founding of this new school strongly lives the need to evolve the social organism as it exists in modern Western societies because without change, humanity will once again be led to the edge of the abyss.
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The School-society relationship
A social order built on POLITICAL-ECONOMIC DUALITY can only lead to tyranny, political tyranny - as in the case of the Bolshevik revolution, and very soon it will be the turn of the Nazi state -, or economic tyranny, and there it is rather towards America and its new New Deal policy that we must look. In both cases, the sphere of culture, of the life of the mind, is swallowed up and enslaved in the service of one or the other of these tyrannies. To maintain the possibility of freedom, it is necessary to make a whole place to the sphere of the culture, at the side of the political and the economic, each one of these spheres of the social life having absolutely to respect the laws proper to each one.
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Three-folding of the social organismThus, one becomes free only if, as a child, one has first imitated one's surroundings:
And men will never become free beings in spite of all the lamentations and political declarations about freedom, if the corresponding force of imitation is not implanted in early childhood. - Then, concerning the basis for a feeling of equal human rights in the social organism, it is in the second stage of childhood, between seven and fourteen or fifteen years of age, that this is developed. The equality of human rights, says Steiner, will not be established otherwise, because adults will never reach the necessary maturity if the feeling of authority is not developed in them during childhood. - Finally, concerning brotherhood, according to Steiner it is after puberty and sexual maturity that this force of human love, which is brotherhood, can be developed: [...] [Sexual life] is, says Steiner, only a particular aspect of human love. And it is this strength of human love that should be especially cared for when children leave school for other institutions. [...] For economic life, which is a historical requirement, will never be inflamed by what should inflame it, that is to say fraternity, love of the human being, if this love has not been developed during these adolescent years.542 |