What is ‘real work’ for children in K-12?
Chapter 13 serializing of Growing Sustainable Children; and, Schools Worthy of Our Affection.
My best guess how, in the next 100 years, whole-child K-12 schooling can evolve worldwide.
“What is ”real work” for children?” Astrid Schmitt-Stegmann, teacher trainer at Rudolf Steiner College asked this wonderful question in my second, 2001 Waldorf teacher training.
It’s a provocative question. It’s provocative in part because it demands the listener re-visit their “frame” their mindset about “work;” worthwhile work vs. mere drudgery.
The most significant aspect of child development is understanding the model of Sensitive Periods, so you can perceive them more easily in students.
Right here we have the big critique Waldorf has of most, not all, Montessori schools. If only adults are capable of understanding Sensitive Periods, it’s logical children, especially prior to puberty are not going to be proficient at choosing for the most part, what they want to learn in classroom time. Children prior to puberty are ill-suited to be in charge of their own education.
Beware of educators who use the above logic to mandate teaching of dumbed down college chemistry and college biology topics in kindergarten — which I have observed first hand. But I digress.
Then there’s “play” for the young child. Is play always good for them? What if K-elementary experiments kids are given electronic screens to play with, hooked up to play worlds created for them by corporations programing them to be good consumers?
This is how the question, “What is real work?” can be so powerful. When to combine Sensitive Periods with children’s “real work,” it becomes obvious real work for children is a gentle upward spiral. Real work differs necessarily for each Grade cohort, for each yearly age, in a stage-like fashion.
But wait, there’s more. “What is ”real work” for teachers?”
This returns us to the most significant aspect of child development is understanding and perceiving Sensitive Periods — a teacher training activity. This is a piece of Real work for teachers.
In progressive educator lingo of the 1970s-1980s, we used to talk to teacher trainees about arranging opportunities for children to develop self-esteem thru age-appropriate experiences.
A child’s emerging Sensitive Periods are on a gentle 18 year upward spiral. While growing up, they change at least every year, a moving target.
This brings us to a picture of Sensitive Periods and curriculum for them as described in Teaching As a Lively Art (1986). Teachers can arrange things in classrooms so children have multiple opportunities to problem-solve and exercise, with their next emerging level of intelligence.
A child’s “real work:” Establishing healthy habits on all levels
The most practical frame I’ve found to view “real work” for children is: arranging things to convey healthy habits to children, on multiple levels simultaneously. This is what the best K teaches do; as well as, the best Grades teachers, who have learned from the K teachers.
If the Kindergarten teacher has done his or her job well, early grade teachers have less to do. If K teacher has NOT done his or her job well; then, early Grades teachers have more work to do. Arranging things so children internalize self-control and self-discipline has to happen. If you pass this responsibility on into the upper elementary grades, parents pull their kids out.
By high school, you hope the children have adequate and sufficient healthy habits installed and can self-manage somewhat. If not, you feel like you are still teaching middle schoolers.
“Real work” for children is establishing (thru repetition) heathy habits on all levels.
How many parents are educated to the point where they can voice this? In my experience even Classic Waldorf parents struggle to articulate the above simple formula.
Some healthy habits we might wish to impart, convey and give repeated opportunity for…
Physical habits — How we make the bed, do the dishes, rake the leaves, tend the garden, care for the animals…
Imaginal habits — Perceiving the world as safe, as lawful under Nature, with challenges worth engaging in, re-directing negative self-talk…
Emotional habits — Our hearts can be broken. Our hearts can heal. Forgiveness and self-forgiveness help. Song, music, dance, poetry, fiction and biography can heal us; even, break our hearts open. …
Mental habits — The outer world has structure and enduring principles; I can know these. I can use these to make what I want to contribute and get my own needs met. Thru mathematics and geometry, I perceive some of the invisible inner structure of Creation…
Mythological habits — I lift myself up by focusing on healthy role models. Who inspires me? What am I learning? Upgrading my role models…
Soul and Above — How healthy are my choices in doing the right thing, at the right time, with the right people, for the right reasons? Where can I make a more healthy choice today?
In K-8 especially, most of the groundwork is laid for students’ Emotional Intelligence, their feeling of successful, harmonious, workable group process, their willingness towards collaboration and teamwork.
Conveying healthy habits IS imparting truly human values. If you are lucky as a teacher, your parents take this to heart and practice it too, making your job easier.
Healthy values as learned habits
Implied in the above scheme of healthy habits is healthy values. Before age nine, this has to be all done INdirectly. After age nine, values can be discussed gradually more explicitly.
With parents we can talk about values directly; hopefully, refreshing the song of our own values — not rehashing a rehearsed head speech about what people “should do” and “should be” from a Waldorf or any other freeze-dried framework.
When a local community of stakeholders has consensus on their values; and, wants to found a school to convey and impart these values to children, then we have a solid foundation for a Waldorf Team Human school.
Our truly human values are no more nor less, than another level of habits expressing on these levels: behaviorally-socially, imaginally, emotionally, mentally and mythologically.
Training a puppy dog
A new puppy dog has a Habit Body and you have to train it. This requires focus, patience and repetition. Potty training, establishing a routine is how we train a puppy dog and emblematic of how we train our Habit Body.
Each of us has more categories of habits than a puppy. Puppies only have Physical and Imaginal (Astral) habits (tinged with Feeling).
Q: I have more categories of habits than a puppy — I’m simply at a loss for words to describe the difference.
A: Correct. K-12 teachers have yet to be taught effective, workable rhetoric for our Habit Body; and, this could be taught.
The blossoming of holistic Heath in the 1970s and Energy Medicine 1965–2005 makes expanding our rhetoric about habits inevitable. Sooner or later, this will reach teachers.
Habits: reactive-responses stored for repetition
Habits are all our learned, reactive responses to life situations.
Each habit we have is behavior memorized (learned) thru repetition.
Each habit we have is behavior conditioned to repeat.
“Memory,” “habits,” “behavior” and “conditioning” are all closely related in this way.
We have so many habits, we need categories. The convenient categories are:
dg-habits-pacme
The PACME acronym comes from: Physical, Astral, Causal, Mental, Etheric (PACME). A little more clear is:
Physical habits ~ How you tie your shoe laces, posture, how you eat,
Imaginal habits ~ How you daydream, self-talk, likes~dislikes,
Emotional habits ~ What you’re attached to, commitments,
Mental habits ~ Beliefs, allegiances, how clearly or fuzzy you think, Inner Critic,
Mythological habits ~ Your role models (good and bad), fairy tales you live by, Angels.
As newborns we begin with a blank slate, all senses as fully open, as possible and permitted, by prior habits and physiology. We begin unconditionally receptive. The time between birth and change of teeth is time to wake up and develop as many healthy habits as possible. Doesn’t this summarize excellent early-childhood education?
In K-5 teachers can teach workable habits. You can moderate excessively reactive patterns in individuals somewhat.
After puberty you can demonstrate and teach making healthy choices. You can give students abundant opportunities to make their own choices and be accountable for them.
We used to say, “He who doesn’t know his history, is doomed to repeat it.” We say more precisely, “Whoever neglects their Habit Body, has the same behaviors and results tomorrow, as they did yesterday.”
Our Habit Body is multi-intelligent
Taken altogether our five categories of invisible habits can be conceived of as a multi-intelligent Habit Body.
Our Habit Body is our best and closest friend. It remembers every routine thing we do daily — so we don’t have to re-learn all our habits all over again each day. Habits are reactivity set on automatic, behavior conditioned to repeat.
Q: So if everything is habits, how can anyone ever think independently?
A: Choice is a much higher energy potential than any habit. Only 95% of our waking psyche is habits, according to Bruce Lipton and Paul Dennison. 5% of our waking psyche is conscious, deliberate choosing and deciding. Some researchers prefer the numbers 90% habits, 10% free choice.
Q: If we can make new choices, how come the one thing human beings do better than anything else is to make the same mistake over and over and over again?
A: The Habit Body is a new topic. As more people learn about it, as rhetoric around it expands, as the contrast between habits and conscious, free choice becomes obvious to individuals, people will gradually catch on to their capacity for free choice. Give it time. If you are training teachers, this topic may be worth your attention.
If there were no parents and no teachers
This is how “real work for children” varies year to year. this become job security for K-12 teachers especially since children even after puberty are incapable of managing for themselves when to learn what. If they could do this from birth, there would be no need for parents nor teachers.
Q: How do Sensitive Periods change after puberty?
A: In-utero to beginning of puberty: fluctuating opportunities to learn-build self-esteem in a range of areas, prior to puberty. After puberty, the rapid fluctuation slows down considerably, head-brain, spine and lateral spinal nerves are the new locus of conscious control. Sensitive Periods now concern healthy self-concept. Parents and teachers are tasked with providing age-appropriate opportunities to develop healthy self-concept in a range of competency areas.
To offer the right experience, at the right time, for the right reasons.
This is the real work of teachers.
Q: Don’t mainstream public sector schools think this way too?
A: Not so much. Outside of Classic Waldorf, you mostly get is trite rehashing of Piaget’s stages of rational-intellectual development, nothing on how Feeling develops, nothing on how morals or hand-eye coordination develops, nothing on we learn in our sleep. The expectation of regular classroom teachers is very low. In the 1980s the vicious cycle of low expectations about K-12 teachers was cited by UCLA Ed. Professor, Seymour Sarason, as an obvious reason more capable teachers gravitated into private schools (this was before charters and before Teach for America).
If you never expect working elementary teachers to become expert at anything — they won’t. If you expect your expertise to be embodied in highly paid “experts” and “specialists” teachers will defer to them.
Going back to Astrid, then she asked: What does “depth and thoroughness of teaching” look like in the healthiest classes? Once we get children of a certain age exposed to appropriate topics and content, is the teacher able to teach with depth and thoroughness?
This is famously addressed in the famous article, How Asian Teachers Polish Each Lesson To Perfection,” in the next Chapter.
“Real work” as “schooling for Team Human”
I wish not to lean too heavily on “Real work” for children, teacher trainees and parents. Joy, the fun of learning is what we are after, what works to make life work better locally for our Tribe. In this sense “real work” is more like “dedication” to several tiers of schooling, spirals of learning, which facilitate graduates able to choose into building-sustaining healthy community wherever they live.
Teach to enthusiasm for learning
If you attend to and teach to the Sensitive Periods, when children hunger for certain stimulation, you can Teach to enthusiasm for learning. This make classroom teaching easier. You are teaching what they wish to learn, what they are ready to learn.
Enthusiasm is like medicine for us
RS says, “Enthusiasm is like medicine for us.” This is ten times truer for children seven to fourteen, when our self-esteem about healthy Feeling life is being formed. So in child-centered, age-appropriate schools, it is more precisely children’s enthusiasm for the schooling we give them — or lack of enthusiasm — which can guide the teacher.
Teach from your enthusiasms
Teachers, please arrange daily lesson plans to teach from what you are enthralled with learning about, as much as possible. Model a life-long love of learning.
Real work of self-discipline: Winding the mainspring
If children are organized around self-control and healthy, orderly group process in grades 1–3, they are ready to ‘be let go’ in Grades 7 and 8. A clock’s mainspring has to be wound-up before the clock can tick regularly and independently ~ Astrid (paraphrase from my RSC notes I think)
Applying this metaphor to child development, the mainspring is many healthy habits instilled into children — including self-discipline and self-control. Learning self-control and self-discipline is ONE of the reasons performing singing, music and dance is emphasized in Classic Waldorf.
Q: But habits are sub- and unconscious. You mean I’m supposed to teach primarily to the sub- and unconscious?
A: Yes, conscious waking Self emerges from the “compost” of our sub- and unconscious psyche. K-5 is the period in human development with the most sensitive periods, where many developing capacities are either won or lost. Classic Waldorf theory documents the sensitive periods for children where sub- and unconscious habits are ready, willing, able and wanting to be formed. This is a big reason why the Classic Waldorf can spread with grace and ease across so many diverse cultures.
Children are learning new habits anyway. The more healthy habits they learn sooner, healthy self-control, etc., the easier your teaching job will be.
Besides this, teach to cooperation and collaboration with natural, lawful Unconscious Patterns. There is always more to learn about these at every age.
We hope, as well, for many healthy habits of group process and Emotional Intelligence. A Habit Body full of these habits gives teachers in middle and high school the best foundation on which a child can exercise their Thinking~Feeling intelligences in alternating fashion, as teammates in partnership.
Conversely, if Intellect alone or external media alone, primarily organize the child’s inner life in lower Grades, in Grades 6–8 alienation naturally sets in and the kids turn off.
It’s children who call for school reform
Let’s look at evolution thru the other end of the telescope. Maybe it’s the children who call for changes in K-12. Surely Sensitive Periods now are somewhat dramatically different from Sensitive Periods prior to World War I. Anyone know of hard research on this? Dr Steiner on this. I’d love to hear of it.
Are children responding well or poorly to current content and practices? If not, maybe time for a change.
To Learn More
