Right out of the gate he describes a day in the life at a Steiner school, with the organic notion of moving through the day from the head to heart to hands; or inner ----->outer.
The description of block education immediately strikes a chord, as that has been the topic of discussion with my wife--what is preferential--everyday balance, or manic focus, in regards to our son's current focus on math (and lack of focus or interest in music?). And of course for me, it evokes memories of my struggle to find a college to my liking way back when--my utter disgust with the factory-like lecture halls I was experiencing, the whack a mole nature of my distracted focus, and the yearning I had to attend Colorado College, which utilized a block-semester(?) format. (And of course, that time I finally visited, at the ripe old age of 27, fresh of a cross-country sojourn and a stint at the South Pole, and that open-minded-I'm-sure professor telling me I was a little old to be nosing around.)
"A child should be led to himself through education. This education should neither give nor take, but only bring to fullest possible fruition what is sown in each child, each in a unique way, as a gift from God." Nuff said.
"Control young people and you control the future." Hmm, did the folks who approved this charter read that part with the proper context?
Weltanschauung: (my definition) Individualized visionary mandate, for all?
"The child wants to grow...he will forge a new present one day, which will look completely different from the way any adult could have imagined. If we teach them to reach for our shadowy picture of the future, then we cheat them out of the future which is rightfully theirs. By imposing our existence on the child, we stifle their inner development. We give the child a picture or a dogma, and take away his future, to which he has a legitimate claim." --As we spiral ever more quickly into a rapidly (though always changing) future, this has never been more true.
The Teacher:
Wants to teach out of natural inclination
Approaches the material in freedom, rather than losing one's soul
Must see beyond one's own Weltanschauung (personal convictions--hobbies, ideals, etc.). (This feels a bit of the journey I have been on)
If Weltanschauung consists of opinions and desires (composed of formulas, programs, dogmas, and doctrines) regarding the world and how it operates, then world knowledge arises out of contemplative powers of judgment. Such a goal is reached by a longer path.
The emptier the keg, the louder the tone when struck...
"It is not, however, a Weltanschauung that can be adopted as simply as any other. It is a method of knowledge and therefore a "path," not a system." (19).
This echoes everything I've learned. He who says does not know, he who knows does not say. The path is only revealed with each step.
Steiner: "Waldorf education does not even want to educate, but to awaken, for that is what we are dealing with today, awakening. First the teachers must be awakened, then the teachers must awaken the children and young people."
Willi: "Education is releasing and freeing, says Troxler, and the same can be said of self-education. According to today's theory, however, the teacher must take a barrage of exams, and he in turn must submit the children to exams, as if anything significant were done for education that way."
Troxler: "There is more at stake in education than mere earthly life and civil existence. It is mankind, whose destiny embraces heaven and earth." There we go--right out of MY philosophy of education paper. How did he plagiarize me from 200 years ago? Oh, right...
ON WRITING
The general idea is to link the abstract back to the concrete; which in first graders is all about both conceptual ideas and the actual, instinctive (for vowels) sounds we make when presented with different feelings or phenomena: the "aah" for seeing an angel leads eventually to the bones of the whole experience manifested as an A: the skeleton leftover after everything is stripped away; the harsh realities of intellectual adulthood minus the imaginative wonder of childhood.
ON MATH
"But man is a calculating being in yet another sense, and, though it be ourselves, he makes us shudder. We must recognize how man faces the entire universe almost exclusively as a calculating being. Instead of seeking for true understanding, we force all phenomena between heaven and earth into rigid formulas and figures. Nothing left in our environment that could not be captured in numbers. But part of ourselves (let's call it the heart) resists such calculating activity. It knows that life cannot be grasped with formulas and equations, that it will escape that confinement a thousand times..." (42)
Ahh, that push and pull that defines my interest in baseball, and why the statistically "best" team rarely wins.
It all stems for the idea of the "whole", the one. Seems like modern math doesn't get to this idea as much until fractions are introduced much later; perhaps this leads to difficulties. As Willi puts it:
...we let the children "calculate" with it by letting them divide the pile into all kinds of smaller, always different piles. The child finds himself in an element of freedom in the truest sense. Limitless possibilities are open to his consciousness, and he experiences manifoldness and creative freedom as the beginning of arithmetic. On the other hand, if the child is introduced right off the bat to one specific arithmetic operation, usually addition, the first calculation he must experience is 1 + 1 = 2. He is thus immediately thrust into the realm of necessity.
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