Experiencing is Being – Moving is Becoming

The focus of the conference was on “affirming, nurturing and trusting” the living relationship between the child and the educator. For the more than 950 participants from 62 countries, personal encounters were also the dominant experience. The halls and corridors of the huge building virtually vibrated with the joy of togetherness, of reacquaintance and recognition. Thus, this report is not simply a list of lectures: impulses we receive from life are immediately assimilated, transformed through conversations and further exchanges, and finally made our own. We take in the thoughts of others and thereby paradoxically come to ourselves. As Spanish philosopher Josep Maria Esquirol put it in his opening lecture, “Taking into myself the otherness of others and the world makes my own humanity more intense.”  The cruelest form of inhumanity, he said, is indifference – if I don't allow myself to be touched by my environment, I also lose access to myself. The main task of education, including school, is to enable fundamental social experiences: Joy in life, fear of loneliness or pain, love for others, wonder about the world.

Again and again, in the lectures and seminars at this conference, I understand that teaching is not about delivering curriculum content. The latter is means to an end because human beings want and need to learn. We learn, so to speak, by learning: how and who we are, and how and who others are, and how best to bring that together.

In a separate contribution, I will address the move away from traditional Eurocentric practices and content, one of the burning issues of this international meeting. Only a global view of the generative principles of Waldorf education will enable our movement to develop in a sustainable way. This article will address basic paradigms of the social experience:

The 9-month-old child, as described by Thomas Fuchs, a Heidelberg psychiatrist, looks to their mother or father when they have discovered something remarkable: The child points to the ball or the car and then, seeking reassurance, turns to the adult: "Did you see that?" This reassurance develops the realization that the world appears differently through the eyes of other people, but that our various experiences can be shared. This is how social perception first becomes possible.

In daily interaction among adults, many disputes begin with the expression, "In my opinion..." as if this self-representation were absolute and conducive to a solution of the common problem. If instead we begin conversations with openness: "What do you think about this?" we allow ourselves to grow through assimilating another perspective. This is what education must do, and this is what teachers and parents can model for young people.

Tomáš Zdražil reminds us of a pandemic artwork in New York: in front of the United Nations building in March 2021 there were 168 empty school desks and chairs, and on a chalk board the words "Absent: 168 million children".

Most of the content one has missed out on can usually be compensated for: what we really miss when we can't go to school are other people. In a good school, the very act of sharing space with others is salutogenic – we become healthier by encountering the world.

Kathy MacFarlane, a kindergarten teacher from New Zealand, describes how 30 years ago most children could eat anything placed before them, were able to play independently, and were able to emotionally process any kind of story. Today, it seems that half of the children have allergies. Instead of inventing and spontaneously creating games on a daily basis, they take their cues from what adults offer and expect. They often become either overstimulated or bored in response to stories. What has changed?

Pedagogical content and processes are not fundamentally different, other than adapting to new realities. It appears that children lack resilience, both health-wise and mentally. This means their ability to recognize their own needs and to take care of their fulfilment in a self-aware and purposeful way. To do this, a person must learn to recognize which outside impulses are helpful and healthy, and what their authentic inner voice sounds like. Of course, this is a gradual development – enabling it in age-appropriate and sustainable ways is a basic pedagogical task. It would be too easy to blame lack of resilience exclusively on new media and lack of exercise, although of course these play an important role.

Most children are driven by car to school or kindergarten in the morning. Their limbs barely touch the ground, they breathe reconstituted air, they can only incompletely inhabit their recently awakened bodies. There are understandable reasons why all this is so, but the passive sitting culture we have created has undeniable consequences: It weakens the human will. Children’s daily experience of being educated, taught, and even entertained without their active involvement creates a long-term expectation that everything in life should be attainable without effort, that they are entitled to things without having to work for them or earn them. This will inevitably have societal implications when this generation enters adult life. My colleagues and I are already noticing among young students in teacher education that they are less likely to work out their own desire to conduct creative research, and more and more often demand “training wheel” guidelines and summative assessment.

An approach to solving the problem could be the daily walk to school, suggests Michal Ben Shalom from Israel - it would certainly be easy to implement. After just twenty minutes of walking, children breathe more freely, walk more upright, improve muscle tone, develop increased awareness of their surroundings. They arrive at school with stimulated circulation and awakened soul - they inhabit their bodies, are present and socially capable. The school-refusing child, increasingly common since the pandemic, would find it much easier to enter the classroom if they had a fifteen-minute walk behind them than if the parental car was still clearly visible in the parking lot.

Some schools have developed systems for this: Ninth graders who mindfully walk younger pupils from the train station or bus stop to school, or "foot buses": parents living close by take turns walking with groups of children in all kinds of weather. Commonality also plays an important role here: our developing humanity requires us to move, both mentally and physically. If we do this together with others, our learning becomes more effective, more joyful, and more sustainable.