Download the article: From the Editor

This is the first issue of the Research Bulletin since the passing of David Mitchell, Co-Director of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education, colleague, mentor, friend, and a general inspiration to so many of us. David’s ardent wish was that the Bulletin be a place where practicing teachers as well as a wide circle of readers interested in Waldorf education would find content and inspiration in a language adequate to current standards of research and discourse. He did not want “Waldorf navel-gazing,” as he called it, nor a dry academic journal, but rather a bridge that would facilitate the movement of ideas back and forth between academia and the Waldorf classroom.

Download the article: In Memoriam, David Spears Mitchell

In what turned out to be a final contribution to his voluminous set of writings on Waldorf education, David Mitchell posed a fundamental question, followed by a characteristically bold reply. “What Stands Behind a Waldorf School?” he asked in an article that appeared in this journal just a year ago. To which his first response was: “I contend there is no such thing as a Waldorf school—there are only schools striving to become Waldorf schools.”

He went on to explain:
A true Waldorf school is always in the state of becoming. This involves human striving and self development during which teachers remain open, constantly observing, and focused on Waldorf ideals while being centered in the world.¹

In retrospect, we may say that this passage could just as well be a description not only of a Waldorf school but also of David himself, in that he devoted his life—with a will that was at once mighty and gentle—to a program of ceaseless becoming. With bounding energy and boundless enthusiasm, he shouldered one building project after another with a potent mixture of knowledge, courage, and dedication, while remaining “constantly observing and focused on Waldorf ideals.”

Download the article: The Three Castles and the Esoteric Life of the Teacher

We live in a time when human beings are called upon to wake up and develop a new consciousness. Before the fifteenth century, prior to the birth of the consciousness soul, one could live out of one’s natural development. There was still a feeling that beyond the physical world, spiritual beings were active and working with human beings. That has not been the case for the last five hundred years. More and more individuals have felt cut off and isolated from spiritual connections. In the nineteenth century Friedrich Nietzsche described it well with the expression “God is Dead.” Spiritual beings have not disappeared, but they no longer take an active interest in the human being’s physical development. Their work has been completed. Now, in the freedom we so value, we have the task of offering spiritual beings moral impulses that come out of our own efforts. Only then will they be interested. It is not destined that this will happen. It is up to us.

Download the article: Learning for Life - Learning from Life

Schools are always faced with new challenges. It is part of the teacher’s task to become aware of the spirit of the times and learn to understand it. Awareness can start with the most simple of events, possibly with the following daily occurrence: Young people enter the school and leave it again.

This is an interesting area of observation. We may experience their coming in and going out like a deep breath which complements every school day. It is a movement without which school could not happen, and it is a movement that continues throughout the school day, because breathing in and out is an underlying concept of teaching. We welcome the pupils in the morning and we say goodbye to them at the end of the day. Every lesson lives between these two—the beginning and the end—and between them unfolds a variety of learning processes. Here we already see a crucial feature of teaching: teaching is not only about the teaching of knowledge. “Correct” breathing implies another quality, a quality that echoes in our daily teaching routines. Even if we do not consciously shape this breathing process, it is nonetheless influenced by the activities we do with the pupils. If we carefully observe how the pupils enter and leave the school, we may be able to perceive whether breathing is nurtured at a particular school.

Download the article: The Philosophical Roots of Waldorf Education, Part One....The Revolution

Kicking away the ladder
This first rubric might be puzzling, but readers who are very well-schooled in Western intellectual history will recognize the allusion right away. It comes from the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, from the early twentieth century, which is— or at least seems to be—a severe, very abstract treatise on symbolic logic. At the end of this brief treatise comes an astonishing statement by Wittgenstein: “My propositions are elucidatory in this way: He who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, kick away the ladder after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.”

Download the article: The Concept of Learning in Waldorf Education

Introductory case study: A ninth grade farm trip
Thirty-five students are spending two weeks at an organic farm in northern Germany. This is a ninth grade, with almost equal numbers of boys and girls. The farm is responsible for providing these young people with accommodation, meals, and educational instruction. Every day there are tasks to be done in the following areas: work with animals (pigs and cows), the cheese dairy, vegetable garden and orchard, field work, and forestry.
In groups of five the students work in each of these areas in turn. In addition there are daily mini-lessons on various aspects of farming and forestry.

For the first three to five days the students struggle to embrace the challenges. Removed from their familiar surroundings, tied to a demanding, though not overly strenuous, work process, they feel it is all too much. Getting up early (at 6:30am), which is actually not much different from a normal school day, proves very laborious. Since many parents have supplied their children with large amounts of sweets and snacks, the healthy and nourishing meals provided by the farm at first go largely uneaten. Tasks that are simple but require some staying power—like digging a vegetable bed—lead many students, after a very short time, to imagine they are exhausted. The working atmosphere at this early stage is thus rather strained.

Download the article: Modeling Clay - for All Ages?

We continue this [artistic working in the early grades] by moving on to three- dimensional, plastic forms, using plasticine if it is available and whatever else we can get if it isn’t—even if it’s mud from the street, it doesn’t matter! The point is to develop the ability to see forms [Formanschauen] and feel forms [Formgefuehl = Form-Feeling]¹

Invigorating street mud
In the quote cited above, Rudolf Steiner points out that the main purpose of pedagogical modeling is for teachers to make a start and have their students activate their hands regularly in creating forms. The forming and form-sensing activity is paramount, regardless of the malleable material used—“even street mud if it is the only thing available, it doesn’t matter!” Elsewhere he calls street mud “a very good material” for this important purpose.²

Observation of young children playing for lengthy times shaping cool, wet mud or sand or cold snow shows us what a primal impulse sculptural activity is for human beings. Our hands want to reshape and transform the earth.

Plentiful earth materials like sand, dirt, and clay lend themselves naturally and readily to modeling activity outdoors and indoors. Hella Loewe, a long-time Waldorf class teacher, found that clay is a wonderfully malleable material and ideal for engaging and invigorating children in the early grades. Her boisterous class developed a passion for their weekly modeling lessons and was harmonized by them. Following each session, she saw “with pleasure how my children developed healthy, ruddy cheeks; even the delicate, pale ones appeared rosy and stimulated.”³

Download the article: Anything But Children's Play: What Play in School Means for Learning

A research project at the Rudolf Steiner School in Hamburg-Bergstedt, Germany, on what play in the school means for learning, as part of a larger research project with the theme “Independent [self-reliant] Learning,” was conducted under the supervision of the Academy for Developmental Mentoring and supported financially by Software AG-Stiftung. The participating teachers carried out individual projects that they hoped would encourage individual work and learning; they evaluated the results and incorporated them into their lessons. The author of this article conducted the following investigation into the effects of play on a child's ability to learn.

Eight-thirty in the morning, outside in the schoolyard
The class teacher of Grade Four, Knut Krodel, observes the boys in his class standing by the garden plot next to a side wing of the school building. There are two groups pelting each other with the bark mulch that is scattered in the garden. There is also quite a bit of mulch scattered all over the pavement next to the garden. Immediately the teacher hurries over to the boys. But before he can begin his admonition, one of the boys comes over to him to say: “Everything is all right. We have set up rules. Afterwards we will sweep it all up.” And in fact, a half hour later the bark mulch has disappeared from the pavement and is neatly distributed in the garden. For three days the children play this game, and on each day they clean up after the game.

A few weeks later, at the same time, in an abandoned corner behind the gym, the children of Class Four want to build a climbing structure. To begin they dig out the earth one meter deep in four locations. The first thirty centimeters is pretty easy to dig, but the rest is very difficult work. After that, four posts are cemented in place. Then, suddenly, they are no longer interested. The four posts satisfy them. The class teacher encourages them to keeping going with the project, but without success. They are already heading for another corner of the schoolyard.

Shouldn’t these children already be in the classroom? What do playing with mulch and building a climbing structure have to do with school?

Download the article: Higgs Field and a View of the Material World that Makes Sense

For centuries no concept has been as misunderstood or the subject of so much speculation and investigation as the concept of matter. In earlier times, people drew their views on the nature of matter from ancient religious texts and oral traditions, whether they were indigenous, Eastern, or Western in origin. In the West, the eclipse of these traditional views and their replacement by the dawning of the empirical scientific era began already at the time of the Ancient Greeks but gained momentum only with the advent of mechanics and the science of Galileo.

Further steps along this path came during the early nineteenth century with the ideas of John Dalton—father of the concept of the atom in the form many of us learned in high school—and during the century that followed with the work of a host of scientists and mathematicians. Finally, we arrive at our present century, during which the ideas of the Higgs Field and Boson have made their debut in the popular press. While many people are enamored with the idea of the “smallest particle” (sometimes referred to as “the God-particle”), others read these descriptions and dismiss them as nonsense.