#1-Serialization of Growing Sustainable Children; and, Schools Worthy of Our Affection
Subtitles: Team Human K-12 Teacher Training;
Waldorf 2.0 for Public Schools, Local Assembly Required
This project complements the Waldorf100 film. For Waldorf’s first 100 year anniversary in 2019, we might ask, what might Waldorf K-12 education look like in 2119, for its 200th birthday?
A positive theme is proposed: Team Human Waldorf K-12 education. In 2016 Douglas Rushkoff proposed humanity as a team sport; everyone is on Team Human — tho not everyone recognizes-acknowledges this yet. “Team Human” is a healthy response to Faustian, dystopian “Team Machine” (programming people to conform to technology). Check out Doug’s podcast http://TeamHuman.fm From multiple angles, Team Human can be used to refresh Waldorf schools as seedbeds of new social-cultural forms.
Can Waldorf evolve, renew itself, in the next 100 years? How and why an authentic USA Waldorf did not yet evolve — yet could — is discussed. What should stay the same? What can be improved? These volumes put a large fraction of the issues on the table for your local conversations.
This is written for BOTH private-independent; and, public charter Waldorf teachers and trainees.
Entire project is organized around the question, “What is “real work”?
- What is “real work” for children on their journey thru the Land of Childhood?,
- What is “real work” for teachers, who guide children thru the Land of Childhood — before and after puberty?
- What is “real work” for parents?
- What is “real work” for everyone, at a K-12 community center towards a Team Human positive future?
- What is the endgame? Perhaps: Grade 12 graduates who are:
- Emotionally Intelligent,
- self-propelled problem-solvers, and
- cooperative-collaborative, willing and able to play on a team or lead a team.
Read as much or as little as you like. Five short volumes of 125–150 pages each. Organized into Four SECTIONS:
SECTION 1 ~ Theme of Team Human K-12 ed. Couple introductions. “What is Real Work for Children?” Lays out the 100-year-old wisdom of Sensitive Periods and how our Outer Game of Life as a child, becomes our Inner Adult Game of Life.
SECTION 2 ~ “What is Real Work for Teachers and trainees?” Annotated short history of childhood. Annotated short summaries of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and related Best Progressive K-12 Practices from outside the ‘Classic Waldorf box.’
SECTION 3 ~ What is Real Work for Parents and Everyone at a school? “Classic Waldorf is primarily characterized by its metaphors,” the UNESCO characterization of Waldorf are built-out in full, the Waldorf metaphors universally useful. Metaphors only useful to “parochial” Anthroposophic schools. School as a person. School as a Commons. WHO do we graduate? Conclusions. Three ways to re-brand Waldorf for the coming 100 years.
SECTION 4 ~ Three ways to re-brand Waldorf, solutions for the coming next 100 years.
Comments, corrections, additions on the entire effort are welcomed.
Written primarily for teacher trainees. It may also usefully outline Team Human parent education.
A robust USA version of Waldorf incorporating Best Practices from holistic-humanistic movements, has yet to develop. The Best Practices likely to be useful are summarized, a way out from the dead-end of USA schools trying to succeed as European-Waldorf-lite.
For an authentic USA Waldorf to emerge, schools will have to embrace North American genius in the areas of Emotional Intelligence, interpersonal competency, personal growth, and healthy group process. Openness to innovations and self-assessments, compatible with Classic Waldorf, from OUTSIDE the Waldorf box will play a big part.
Can USA Waldorf evolve? Will it evolve? What could this look like?
If Waldorf ed is new to you, check out the Waldorf100 video on YouTube to feel its worldwide, international momentum for yourself. Celebrate here: Waldorf100 video (17-min.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfec6eF4I_4&t=1s
Why not start here?
“We were making the future,” he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making ~ The Sleeper Wakes, H.G. Wells
Dedications
To Douglas Rushkoff for the meme of Team Human which proposes a healthy values container for what Waldorf could be like in 2121.
To the heartfelt, community-building spirit of Insight Seminars and especially Teen Insight: https://www.InsightSeminars.org
Eugene Schwartz, one of our most inspiring Waldorf practitioners and cultural innovators, one of very few persons thinking aloud on, “How and in what directions will Waldorf evolve in its second hundred years?”
To all the loving beings in Soul and Above who supported the year of effort on this project, supporting me to overcome endless obstacles and doubts. I could always count on Angels to show me where the mss was weakest and most needed attention.
To all those who in the first 100 years created the original ‘Classic Waldorf box’ those educators, known and unknown who, inside Waldorf, innovated new pieces of Goethean Psychology, applicable to K-12 ed.
Where there is no healthy vision of the future for seven generations, the children perish ~ adapted from the Greek, 500 BC
School as a river
I think of every school as more like a river than as an institution. I like what people say about rivers: You can’t walk thru the same river twice. The quality of any single school is always a moving creation slowly changing every year.
Healthy values in local community are also like a crative river, changing slowly each year. Take from these volumes the ideas and methods, according to your local consensus, which strengthen the flow of your values-into-action.
About the author
HOW did you write this? WHY write this?
The more good schools you can physically go to, and tour, while they are in session, the better. One of the great assets I had to work with, to write this, was an unusual Waldorf adventure. It took me on a tour of 25 Waldorf schools from Seattle, WA to Florida. Another asset was my tour of 150 public schools, mostly inner city schools, 250 classrooms in these public schools I estimate, not counting more classes I observed but did not do any teaching in. On top of this, as a student, I’ve taken classes from 13 bricks and mortar colleges and universities. What an education!
A 400 page 1991 0.5 version of this book was completed yet never published. It served as a successful undergraduate honors thesis at CSUDH, Composing Your Own Vision of Whole-child K-12 Education. It was subtitled: Converging Rudolf Steiner, William Glasser, Thomas Gordon, Rudolf Dreikurs and others; Growing new eyes to see age-appropriateness in the classroom. At first I thought a good deal of the 1991 version would be useful. Turned out, almost none of it survived. A new, different, better text emerged.
What number book this is for me is unknown; I’ve lost track. Happy to serve as i can writing all these book series.
I took my first Waldorf teacher training 1986–1988. Until 2001 I was involved in the first exciting wave of early Waldorf charter school activity. I was focussed on Waldorf independent and charter schools. After four years with special needs teens, I left the education field entirely in 2007.
Before teaching I worked for 80 businesses as an office and legal secretary temp. Before that I worked for 11 nursing homes as a substitute orderly. Before that I worked as a house painter. Before that I worked at the Aquarian Research Fdn. newsletter. I also traveled to intentional communities.
The somewhat permissive parenting I received suggests why my classroom management was never strong. With years of inner work and outer practice, I eventaully became a super-sub, bringing my own Waldorf lessons into public schools on school substitute assignments. I was most successful with K-4 kids; and then again, adults in ESL night school. I taught a happy year in a Gifted and Talented Grade Five. The children blossomed but I was blocked by the Principal from continuing. Other teachers liked my methods but not him.
I’ve taken two Waldorf teacher training years; and, a summer course for Waldorf early grades in public schools. I took conventional teacher training 1991–1993. I should have gone into special ed 1993, but I was too prideful.
I was briefly the Interim Director of a Santa Cruz Waldorf charter startup which never opened; we lost our site. I worked at RSC for a year on the grounds and on the large event crew. I re-took the teacher training year at RSC in 2000–2001.
2001 I gave up on Waldorf as a career. I entered grad school for high school counseling. Right after in 2003, I worked with therapists in the VA Hospital for six months, a wonderful team effort to revise client case records to be be more Emotionally Intelligent.
In 2004 I met more of my destiny in moderate-severe special ed. In 2007 the special ed school I was working at changed direction radically; I and others left. I went 100% into Energy Medicine, client sessions and documenting Best Practices in Energy Medicine.
Is this a good resume for an outsider book like this? I’ll let you decide. Most good ideas here seem to come from my Waldorf outsider status. I was never a Society member, tho I love many of the members I met. Adult teaching and consulting still interests me. Currently I still support a few clients and write a lot.
- Bruce Dickson, Pasadena, CA (2021)
My task as an author has not been to write down new ideas around me. Rather, it is to have the patience to persevere until new ideas I am looking for appear, so I can write them down ~ Malcom Gladwell, paraphrase from his promo from a YouTube writing course
Kindness is the best indicator of wisdom ~ Alice Walker, author, The Color Purple
If you have a better online “home” for this serialization, let me know — HealingToolbox attg mail
