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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
JUNE 1
International Children’s Day
International Children’s Day is somewhat sanguine – a little like those it wishes to acknowledge. It is variously celebrated in many different countries and on many different dates. “Children’s Day” was first recognized globally in October 1953. It was sponsored by the International Union for Child Welfare in that international epicenter of human rights, Geneva. As “Universal Children’s Day” it was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly on November 20, 1954. This is also the date, in 1956, when the UN adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child.
However, I like to acknowledge the first flicker of an initiative; the true genesis. This was six years earlier, on June 1, 1950; the date the “International Day for the Protection of Children” was born; or in its shorter nomenclature, “Children’s Day”.
I was a child then, a country boy just nine years old. Little did I know that forces were afoot to provide me with blanket protection against all that the wicked world could throw at me. Ah, if all the little ones that came after could have been so lucky. The true spiritual spark for this special day was ignited by the Women’s International Democratic Federation in its Paris Congress in 1949. Trust women to think of it!
Today, in one form or another, Children’s Day is happily celebrated in more than 100 countries. However, one wonders what kind of country or society would actively choose not to celebrate it – over 100 morally indigent nations apparently don’t think it necessary!
The initial impulse was to protect children against exploitation, especially in the workplace, where they were effectively slaves in many countries – and in some hell holes they still are.
Sadly, worldly justice cannot · be counted on to save the little ones. Thank the good gods that, as the law of karma assures us, even if it is not a just world, it is a just universe. Or as Jesus implored, “Suffer the little children to come unto me”.
The following observations are related rather to our own so called Western enlightened circumstances, where child protection is a given. However, we can, with the best possible intentions, create damage to growing bodies and minds by a mindless acceptance of sparkling new technology arriving under the guise of “teaching aids”, and the like.
On a recent visit to a high school, I was shown their new IT room, generously provided by the Federal Government’s Stimulus Plan. This complex cost millions and comprised over forty top-line optic-fiber-served computers, with even a special temperature-controlled room to power them.
Unhappily, the feeling in the room was decidedly sterile, with no personal or collective accoutrements to brighten up the severe all-plastic, predominantly grey learning space. So I was not surprised to be informed that the room is hardly used, the students barely coming in; and even then their use of this high-tech wonder being desultory at best. Perhaps they had their own personal equivalent in the form of laptops, I-pads, mobile phones, notepads – whatever!
I was also told that, due to the natural obsolescence of new technology, all the computers will have to be replaced in five years at best, at a cost of even more squillions. I was also informed that a condition: of departmental registration required was that this facility be provided whether the school – or the students – wanted it or not. Profligacy gone mad!
I then visited their primary school, where, to my delight, they had no computers at all! Apparently, the use of electronic teaching aids of most kinds for young children in this enlightened school is minimized, the emphasis being rather on human interaction.
This includes a teacher talking to the children, demonstrating, amusing, encouraging, energizing. As the old adage goes, an ordinary teacher informs, a good teacher enlightens, a great teacher inspires.
And these bright classrooms were certainly not grey; rather a kaleidoscopic riot of imagination and interest; mirroring the internal landscape of the lucky habitues. Apologists for computer use with small children cite this imagination factor, with no grounding in reality, alas.
Imagination is by definition the butterfly-like free-flow of thoughts and images, with no constraints whatever.
All processing on computers is restricted by the programming within. No matter how imaginative it appears, the child will always be restrained by this inherent limitation. Imagination is, above all, stimulated by artistic activities, life-filled images, and enriching ideas – even spontaneous humor!
The insidious and sinister advance of computers in education has now become a frontal assault, being employed as “educational tools” from kindergarten to senior high.
So, before the all-important psychological or educational ill-effects, let’s look at the physical.
The eyes of children, when working on a computer, are set at one focal length, about forty centimeters. Nothing could be worse for long-term (and often short-term) vision than this rigidity.
Nature provides opportunity for focus-change to apply continuously. A child in a given second, in natural circumstances, may change focus up to five times!
In time the lens of the eye will harden at this fixed focus: but that’s not all. The peripheral range over which a child’s eyes wander is now limited to a 30cni square screen, so the ocular muscles operate in short, quick, regulated movements only – mostly sideways – back and forth in mechanical repetition!
The child, for hours on end, never really looks up, down or around, as s/he normally would sans computer.
And what of posture? In a normal classroom, children perform diverse tasks on, around, under, and beside their room and their desks – and even outside. There is a great variety of muscular, hence circulatory, changes in this prepositional lifestyle.
Gross motor or ‘whole-body’ learning is of immense importance. In contrast, when sitting at a computer the whole-body locks into one C-curve position, with every joint frozen, robot-like; from toes, through ankles, knees, hips, spine, shoulders, neck.
Over a long period, this can bring on a plethora of chronic joint and circulation problems, perhaps not fully emerging till adulthood. When we perennially slow the circulation of a child, we enfeeble the heart – one can guess the outcome here!
Then there’s the radiation: the high-powered electronics of modem computers emit a wide ‘menu’ of potentially lethal rays.
These are constant within close proximity to the child’s upper body. How long before the horrors of throat, tongue, thyroid, breast and other cancers and immune-deficiency maladies appear? Over the years this is not merely a remote possibility, more a probability.
Then we have the hands: because of the mechanical pin-point focus required to operate a keyboard or mouse, the hands too lock into a parody of their former beauty. They become a pair of small, white spiders. White? See ‘circulation’ above.
On an aesthetic as well as physical level, the hands no longer engage in myriad gestures, like pointing, waving, grasping, scratching – caressing! Only the tips of the fingers are active, hence the spider analogy. In the worst sense the children become typists, along with its occupational hazard, RS.I. The typewriter was invented for blind people; only by default did it enter the mainstream – and today it has descended to the world of childhood. This desensitizing of the hands is perhaps the most de-humanizing of all – until we de-sensitize the actual teacher.
In a healthy classroom the ever-active teacher usually addresses the children from the front. This body-presentational – or theatrical – teaching includes three essential zones of contact; they are speech, face – especially the eyes – and hands.
These three-communication media create a potentially rich bonding between teacher and taught. When teaching children on computers, most of the instruction comes from behind, the teacher becomes a ghost!
Today the near-redundant pedagogue doesn’t really teach anymore; rather becomes a mere ‘program guide’ – the computer contains all the content; hence it dictates (meaning ironically ‘to speak’) the teaching.
Now to the psychological attack: children/students of all ages require, as earlier mentioned, imagination in their learning life. The consequence of a child who has a machine as a teacher will be an adult who can’t resolve – or even confront – a problem without a fixed program, whether computer-based or not. The mental processes become mechanical, the mechanized ‘ human’; the machine meanwhile becomes humanized! And what of this new – officially recognized – psychological disease, computer (or ‘screen’) addiction in children?
Psychiatrists now have to treat young people who, after tapping away on the computer for much of the school day, run straight to their P.C. or whatever at home and play computer games all afternoon. The parents can barely prise their mesmerized offspring off the machine to have dinner – then straight back into it for so-called ‘homework’ perhaps – then up at 5am. for more games or TV cartoons.
The last word should go to one far more qualified than your schoolteacher author to expound on this subject. Dame Susan Greenfield, eminent British neurologist, has elaborated a theory about the influence of IT on young brains. The Great Dame believes that, given the time children spend gazing at screens, small and large – reckoned to be from six to nine hours daily – their vulnerable minds are developing differently from those of previous generations; and negatively at that. Or to use her own words:
“The brain has plasticity; it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behavior has real consequences. ”
She sets out a catalogue of repercussions, including: the substitution of virtual experience for real encounters; the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry; a decline in linguistic and visual imagination; an atrophy of creativity; contracted, brutalized, text-messaging, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complex thinking. Her principal concern, however; is how computer games emphasize what she calls “process over content” – method over
meaning – in mental activity. As the world expert in her field, Susan Greenfield once famously stated, that:
“In spite of years of research by thousands of experts, we simply have no idea what consciousness is?”
As such, we interfere with it at our – or our children’s – peril. Have a happy – screen-free! – Children’s Day!
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