Following the teachers’ meeting promoted by the APEPW on May 20, part of which was recorded on video, I decided to share a short reflection with you after hearing the extraordinary testimony about your work at this equally extraordinary time.

At this point in my life, after nearly 40 years dedicated to the existence of Waldorf pedagogy in our country, which has gradually revealed to me the mission of anthroposophy in today’s world, I can do little more than look, listen and try to understand what is happening around me in the fulfillment of that mission.

That’s why I want to talk to you today about what I saw and heard at your meeting in the light of anthroposophy.

Based on the conviction that nothing happens in the visibility of our lives that doesn’t have a profound cause and design, dictated by the spiritual world, we are required to be able to cultivate clarity of thought, warmth of heart and rightness of action, not to serve ourselves, but to serve others who, close to us, represent humanity.

The challenge that humanity is currently facing requires everyone to distance themselves from the visibility of the other(s), while at the same time, more than ever, especially in the case of teachers, these other(s) need to be accompanied. How to do this was undoubtedly the agonizing question of every teacher around the world.

In my opinion, this question can only become truly disturbing if human beings, faced with the emptiness that physical distance apparently brings, are held hostage by this emptiness, because beyond the externality of the course of life, they no longer have a glimpse of the spiritual dimension of existence.

Being a Waldorf teacher implies the awareness that the essential role of being a true companion to your students is fulfilled when, freed from the constraints of close physicality, you can make your deepest identity available to approach, understand and love the Being of each student, in the nocturnal space of the Great Meditative Encounter. His day job, day after day, in front of his students, is just the consequence of the closeness he gained the night before.

Serving your students means, night after night, strengthening the links between your own Self and the Self that each child’s development is predestined to receive from the spiritual world. Only in this way can you provide them with the physical and human conditions “that allow their soul-spiritual nature to harmonize with their physical nature in order to carry out their process of development”, the great goal of every educator’s work, according to Steiner.

Within this awareness, bonds are not broken, absence is not real, feeling is nurtured in the warmth of the true relationship that remains. The fundamental question that the teacher must try to answer is no longer what to do in the current situation, but what it is that only I can do each day, as a result of my night job.

If part of humanity, living alienated from this dimension of existence, depends on the fragility of each moment, on sensory impressions that soon fade, on the unintelligible meaning of the physical presence of others, the demand of the challenge that the current pandemic has posed – to live apart from the visibility of the other(s) – becomes an offer for this same humanity to wake up from this slumber and see what its eyes have covered: “I am not me, I am the one who walks beside me without me seeing him…”

You may ask, what about the hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye observation that used to happen every day? It’s true that it no longer happens in the course of today’s daily routine. But it’s also true that it only focused on the fleeting impression of the moment, because the real observation that, transcending the immediate, allows us to dive into the dimension of the other – Who are you? – is what the College of Teachers decides to do, not in the presence of the child’s physicality, but by evoking the invisible presence of their Being, so that they can be told what they need everyone to do.

When I heard you mention the effort to “adjust to each class” what you were doing “to respect the children’s development”, because “I’m the one who has to accompany my students… be with them, make the journey with them”, “be even more connected to the children”, I understood how, even in conditions that seem to overturn the foundations of pedagogy, your connection to what is its true essence, prevailing in your will, is revealed in your being and doing.

The awareness of “going to sleep”, intensifying the night work, so that the real contact is not lost, awakens in some of you (as has been said) and has awakened in me the “gratitude” of being able to do so, thanks to the fact that, somewhere in our lives, we chose to serve the human being through our students, no matter what!

In these circumstances, filling your feelings with looks, laughter, “the beautiful way” in which you connect, jokes and little episodes from your family life, wanting to “bring courage and joy” to the children in their daily lives, because in effect “school has been taken away from them”, testifies to how you are moved – moved by – your students’ feelings and are committed to giving them back what has been taken from them. For me, this is a sign of your genuine willingness to serve others with courage and selflessness.

And those who are willing to do so are able to find sources for sharing the world and life, in the manifestations that inspire the eye to contemplate the richness of their forms, helping to nullify fear and arouse courage, but above all to recognize around them “the forces that nourish and lead to the spiritual world”. And this is what nullifies the “opposing forces” that seem to want to dominate us, as Pamela told us, who hasn’t given up in the current circumstances on bringing eurythmy to her students!

Proving that it is the great challenges, those that seem to surpass our strength, that open up horizons for us to serve better, because they had to penetrate the students’ family space, we heard how they ended up involving parents in their children’s tasks, sometimes with commitment and enthusiasm. And once again, the importance of the arts in Waldorf pedagogy was evident: teachers who were not afraid to reinvent their artistic practices, even from a distance, enthusiastically involved parents in their children’s work, transforming this experience into a healing activity available to everyone, to alleviate the difficulties that everyone experiences, whether it be plastic arts, handicrafts or even listening to the story of the day as a family. But another healing aspect, as you shared, came from your commitment to being attentive: you helped the families to organize themselves, to manage the distance learning situation, to give your support whenever necessary, in essence you tried to answer the question of the service that Waldorf pedagogy aims to provide to society: “how can I put myself at the service of those in need?” In my opinion, this is the fundamental question that will lead to the change we want to bring to the world through our students.

However, I ask you to consider: the answer is not change, but paving the way towards it! The answer can be a simple gesture, a short word, an insignificant act, whose effect on the other person can trigger that change, about which we still know nothing. We have to be sufficiently humble in our way of serving: we have to ask the question and know how to listen to the answer, but above all be able to act by making the simple gesture, saying the short word, carrying out the most insignificant act, to mitigate what the other(s) needs and not what I myself think or dream the world needs.

The legacy that Steiner left us is based on Spiritual Science, whose “task is to provide a practical worldview that contributes to the solution of the most important tasks of humanity today and to its development”. It demands of us “an authentic knowledge of life, whose fundamental laws will not differ in the future from those of the present… It will therefore not fail to respect what exists. Whatever the need for reform, it will seek in what currently exists the germs for future development, for future transformation, deducing it from what exists, because what exists contains the principle of evolution…. All human life contains the dispositions for its future.”

That’s why “the spiritual study of the human entity is likely to provide fruitful and practical means of solving the pressing problems of today.”

If the international community of the Waldorf School Movement had meditated deeply on this testimony by Steiner, who was one of the first to focus on the area of education, dating back to 1907 (later published as “The Education of the Child According to Spiritual Science”), perhaps they would have avoided the tendency, which occupies other politico-educational circles, of conspiracy theories to analyze the current situation!

In the task that today’s world has brought us, as teachers, the respect you felt for the conditions surrounding your students and families, the effort to find possible solutions to accomplish this task, the desire to meet the needs of each student to help them envision their own future and therefore “give purpose and direction to their lives” helped.

If, as Steiner said, we could simply deduce the principles for educating children from the contemplation of the human being in the making, we would need nothing more. However, we recognize that we are not yet capable of such a deduction. Steiner also recognized this, which is why in the course he gave to first-school teachers in Stuttgart, he gave precise instructions on what to teach, in parallel with knowledge of the human being, from which the Waldorf Curriculum was built. This contains, age by age, what human nature needs in order to realize “the dispositions of its future” and consequently contribute to the future evolution of humanity. So, dear teachers, don’t dismiss the so-called “content” as unimportant, especially now that it is absent from your school. Of course content is important! The contents of the Waldorf curriculum are not mere school information, they are the nourishment that each age needs to fully realize the demands of their growth.

A lot of work needs to be done on why and for what each aspect of the curriculum is being worked on at that precise moment in the students’ lives. And do it with gratitude, because without this curriculum we wouldn’t know how to respond appropriately to the developmental needs of each age group!

I ask you to look into these fundamental questions of your mission if you continue to meet to share experiences, knowledge and feelings.

With admiration, respect and affection

Leonor Malik

In fact, if our students could consciously express what they would like to receive from us teachers, they would certainly say that we should tell them about themselves: we want to know who we are, what we have in us that makes us unique, what we are capable of in order to know where we are going… In fact, the foundations of Waldorf pedagogy imply a deep knowledge of who we are and its purpose is to lead human beings to awaken to their spiritual entity in order to change the world!

But this is in line with the purpose of my contribution and the source that inspired my title: I’d like to talk to you about spring, because “that’s all I care about”!

Since March 13, my dear colleagues at the Jardim do Monte School have been working intensively with students and parents to implement the Distance Learning Plan, trying to maintain the connection they have built with children and families so that the primordial questions intrinsic to human nature can continue to be answered.

For my part, in privileged confinement, surrounded by the exuberance of spring, I got used to “being” in this space, in the absence of all those who turned it into a school.

Every day I walk through the rooms, empty of people, but still overflowing with the feelings that inhabited them, and in each one I glimpse the hands that touched the objects, the gazes that contemplated the drawings in the painting, which remain there, waiting for tomorrow, the flowers that need to be watered, the windows that need to be opened, the breeze that enters carelessly, runs through the space, ruffling the curtains, the life that waits for life to continue…

I smell the scents of spring and go out, remembering the children who used to run outside, embracing nature with shouts and laughter.

Green dresses all of space! Or rather, endless shades of this extraordinary color that speaks to us of the Earth, conveying myriad encounters between light and shadow!

I walk slowly up the slope, holding on to the rosemary that grows tall, careful not to step on the marigolds that are creeping through the flowering lavender. The paths that show us possible routes have almost disappeared under the euphoria of growth. The trees, at the height of their new shoots, intertwine their branches, some still in the dazzle of being dressed in fragile petals that the wind delicately makes fly, they create little shelters of shade and, suddenly, an orchid appears, and another, and another, looking at me almost amused, from the height of the perfection that makes them unique. I look at them closely: tiny insect-like shapes, symmetrically arranged, confident that the fascination of their colors will seduce any eye! And they’re right, looking at them up close is a temptation that guides us daily to the space they occupy, vertical in the delicacy of their size.

I arrive in the forest and the near-silence before suddenly fills with sounds that force me to look up: the songs of different birds are mixed with their flitting about in all directions. I recognize doves, goldfinches, blackbirds, red-breasted nuthatches, finches and, of course, flocks of sparrows proclaiming a carefree way of life that makes me smile… How easy it is to feel carefree, walking through greenery and chirping, comforted by the freshness of the air that sudden rays of sunlight penetrate, opening up small patches of sky that soon fade into the compact of leaves that shine, announcing the light that covers the forest’s shadow.

And suddenly everything opens up: I’ve reached the top, the King of the Mountain, so named by the children ever since they turned this place into a school. The trees generously give way to bushes, where the green, surrendered to the light, turns yellow and even white in the flowers that cover them and then, welcoming their warmth, reveals itself in the almost red-orange of the berries that make up the scenery.

I breathe, awake again to the space around me: the landscape opens up into green hills under the immensity of the sky populated by the whiteness of the clouds that sail aimlessly, invisibly blurring into new shapes that soon blur again… The swallows fly, scraping the top of the hill, because all they care about is the light! Carried along by their fluttering, I see the usual serenity of grazing cows on the hill in front of me, surrendered to the fullness of life that springs up around them. Further on, there are the horses that we usually see from school, sometimes engrossed in grazing, sometimes busy in irreverent races that fill us with joy… and once again, carefreeness…

I contemplate the immense sky that completes the existence of life on Earth and I am in it! I remember the question our late friend Georg Külewind asked us when he first worked with us: What is closest to me? We took it into the night and the next morning no one could answer it! The answer is simple: my ATTENTION! Much later, in a lecture by Steiner, I read that in everything I look at, I AM: “Man, as a soul-spiritual being, is really inside what he looks at. Awareness of what we look at comes about because our organism mirrors in it the reality we look at…. We are part of what we look at…” (Occult Reading and Occult Hearing, p. 18,19). That’s why the world needs our gaze to be revealed!

When I plunged my gaze into the splendor of spring, I experienced the reflection of that gaze in the rebirth of life in every part of that splendor, in the enchantment of its shapes, colors and movements. But in fact, at the very moment I looked, I penetrated the process behind the observed reality. Within this process, what is revealed to us is the beginning of perishing and not of life. This happened the moment the seed, fertilized by the earth, began a new cycle of life. The blossoming that surrounds us at this moment will soon perish, it is already the harbinger of the end of this cycle. The hatching of life takes place in the darkness of the seed, which takes shelter in the darkness of the earth, where the awakening of the future is contained for true Rebirth, true Life, thanks to the union between the spiritual element of the Sun and the astral Being of the Earth. The exteriority of spring can actually be the great illusion about life!

In The Gospel According to John, Steiner, in the 13th lecture (July 6, 1909), speaking of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers that have penetrated the human entity, which lead us to see physical reality as the only possible reality, and consequently to forget the spiritual origin of any and all physical phenomena, warns of the seriousness of the occurrence of this truth: the “deception regarding the external impressions of the sensory world… which we must recognize as illusion… and we must learn to see their true form behind the external aspects.”

In the context of this occurrence, physical death is the greatest illusion, the undoing of which required the emergence of the Christic impulse, i.e. the suffering of physical death by a spiritual and therefore innocent being. It was through his suffering that “the knowledge of the true form of death” was revealed, which is not perishing, but the restarting of Life in the spiritual world: “Just as a plant springs from a seed, so life springs from death, which is a seed of life and not a destructive element.”

Easter is always celebrated in spring. In addition to the temporal aspect of the year on Earth, there is another aspect that helps us to experience spring in its cosmic meaning. In order for Christ to come and redeem death, it had to have appeared on Earth, apparently contradicting the image of the Father who created Life. But, in fact, it was from the illusion into which the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces plunged humanity that the need to redeem this image emerged, in other words, to resurrect the principle of the Father: the spiritual origin of all physical phenomena.

“This was Christ’s mission on earth: to replace, through the event of Golgotha, the false figure of death with the true one,” Steiner tells us. “The new Sun of Life would never have risen if death had not come into the world and allowed itself to be defeated by Christ.” This is how we understand that the Father sent the Son to reveal his true nature, reawakening the Father’s principle in human memory. This is how Easter, celebrated in spring, acquires its cosmic significance. By immersing ourselves in its splendor, we plunge back into the Spirit of the Father, who underlies all the phenomena that sensory reality offers us.

The meaning of the meditation to be done morning and night, which Constanza Kaliks brought us a few years ago, takes on a very special significance: when I wake up to the world around me, I, being in everything I look at, am in the Father; when I fall asleep, removed from sensory reality, the Father is in me, watching over the continuation of life in my physical-etheric body.

I’ll end on a note that, for me, highlights this slow awakening in humanity’s consciousness to the existence of the Spirit of the Father, redeemed by the Son who now embodies the Being of the Earth: Earth Day was celebrated for the 50th time on April 22nd. Although little has been said about it, its significance has not passed in vain for those who cultivate this slow awakening throughout their lives, in the daily celebration of the Earth. This is the case of Jane Goodall, the woman who dedicated and still dedicates her life to LOOKING at chimpanzees, sharing her existence with these beings, turning it into a form of unconditional love for the Earth itself. I noticed that on the National Geographic Magazine channel on the evening of the 22nd there was a program about Jane Goodall’s work, as a way of marking Earth Day. So I had the privilege of seeing how a constant and dedicated gaze enabled this woman to perceive the divine in the eyes of these animal brothers and sisters (Steiner speaks of the animals closest to man as souls who, at the time of the moon’s separation, sought bodies too soon to incarnate, settling into forms that were too rigid) and to serve him so fully that today, through this service, she has brought hundreds of people together to work towards the same goal of preserving life on Earth, with real projects that have brought about beneficial and essential changes in many parts of the globe.

The times we are living in are times of redemption, of the Christification of memory, of a return to the Spirit of the Father who entrusted us with the Earth. It is through him that the future will be fulfilled and his will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. This week’s Soul Calendar bears witness to this:

… “The world is everywhere

Like a divine primordial image

Of whose truth (I) am a reflection.”

Leonor Malik

May 2020

The way in which the plant and animal world works to find appropriate responses to their needs, while at the same time cultivating dynamics of cooperation and inter-help, which not only allows them to share in healthy development but also protects the vital essence that allows them to exist, has become more consciously a source of study and learning for the entire school community, particularly for our students and teachers.

At a time when man’s life on earth is dominated by threats that stem precisely from a lack of respect for the natural world, our school’s pedagogical project, within the framework of Waldorf Pedagogy, which effectively aims to contribute to social transformation through the future performance of its students as citizens who can act with a free conscience in favor of Life and Humanity, has defined the following theme as the intention of its work for this school year: “The building function that the natural space of the school plays in the education of the human being, as responsible for the future of humanity.”

At the opening of the school year, we immediately presented our intention to the parents, creating a moment of silence and contemplation of the surrounding landscape. We dedicated the first in-house training session with all the staff to the start of this new dynamic, based on a holistic approach to the surrounding natural life that included exercises in phenomenological observation and artistic expression of manifestations of nature, according to the Goethean method. The individual experience of this practical work was then shared in order to integrate its conclusions into the Waldorf pedagogy’s vision of the human being and their needs at each stage of their development.

In order to deepen this work and allow it to inspire all of the school’s pedagogical and social practice, ways of acting in the school’s day-to-day life were outlined that would strengthen the links between the life of nature and human consciousness, leading it to an inner work of self-education to awaken new capacities and skills that will allow us to harmonize our way of being and being with a view to a globally sustainable future.

For this work, we are relying not only on the ability to observe all the “beings” of nature with respect and wonder, but also on the requirement that, in any area of knowledge, the teacher has developed the ability to approach it in an artistic way, in which beauty is the great motivation for learning until adolescence – skills that are inherent in the pedagogical training of the Waldorf teacher. But we also have the invaluable help of collaborators who carry out tasks directly linked to the life of nature (according to the principles of biodynamics) who will henceforth be the constant link between the course of life on earth and life at school, providing the latter with information about what is happening there, needs to be met, lessons to be learned, observations and discoveries to be made so that a solid bridge can be established between the two. As far as possible, teachers will have to integrate all of this into their work, allowing their students to reconnect not only by feeling, but also by thinking and acting to the great house we inhabit.

In addition to the existing activities which, throughout the year, follow their own rhythms in terms of working the land – preparing the soil, sowing, tending, harvesting, processing various products for food or therapeutic use – working with animals – from shearing wool to making yarn and its natural coloring – we’ve started collecting tree seeds for reforestation, marking out transition zones for observing and preserving native plants, drawing up field diaries that show the evolution of a plant, the life of a tree, the changes in a natural space over the seasons, in order to

understand how each species or ecosystem coexists and copes with the surrounding external conditions, thus establishing an emotional bond with the natural world. This diary will include various approaches: more descriptive, more literary, artistic illustrations, comparative studies with other forms of life on earth or other forms of adaptation to different external conditions, as well as the relationship between the location of their existence and human intervention over time. The various areas of the curriculum will be covered in these approaches, allowing for a lively relationship with knowledge, but above all a soulful and uplifting relationship with nature.

We hope to be able to progressively integrate parents into this cultivation of a more conscious relationship with nature, recognizing it as the essential and primordial link between human beings and Life.

Leonor Malik

How can we keep the Waldorf movement alive and fruitful today, in any context? Maintaining something means “preserving”, but the movement needs constant interaction with the world around it, which is constantly transforming and being transformed. What do we need to preserve and what do we need to transform in order to keep the anthroposophical impulse alive? The spiritual impulse must remain spiritual; it cannot change. Historical and cultural conditions, on the other hand, are no longer the same.

For all children

We see Rudolf Steiner’s creative gesture in 1919, when he was active from the social situation of the time. This gesture must be nurtured and preserved. And yet, if we only imitate the first Waldorf school, we would end up becoming pale copies. In adopting this creative gesture, we must, according to Rudolf Steiner, engage in a dialog with the current legality, the academic world and social reality.

The first Waldorf school was founded for children of workers; today we don’t necessarily find children of workers in Waldorf schools. We have to make sure that the improvement of the Waldorf School does not take place in a closed environment and that the spiritual impulse can become fertile for any child.

In our work with Waldorf Education in Argentina, we have three Achilles’ heels: in the cultural sphere, our internal language was not adapted to scientific discourse; in our relationship with the authorities, we had to continually ask for legal exceptions in order to maintain our educational freedom; in the social sphere, we focused for decades on a particular group – privileged and homogeneous – and consequently neglected other groups in the country. Basically, we didn’t follow the impulse of tripartition in the three spheres of society.

Adapting to the conditions

We tried to establish contacts with the authorities and look at teacher training programs with the intention of supplementing them with anthroposophical views so that they would be available to any teacher. For example, we don’t insist on not teaching Geometry to very young children because it’s too intellectual, but if the government demands that we do it, then we do it by adapting it to the child’s age.

Young teachers and teachers in training at our officially recognized institute are motivated to work from anthroposophy. They don’t find ideal situations but have to deal with the challenges they encounter and adapt their work to each situation. With this approach we hope to be able to break out of the niche of alternative education – because that is a niche of self-defense, where the treasures end up being protected from any contamination: a dangerous place of purity, perfection and stagnation.

When we give this treasure away as a gift, it will not be diluted, but will become the seed of cultural change and transformation. Studying and internalizing anthroposophy is not a goal but the foundation. The goal is in the future – and the future is somewhere in the world.

Alejandro Ranovsky is an elementary school teacher, researcher and trainer in secondary education and philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires. He is co-founder of the Perito Moreno Teacher Training Institute, where he also provides training.

In Anthroposophy Worldwide, 5/2019, translated by Leonor Malik

As the Jardim do Monte School is part of UNESCO’s Network of Portuguese Associated Schools, with which it collaborates annually in pedagogical meetings, it was invited to take part in this event as a unique testimony to the role of art in a school’s pedagogical project. Unique, in that all the other participants would testify to how art, especially music, played a therapeutic role in emergency situations – wars, natural disasters, etc – in various parts of the world.

With the Symphony 2030 project, the A. B. Foundation has launched the following challenge within the framework of UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship:

“Education is a source of fulfillment, discovery and transformation. By empowering children and young people with values and skills that enable them to live with others with respect and solidarity, education is a force for peace and sustainable development. All of this is protected within the vision of the 2030 Agenda, which contemplates the moral, social and humanistic purposes of education. Quality inclusive education needs to impart not only values, but also skills for the 21st century.”

This commitment between UNESCO and the A. B. Foundation aims to recognize the power of art in education to awaken the innate creativity that every human being has, protect the living cultural heritage and unite everyone around common values and aspirations that are at the heart of the 2030 Agenda.

We found the invitation surprising, since this school year our school, in continuation of the work started the previous year, is working very hard on inclusion measures, which include not only those established by the Inclusive School but also therapeutic measures within the Waldorf Pedagogy, which we are privileged to be able to offer our students.

Accompanied by a good visual support of our work, excited about the opportunity to present our pedagogy to a wide “non Waldorf” audience and knowing that I would be able to hear André Bocelli live singing the Ode to Joy, I flew to Paris!

Warmly welcomed by the organizing team, I still attended the General Conference, which focused mainly on Inclusion in Higher Education, and where Portugal was represented by António Nóvoa.

In the huge amphitheater where the session was to take place, I met the other participants – the Secretary General of the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, several music artists involved in peace work on behalf of UNESCO, as well as the artistic director of Voices of Haiti, which is one of the AB Foundation’s main projects – we chatted for a while and at the scheduled time André Bocelli arrived. He began by talking about music in his life, the role of his foundation and finally gave us Beethoven’s hymn, right there close to our hearts! It was thrilling!

The session also had some beautiful moments, when we heard what these people do with their music in areas of terror, where everything seems lost and yet, thanks to the human voice when it sings or the liberating power of music, how human beings can be rescued from their suffering and reconnected to the joy of living! One of these people, a Japanese violinist, after a few brief words, spoke to us through his violin, just as he does in the places he wants to rescue. It was magnificent!

For my part, I took the audience back to the school, looking at the beautiful images that bear witness to the children’s daily lives, the beauty of their work, the involvement of nature. I spoke about the transformative action of the world, which is the intention of the Waldorf School, and how the development of each child is nurtured so that each of them becomes a future agent of change; how art is present in every moment of their work, awakening the creative soul of the human being through it; how Waldorf pedagogy, as a salutogenic pedagogy, promotes inclusion, as the concept is understood today, through the respect that its practice devotes to the needs of each stage of development and through educational resources, particularly those of an artistic nature, which play a healing role in it, determining the construction of the Being.

It was very gratifying to feel and see the interest of the people who came to me in the end, with some of whom I was able to exchange warm words, full of confidence and recognition of the work that guides us in the name of the future.

I leave you with Steiner’s verse, with which I ended my participation (given by Maya Moussa, in the context of Art Therapy), a source of gratitude for the creative power of the human soul and which, I can say, was received with some emotion:

“At the beginning of time

The Spirit of Earth addressed the Spirit of Heaven

And begging him, he said:

I know how to speak to the Spirit of Man

But I beg you

May you grant me language

For which the Heart of the World

May you speak to the Heart of Man.

Then, full of kindness,

The Spirit of Heaven,

to the pleading Spirit of the Earth,

granted him Art.”

Leonor Malik

We’ve made available here a documentary that RTP made about other ways of educating, beyond the conventional, and it included our school. The third year was specially chosen to illustrate our way of educating through Waldorf Pedagogy. It’s worth a look! Click here or on the image below:

The view of education in the early years is divided into two main currents: one that believes that we should “fill” children with knowledge and try to shape them in the same way, so that they become intelligent little people and consequently successful adults. The other believes that childhood should be preserved – allowing children to enjoy being children and understanding that this is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

If you believe in the first current, you can go on with your life and read another article, I honestly don’t want to waste your time. But if you believe in the second current, or at least agree that it makes sense, perhaps what I have to say will be of interest to you.

Just like you, I was looking for the best educational option for my son from the time he was in nursery/kindergarten. It was important to me that the educators didn’t “break” his spirit, allowing him to remain the unique little boy that he is. Fortunately, after a great deal of research, I found a kindergarten that allowed children to enjoy this beautiful time of playing, inventing, imagining and – most importantly of all – learning through experience. Every corner there was a learning experience and music with old pots and other improvised objects stimulated the child’s imagination.

But now it was time for first grade, and like all parents, I felt fearful about the reality that was approaching and the fact that he and the other children are expected to behave in a certain way, with the long hours sitting in a classroom, having to learn through memorization and the stress of the assessment tests that are so unnecessary at this age.

Even against my instincts, I handed this little soul over to the public school system (or as I like to call the learning factory) and what I feared became reality before my eyes.

My little boy, who loved going to kindergarten, started to lose his confidence. He was trying to show the teacher how unique he is, but this was understood by the teacher as a need to “straighten him out” so that he would fit into the same “mold” as the other children. Well, it took me three months to realize that this wasn’t the environment I wanted my son to grow up in. That was 90 days too long!

At this point, I tried to find out more about Waldorf education and its worldwide movement (schools in more than 60 countries) to build a new way of educating. If I had to summarize in one sentence what this education is and what its goals are, I would say that this pedagogy seeks to help children become free human beings and to help children reveal their true identity and their unique spiritual nature.

This education believes that children respond better to learning through experience rather than memorization, and this vision has been proven to contribute to the education of young people who are more involved in life, with greater self-esteem and security and a greater capacity for learning, along with other qualities such as respect for nature and healthy nutrition.

WOW! This is exactly what I was looking for!

With more than 750 schools within the European Union alone and recognition from UNESCO as the pedagogical model capable of responding to the educational challenges of our time, especially in areas of great cultural differences, they’re probably doing something right – right?

I looked for a Waldorf school in the Lisbon area and ended up finding Escola Jardim do Monte, near Arruda dos Vinhos (it has a bus that picks up children in Lisbon and Loures). I can tell you wonderful things about this school, such as the simple, country atmosphere (it’s a farm), the dedicated and friendly staff, the fruit trees scattered around the school, small classes, healthy meals, and lots of songs… oh, the songs!

My son finished 1st grade and is about to enter 2nd grade. His self-esteem improved very quickly and looking back I feel I saved him from being just another person shaped by the traditional education system.

What kind of school do you want for your child?

In one way or another, I wish you a good school year!