September/October 2002
Feature Articles
Holistic Health Q & A
by John DeCosmo, D.O.
Of genes and gene testing and evaluation.
What is... the Organic Movement?
by Robert Roman
Part two of a three-part article detailing
the author's personal experiences and the growth of the organic movement.
UnCommon Sense!
by David Findlay
War - Iraq - Should we remove Saddam
Hussein?
Articles on the theme "The Learning Process"
A Basket Weaver
by Lou Galgano
An example of how one artist learns
and teaches what he knows.
Getting "It"
by Lewis Fishman
Using "it" as an inspiration
to learn.
Learning Without Harm
by Barbara Bedingfiled
How intellectualism has negatively
influenced our education of the young - and how to counter this.
Music and Movement, and Learning
by Bob and Claire Franki
How the combination of music with movement
from age zero not only facilitates musicianship but increases coordination
and learning.
September 12
by Janet Kato
A moment when the learning process
became the healing process
Learning From Everything
by Patrick Plaskett
Learning from life - from both the
"good" and the "bad."
Learning From Other Cultures
by Dr. Jean Houston
The birth of the Planetary Human
The Relationship Learning Process
by Bob Murray, Ph.D.
How our problems stem from failed relationships;
how to make good ones.
Learning Without Harm
by Barbara Bedingfield
This is the day of intellectualism. Its insidious effects can be seen in an inactive population that is overweight, lacks practical life skills, has little or no interest in the arts, amuses itself with hours of television, and is concerned mainly with "getting ahead" in life with all of the material goods displayed through the advertising industry. The effects of this intellectualism have spread into the education of our children.
Today nursery schools and kindergartens attract families by advertising early academics and computers for young children. Parents, anxious to have their children get a head start, embrace this idea without realizing its harmful effects: children are led too soon out of their dreamlike consciousness that unites them with the world. Growth forces that should be left alone to build the body are diverted to the head and thus are depleted of their life-giving and formative capacities. Children become precocious and too awakened, often seeming more like little adults than robust youngsters. They lack a capacity to play out of themselves through fantasy, looking toward others for diversion. They are inactive, having too little opportunity for healthy active play. They are unable to form internal images, an essential activity for brain development, because they have received too many ready-made images from media.
A good kindergarten honors the early developmental stage of childhood and nurtures children with kindness, with stories, with songs (sung by the teacher and not a recording), with verses and rhythm and with a large measure of patience. Children play actively and out of fantasy, taking on the roles of grownups in their lives. They participate in little domestic tasks such as baking, setting the table and cleaning up. Their natural dreamlike stage of consciousness that makes them feel at one with the world is protected and they are allowed to remain happily and healthily in this natural state of childhood until nature's timetable says it is time to wake up. Children allowed to experience the full measure of childhood through a play kindergarten are more likely to be rounded, rosy-cheeked, active, full of fantasy and able to sing in naturally high sweet voices.
"A study done in Germany compared about 1000 children who had played in kindergarten with the same number who had worked on academic subjects. By the fourth grade those who had played excelled significantly over those who had done academics. Their advantage was in physical development, emotional/social development and in intellectual development. The results were so conclusive that the Germans who had been moving towards academics in kindergarten, switched back to play." (Joan Almon, Chair of Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America)
It is equally important that a child's grade school experience is not based on one-sided intellectualism. Children should be immersed in song, movement, poetry, and art as part of their everyday lessons. They should have recess as a time of breathing out and relaxing from concentrated work. All children are artists and, when they are given the proper tools with which to work and the teacher's guidance, they can draw, they can paint, they can model, they can sing and they can play instruments. These are not frills, and study after study has been done to show that experiencing the arts enhances cognitive learning.
Children need stories. Stories from the great myths, legends, and biographies of the world nourish the feeling-life of a child and build an inner moral strength in a way far superior to moralizing. Children are hungry for real stories and instead they are given a poor diet of pallid stories, TV sitcoms, thrilling adventure movies, violent computer and video games, and cartoons. Teachers trained in the Waldorf methods have taken the art of storytelling into prison schools for teenagers and have witnessed the transformation of these hardened juveniles as they gradually allowed themselves to hear these remarkable stories of the ages. In Waldorf schools all lessons geography, botany, zoology, math, writing, history are brought through imaginative story by the teacher because it is the life of feeling-thinking, not just the intellect, that brings learning alive for children.
Children love to work with their hands and a good education ensures that they can learn the practical skills of life. First-graders can knit! Second-graders can crochet! Third-graders can build a playhouse! Fourth-graders can carve wood! Handwork is given a place of prominence in the Waldorf curriculum because these skills learned in handwork are readily transferred to academics starting and finishing a project, working with care, taking pride in one's work.
The wrong education can be harmful. It can snuff out the zeal for learning and cause burnout with an overload of intellectual work. It can turn children into machines that operate by rote instead of thinking. It can produce human beings who are one-sided in dry intellect, in runaway emotions, or in brute physicality. It can inhibit the flourishing of a child's natural artistic gifts. It can cause physical illness and even suicide.
A truly healthy education is one that educates the head, the heart and the hands.
Barbara Bedingfield is a founder of School of the Suncoast, a developing Waldorf school in Clearwater FL that is part of the worldwide Waldorf School Movement first begun in 1919. (727) 532-0696
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