By John Brousseau

First I want to thank those who created this conference for inviting me to participate and making it possible for me to join together with all of you in this great event. There was a time when the list of speakers was named in the order in which we will speak and I wasn’t sure, and I looked at that and I thought, well it doesn’t really matter what order it goes in as long as I don’t have to come right after Dannion Brinkley. (Which I did. Laughter)

All Education Is Self Education

• To start I want to give you a glimpse into Waldorf Education and how it thrives in the world today.
• Then we’ll look back on Rudolf Steiner’s wide ranging contributions to the founding of Waldorf education.
• That will take us to Adult Education, The Waldorf Institute of Southern California, and individual transformation as a key to becoming a Waldorf Teacher.
• In addition to the specific questions you might bring we will add some specific questions to be considered in tomorrow’s breakout session
• Finally we will close with a personal aspect of Waldorf Education

Waldorf Education

Imagine a school where the children really love to go to school, where you often hear the parents say, “I wish I had gone to a school like this.” Well, there are more than 900 schools like that, called Waldorf schools, and while many are found in Europe and North America they can also be found in Egypt and India, China, Japan, Israel and in many other countries around the world. It is the largest system of independent schools in the world.

A major clue to discovering what distinguishes Waldorf education and schools is that the teachers regard into life on earth their inborn and unique potential, gifts, weaknesses, and above all, intentions. The Waldorf teacher seeks to light the fire of enthusiasm, not fill an empty vessel. He or she is more interested in creating an environment for learning, for waking up, for recognizing. The Waldorf curriculum is a wonderfully effective tool for accomplishing this pedagogical goal of the Waldorf teacher and sets the stage for the unfolding of self- and peer-education.

The wisdom of the Waldorf curriculum is founded upon Rudolf Steiner’s characterizations of the three primary stages of child development, which I will summarize as follows:

The First Seven Years

In the first seven years of life the child makes enormous developmental and educational strides, achieving uprightness and walking, speaking and the beginning of thinking while building up his or her physical body. The natural mode of learning during this stage is through imitation. The Waldorf early childhood teacher (or parent) wants to be and to create an environment that is worthy of the child’s imitative power and openness to the world, an environment that strengthens and supports the child through meaningful activity, predictable rhythms in the day, week, year, through objects and toys of beauty that leave room for activity and imagination.

A key word which catches the mood of Waldorf early childhood education is: Goodness.

The Second Seven Years

In the next seven-year period, that of the elementary school years (7-14), the child’s powers of imagination crave stimulation and opportunity, and this is the key to setting the stage for learning (self-education) during this phase of development. In Waldorf schools experiencing and practicing art are not frills, but an integral part of the educational experience. The children learn by listening to stories and other oral presentations, drawing, painting, sculpting, playing and singing music, movement, handcrafts – they receive nourishment for head, heart and hands, for body, soul and spirit. They learn to be creative, individually and in the group. And in this developmental period, when the emphasis is on the soul, they learn largely through imagination and empathy.

The keyword which describes the goal of Waldorf elementary classes is: Beauty.

The Third Seven Years

In the third and final period of childhood from 14 to 21 years, adolescents, high school and young adults want to be challenged in their capacity for thinking. To properly set the stage for this to occur, Waldorf educators will not spoon-feed them data or theories, but will create the conditions in which students can develop their own powers of accurate observation, independent thinking and judgment. Young people at this stage want to be inspired and guided by teachers who are actively connected with the contemporary world through their knowledge and experience.

Here the keyword to express the striving of youth is: Truth.

Imagine a school where the teacher actually visits the children in his class at their homes!

In the elementary grades children in a Waldorf school have one class or main lesson teacher with whom they ideally travel from first through eighth grade, while enjoying additional educational influences from their special subject teachers (foreign language, music, handcrafts, eurythmy, games, etc). With such a long-term connection, the class teacher not only learns to know and work with the students’ individual strengths and weaknesses, but she or he has the opportunity to create and support a strong social community within the class. (As adults, Waldorf graduates often continue bonds of friendship formed in their earliest educational years.)

The class teacher works most intensely with the class during an early morning period usually lasting about two hours. During this main lesson time, the children enter into a given subject for a block lasting three or four weeks. During main lesson, the teacher may present material, encourage discussion and have the students write and draw in their main lesson books, which they create to describe their work in the block.

There also will be activities such as poetry recitation, mental math, and movement games (especially in the early grades) that enable the children to breathe in and out. When a block is finished, that subject can go to sleep for a time and the students can immerse themselves in another subject.

My Experience as a Waldorf Teacher

I had the privilege of working as a class teacher in a Waldorf school for 30 years. I began with children in first grade and led them along from grade to grade until we all graduated in eighth grade, after which I had a sabbatical for a year and started over.

Just before I began this work, my mother asked me, “Do you really know enough to teach those children for eight years?? Well I thought I did, but one could also say that I really didn’t! Luckily, being a class teacher is a great opportunity for personal growth.

And I did experience many times the joy that working with imagination brings to the children and the teacher. I’ll give you an example about going to the park. Well you can picture us at the park with the children running all about and every now and then I could try to draw them together and show them, Ranger Rick style, this or that flower or squirrel etc.

We have said that the one task of the Waldorf educator is to set the stage. So I needed to visit the park first, then create an imaginative story that night – about the dandelion seeds blowing and the clover blossom glowing in the sunlight – which I told the next day to the children in the classroom. On the following day I encouraged the children to retell the story, and on the day after that we walked to the park. Then it happened that one of the children running about stops in her tracks and says excitedly, “O look, Mr. Brousseau! there are the dandelion seeds – right next to the clover blossom just like you said.” And when a child says, O look! many other children look too, and it becomes a real learning moment for the class.

Bringing Greek Mythology to Life

In fifth grade the curriculum suggests wonderful blocks of Greek Mythology, Myths from India, Persia and Egypt, the story of Gilgamesh – interspersed with blocks on Mathematics, English, Geography and History. I knew without a doubt that my son’s class teacher had succeeded in bringing Greek mythology to life when my son asked me as we were driving past the beautiful Greek Church near where we live, “Do they worship Zeus there?”

Learning to Read

We can awaken to the idea that all education is self education when we observe the varied rates at which children become able to read. The teacher generally teaches the whole class without a great deal of individual instruction. However, in the Waldorf school we accept developmental and individual differences and find that some wake up to reading in first grade, some in second, and hopefully almost everyone reads by the end of third grade. The parents think I am a remarkable genius if their child learns to read in first grade; I am much less capable in the eyes of the parents of the second grade reader; and there may be a crisis of parent confidence while we are waiting for the third grade reader to awaken!

The important point here is that often the slow-to-awaken reader has a strong relationship to reading all his life long while some early readers lose interest.

It is Important to Visualize the School as a Community

The social impulse that a continuing class teacher can engender and support is also supported by a curriculum that fosters social interaction as well as appreciation and gratitude toward the natural world and fellow human beings. In the elementary grades and at a different level in the high school, students will delve into the mythologies, religious expression and history of cultures the world over. Classes in two foreign languages beginning in first grade also directly expand their cultural perspective. Students develop feelings of interest and respect for the innate goodness dwelling in all human beings. A sense of responsibility for the welfare of humanity and the earth is a natural outcome.

Education is a Community Involvement

Educating children requires the involvement of a community of people whose focus is on the children as they progress through the developmental epochs of childhood. The nature and structure of Waldorf schools encourages group efforts at every level. Waldorf schools are self-administered, that is, they are teacher-run.

It is the educators themselves who make decisions regarding the policy and administration of the school in addition to the pedagogical work they do together. The life of the school depends on this cooperative working of the community of teachers. It also depends on cooperative working between the teachers and the parents. The active interest and participation of the parents is an essential element in a healthy school community.

In our time the Waldorf educational movement has found fertile ground for growth in many parts of the world. The fact that each school relies on a community of effort to flourish makes it readily able to take root in widely varying cultures and circumstances, and to be authentic both as a Waldorf school and as a part of the wider community. Waldorf education can truly think globally and act locally.

History of the Waldorf Schools

Looking back to the beginning, we find the Free Waldorf School, as it was called, opening its doors in September 1919 in Stuttgart, Germany, under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner, natural and spiritual scientist, philosopher, artist and educator. Rudolf Steiner’s investigations into the spiritual world are the foundation of Waldorf education.

If we examine the roots of Waldorf education, we see how Rudolf Steiner’s remarkable insights with respect to the interweaving body, soul and spiritual aspects of the human being were brought to the pioneer teachers compressed in a series of 45 lectures or seminars that were given in two weeks just before the start of the first Waldorf school!

The Waldorf school curriculum is derived from the human being. The child beholds himself in the curriculum and finds the answers for his inner development needs through the content of the lessons offered.

More directly, the child hears many stories- fairy tale, legend, myth, biography and freely chooses to dwell on portions of stories most closely attuned to his own development at that moment. Further, he remembers and draws strength from other aspects of those stories as he matures.

Children are Spiritual Beings

In addition, as a Waldorf teacher I have come to know, perhaps only dimly, that the child who comes to meet me is a spiritual being whose life on earth is a continuation of spiritual and soul life in the spiritual world. My task as teacher is to remove hindrances and nurture insight, interest, warmth and vitality so that the specific spiritual intentions of the incarnating individuality can come to expression in the growing child and maturing adult. And I know this has also been the experience of whole generations of Waldorf teachers since the original Waldorf school was started 86 years ago.

And for those of you who are worrying about what happened to heredity and environment, generally we picture that the individuality chooses the heredity and the accompanying environment as well.

Frequently we refer to holistic education and teaching the whole child, and as teachers, we can relate to willing, feeling and thinking as well as to body, soul and spirit.

And perhaps the greater significance of the various triads is that it is the working together or the unity of the three elements that is important. For instance, we can talk about body, soul and spirit but it is the real live human being, with integrated body, soul and spirit that matters.

Significant is the recognition that none of these aspects appear in the human being by themselves, and that they are remarkably intertwined with the individual wishing to bring them into balance.

For instance it is easy to picture the person who rushes into a situation without thinking, or another who sits back and watches and never offers to help, or how wonderful it is to be with someone who can recognize a friend’s hidden need and has insight and capacity to implement a tactful solution. At the same time, we often value most highly the one-sided qualities that characterizes one or another friend.

Waldorf’s Social Mission

It is important to remember that Waldorf education has always had a social mission. Out of the chaos near the end of the First World War the first school was founded for the children of factory workers. This was not a factory school to train qualified workers for the factory – but a school for humanity, whose students could bring new impulses into the general cultural process.

In the opening address, at the start of the Waldorf Teachers Seminar Steiner said, “To achieve a modern spiritual life, the Waldorf school must be a true cultural deed. We must reckon with change in everything; the ultimate foundation of the whole social movement is in the spiritual realm and the question of education is one of the burning spiritual questions of modern times. We must take advantage of the possibilities presented by the Waldorf School to reform and revolutionize the educational system.”

Rudolf Steiner was intensely interested in the social question and wrote and spoke about necessary changes and finally founded Waldorf Education out of recognition that human beings had to be educated differently in order to become able to reach a new level of consciousness. He intended this change of consciousness to be carried by thousands of Waldorf schools around the world.

The number of Waldorf schools grew only slowly until recently; but it may be that consciousness is now shifting sufficiently and the time is at hand for significant world-wide change in education.

The Threefold Nature of Social Relationships With Humanity

Steiner also spoke about the threefold nature of social relationships within humanity. He spoke about a Cultural Sphere, a Rights Sphere and an Economic Sphere. The Cultural Sphere includes Religion Art and Science. The Rights Sphere includes the Judiciary, the Executive and the Legislature. And the Economic Sphere includes Production, Distribution and Consumption.

These three spheres are ideally independent but interacting and if their effects were really independent and in balance, we might actually experience the Freedom Equality and Brotherhood that failed to find a home in the past. All of this comes under the heading of Threefoldness and Steiner used that term in particular to refer to these three spheres of influence.

Right now the economic sphere is dominate and interferes in the Cultural sphere – education, with No Child Left Behind Act – and interferes in the rights sphere by buying directly or indirectly the votes of politicians.

A different case of unfortunate cultural sphere interference could be imagined if a particular religion become favored by the state.

Steiner said that individual human beings needed to change before we would be able to experience significant improvement in the social well being of humanity. And that takes us to adult education, the Waldorf Institute of Southern California^® and Individual and Group Tasks.

Waldorf Teachers

Now I hope that some of you, or a friend of yours, would have a question about how one becomes a Waldorf teacher.  There are about a dozen Waldorf teacher education programs in North America and one of those is our Waldorf Institute of Southern California^®, with programs in Los Angeles and San Diego.

Important factors in our teacher education program are: sustained artistic work, which becomes reflected in the art of education practiced by each teacher and sustained cooperative work and discussion among teachers and students in the program, along with many opportunities for students to exercise individual initiative.

We encourage students to notice learning moments – that magical moment when someone says “Oh I see” and then everyone wakes up for just a moment. A student commented during one of our review discussions, “When I used to attend classes, I gave most of my attention to the instructor. Now it’s different, I must listen closely to everyone in the circle, for the next learning moment can come from any direction.”

At the center of becoming a Waldorf teacher, the adult must freely choose to place himself or herself on a path of inner self development. Aside from the positive soul-spiritual effects of personal transformation, this striving also creates an important bond with the children who naturally are in a continuous state of consciousness transformation as they mature.

Just as the Waldorf teacher needs to cultivate a lifelong enthusiastic interest in the world and in other people, the child must learn to balance the demands of the outer world with steadfast inner discipline – to make a space so that the quiet indications and intentions of the spiritual world can be noticed.

Rudolf Steiner suggested a special prayer for the teacher.

Dear God, Make it so that I,
with regard to my personal ambition,
may completely extinguish myself.
May Christ make true in me the Pauline words:
Not I but Christ in me;
So that in me the rightful holy spirit of true
education and teaching can hold sway.

Now think of children as they come into our lives; they are the most recent messengers from the spiritual world and they (unconsciously) can bring us relevant glimpses of spiritual world intentions, if we are open and observant.

So while it is vitally important for the Waldorf teacher to study, to contemplate the three-fold nature of the human being, and also to come to numerous insights as to how the Waldorf curriculum harmonizes with the ages and stages of the developing child, much significant personal growth and capacity to serve humanity arises from actual sustained teaching in a Waldorf classroom.

Meanwhile, back at the founding of the original Waldorf School, Steiner called upon the teachers to wake up in three specific ways.

1. He called to each teacher to freely choose to place himself in the profession and become awake to his own higher self.
2. He called to all the teachers to become awakened to cooperative work with their colleagues.
3. He called to all the teachers and to the community to become awakened to the tasks manifested by the spirit of the times.

This third call is directly related to our conference today.

Groups of people are awakening to the call of the spiritual world. And even though we can experience the anti-social forces and materialism becoming ever stronger, it has to be possible that, at the same time we are becoming more painfully aware of this, we are also more free to choose to redirect our attention and to align ourselves with the intentions of the spiritual world.

Wired Magazine founder, Kevin Kelly, views technology more generally as an invisible force operating everywhere, and becoming more accessible to more and more people as miniaturization and mass production make all convenient inventions increasingly available, as the outer costs plummet nearly to zero and that which manifests as the real interest of technology is our human attention – where we choose to turn the light of our consciousness.

And then I just came across an interesting summary by Daniel Pink where he develops the thought that we have arrived at abundance through emphasis on left brain activity in this Information Age, and now need to strengthen our right brain activity to properly integrate ourselves with artistry and empathy into what he labels the Conceptual Age we are entering.

Tomorrow’s Breakout Session Questions to Consider

I would be most interested first in the questions you bring and then we might consider:

• What is consciousness?
• How do we work in harmony with and in support of changing consciousness?
• How can we inspire others to join us in activities which will bring about transformations in consciousness?

Previously important world conceptions were accessible only to particular groups of human beings. Now it is possible for everyone over the whole world to become aware that we all live in that whole world, that it includes the spirit, and that we can choose where to direct the light of our attention and take the next step forward that was intended for humanity.

This may also be the time when a sizable segment of humanity could come to recognize the truths of reincarnation and karma. Egoism is partly overcome when we look back on our lives and become grateful to all the many individuals who have shaped our biography.
Our outlook changes when we live with the thought that our gifts, challenges and meetings with others really arise from interaction among spiritual beings before we were born, and from our own actions or inactions in previous lives. A strong moral force of responsibility for others and for the world we live in will flow from recognition of reincarnation and karma.

There are Questions Such As:

• Am I my brother’s keeper?
• How does the empowerment maxim “never do any thing for anyone that they can do for themselves” fit in?
• Does helping people interfere with their corrective karma?
• And one more – E Pluribus Unum – Out of many we are One – What can we do as individuals to move the American people and systems closer to this ideal?

A Personal Waldorf Experience

To end, I wish to return to a personal story of Waldorf education and tell you briefly about my former student, Terry. He had curly brown hair, bright sparkling eyes, a well developed sense of humor, but was serious at the same time, with considerable sensitivity and understanding – and all of this was visible as early as first grade.

In sixth grade, Terry worked very hard at his geometric drawings. He was talented but not habitually neat, but these drawings were most beautiful and reflected a remarkable effort on his part. At this same time, the class learned the poem, The Chambered Nautilus by Oliver Wendell Holmes. As you may know, the Nautilus is an unusual sea creature whose opened shell displays a lovely increasing geometric progression, eloquently described by Holmes.

Terry graduated from eighth grade as a star dramatic performer, champion reader, already deeply involved in a number of world ecology issues. He went on to public high school because he wanted to play football at a big school. He found he didn’t like it much, but he founded a High School recycling program there, and became directly involved with a Japanese student exchange program.

Terry became an environmental scientist. He was also an expert animal tracker, a second degree black belt in Korean Hap Ki Do, a potter, and an analyst of indigenous law and environmental policy. He began to work with the U’wa community of Colombia in May 1997.

The U’wa people embody much that Terry valued. They live with profound respect for their land, maintaining a cultural, spiritual and educational system that makes community life sustainable across generations.

Terry created a coalition of non-governmental organizations to support the U’wa struggle to retain their traditional land and to oppose oil company efforts to drill on their sacred land. The U’wa embraced Terry as one of them and they considered him their international ambassador. At the age of 25 Terry was kidnapped and killed by members of a militant rebel faction in Columbia.

At his memorial service, I spoke that the potential and promise of Terry’s life was not lost, and suggested that he was carrying unused forces into the spiritual world that bring light and encouragement to those in the spiritual world so that others will be inspired to further idealistic accomplishments on earth. I spoke also that I believed that sometime in the future the individuality that bore Terry’s name will bring back to a new life on earth his gifts, with greatly enhanced love, strength and effect for the earth.

I also read a fragment of the Chambered Nautilus poem Terry had experienced in 6^th grade. After the memorial, I was approached by one of Terry’s colleagues who told me something wonderful. He said when the U’wa sent runners deep into the jungle to tell remote villages that Terry had been slain, the runners reported that the medicine people in the village already knew about Terry’s death! They explained that Terry had visited them in a dream and given them a tool – a large white Snail Shell. To the U’wa the snail shell symbolizes peace, purity and problem solving.

I thought you might like to hear that fragment of the Chambered Nautilus Poem as well.

Fragment of The Chambered Nautilus

Through the deep caves of thought, I hear a voice that sings,
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s un-resting sea!

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