Download the article: Clean-up Time and Gnomes
Occasionally when I visit kindergartens, I hear a particular song which accompanies clean-up time, and recently there was a lovely anecdote in Gateways which involved this same song about a "dusty gnome" who calls on us to clean our home. I would like to pass on an experience I had many years ago when a master teacher from a European Waldorf school came to Acorn Hill to teach a course. I no longer recall which teacher it was, nor how this topic arose.
In any case, this teacher told us, with some indignation, of a song she had heard in American Waldorf schools involving a dusty gnome. None of us knew the song, but she impressed upon us that a gnome cannot be dusty! She said it is against the very nature of the gnomes, and that if we refer to elemental beings, it is essential to be truthful as well as unsentimental. This made a deep impression on me at the time. Later, our faculty worked with Rudolf Steiner's lecture cycle, Man as Symphony of the Creative Word (now, I believe, published with a different title) in which he speaks in detail about the elemental beings and their connection with the kingdoms of nature. My understanding of the gnomes is that they possess the capacity for instant comprehension, without our human necessity of thinking through things to reach an understanding. They can also move swiftly through matter, like light. This is a very incomplete description of the gnome's nature, but does hint at the reason for our teacher's statement that a gnome could not be "dusty."
A few times I have suggested to teachers that if they wish to use the clean-up song about the gnome, they could change the word "dusty" to "busy;" this fits into the melody but might be more true to the nature of the gnome. This is something to consider. To this I would add a remark made by another master teacher, when her advice was asked about turning off the lights as a signal to begin clean-up. "Well," she said, "you can certainly do that. However, some day you will realize you don't need to have any signal at all. You will just clean up." Perhaps we do not always need a song for clean-up time, but can just go about our work with the children.
If you are interested in pursuing the topic of the elemental beings, their relationship to humans, and our responsibility to them, I recommend the lectures mentioned above as well as Marjorie Spock's book, Fairy Worlds and Workers. In these times of profound concern for the health of the Earth, our attention to, and respect for, the elemental beings is more important than ever.
Nancy Foster is a longtime Waldorf teacher from Acorn Hill Waldorf Kindergarten, an educator of teachers and parents and an author.