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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…
NOVEMBER 25
White Ribbon Day
How civilized we are as a society to put aside a special day in the year to recognize the plight of women in regard to domestic and other violence. Each November 25 men of all ages and outlooks are encouraged to make a personal commitment to not only refrain from abusing women, but to protect them, where possible, from other men.
Hence I also make my pledge to honor these worthy goals One hundred thousand dollars reward! That generous sum was posted recently for information leading to the conviction of one or both men who brutally sexually assaulted a young woman in Bourke in western New South Wales. The deeply traumatized victim was, poignantly, the daughter of a police officer; a man whose chosen vocation was to protect the public from such evil. Could the girl’s filial’ status have, assisted in the rather unusual response of issuing the reward?
Of course, I have not the slightest criticism of the reward as such my only cavil is that this kind of government action is not a routine response to all such unsolved serious crimes.
And it is a fact, rewards do work: the two felons in the Bourke case could hardly have failed to boast of their deeds to others of their ilk. It would take only one of their avaricious associates to pick up the phone in view of waμci.ng away with a hundred grand. The fact that rewards are effective is borne out by their having been around in Australia since the early bushranger days. An enormous amount of resources are devoted to maintaining our police services, and rightly so. However, how much more effective could the long arm of the law be if augmented by the eyes and ears of the public; driven to the awakening of social conscience by the incentive of a large payout? In that case almost everyone becomes a signed-on deputy.
A scale of an automatic rewards system not only solves crimes, but saves money, the criminals the public catch provide the police more time to pursue other more difficult cases. Therefore, it should be legislated for all heinous crimes; especially those of a violent or sexual nature.
This would not only result in the capture and conviction of more criminals, but, due to any. witnesses being potential canaries, to use the Underbelly argot, there would be a disincentive to commit the crime in the first place.
Naturally, this is still the case of locking the stable door after the perpetrator has bolted. Even if convicted, the victims of their crimes still bear the scars, both physical and mental, often for the rest of their lives. How better then, if society can actually prevent many of these innocents from becoming victims in the first place. A good starting point would be with providing many if not most potential victims with, literally, a fighting chance to defend themselves against attack.
But first, a personal insight into the horror of violent abuse from sexual assault researcher, commentator, and most importantly, victim, Nina Funnell.
“I will never know what possesses a man to attack a girl from behind, holding a box cutter to her throat … I will also never know what goes through such a man’s head as he drags that girl from a path and into a park, before bashing and choking her. I do, however, know what it feels like to be that girl.”
In a sport unit on the ancient Korean martial art of tae kwon do in one high school, one in which all girls and boys in Year 10 participated, they used the services of a professional instructor; one who brought a combination of discipline (physical and mental), fighting skills, and vitally, a code of Buddhist ethics to the task. He impressed the not-so-impressionable 16-year-olds with the story of the provenance of the Buddhist martial arts – of their pacifist foundations. In ironic contrast, tae kwon do means striking with feet and fists!
Monks and mendicants on their endless pilgrimages were often attacked by bandits. So, they (the monks) created an art of self-defense where the attacker would be left incapacitated. However,
they would be basically uninjured. The monks, meanwhile, went on their merry way unharmed. As in all Asian body disciplines, an artistic approach is used to balance the physical – and so it should be in schooling – and so it was.
Hence, tae kwon do, as with most of its sister disciplines, like judo and karate, is both a martial and a movement art!
The students responded to the program with · enthusiasm, some continuing on to their various colored belts after its conclusion. Many were the visible benefits, like the overcoming of adolescent fear, and a new confidence in step and posture. This all begs the question: Why can’t the parents arrange for self-defense classes out of school? Well, most of them, for various reasons, probably wouldn’t – and some couldn’t. When the skills are taught at school to all students, boys and, especially, girls, individuals are not at the mercy of their parents’ indolence and/or ignorance in this crucial area.
A short course on ‘street defense’ was also given, as often alluded to by Nina Funnell, where she expertly describes the points of vulnerability of an attacker, like the groin and eyes.
However, street defense is not in the purest sense a Buddhist-inspired martial all, but useful when pressed into a doorway by some heavy-breathing oppressor. The students were particularly interested in how many ‘weapons’ they actually carried on their person on any normal day. Weapons which, when used exclusively for defense (an unbreakable canon of this program) could be amazingly effective – especially if you don’t happen to carry a cane-cutter’s machete everywhere you go!
Take the simple pen; poked hard into the right spot a Parker can disable an attacker long enough for an escape – or the heel of a shoe – or a key – or coins – or a rolled-up newspaper – or a comb. Even the humble credit card, when used deliberately and skillfully, can deliver a slashing wound.
And what a defensive weapon the voice is. Instruction was given on how to confront and address a leering and potentially dangerous – and cowardly – adversary. These people seem to actually feed their indigent egos on keening appeals. “Please don’t hurt me!” never seems to work. But a flashing-eyed stentorian “You – Go Away!” often does. Insults, however, are not recommended, as these can provoke the would-be assailant into a face-saving stand. Rather it should be more like a fierce headmistress authoritarian command. This worked admirably for a friend of mine.
This feisty young woman was assailed by a small group of hoodlums on a country road. Mind you, she was a student of speech, so her delivery, projection, and articulation – and volume! – were first rate.
Pacifist detractors may scorn my promoting of such combative self-defense precautions, but I take my lead from the response of the students, and their gratitude for the knowledge and skills acquired. These are skills we hope will never be used. However, the relative peace-of-mind attained, by both girls and boys, would sit beside them on empty train carriages late at night, or walk with them through dark, lonely streets – or even accompany them in their own kitchens when an abusive, inebriated husband arrives home.
Of course, the first law of self-defense was driven home time and again: if at all possible don’t rely on self at all – get help, wherever this may be, next door, a nearby house – or from a passing motorist. Whatever, when the help account is empty the strong recommendation is to fight for your life – because that is what is so often on the line, life itself as it probably was with Nina Fennell.
Oh, if Anita Cobby, Janine Balding, or many other victims of highly publicized rapine, battery and murder had not, in sheer terror, submitted to the · steel-edged blandishments of their abductors, but had delivered a few painful responses of their own – or even yelled for help, no matter what the threat, they may not have ended their beautiful young lives so tragically.
The skill-confidence edge that a high school course in self defense gives to students, both girls and boys, may one day deliver them from the ultimate degradation and indignity of the cowards who see other human beings as merely meat for their nefarious appetites. A more arcane benefit of a school policy of a universal teaching of self-defense is the knowledge in the assault fraternity that the pretty girl they see walking home alone at night might be one of the many who are equipped with a black belt in tae kwon do. This just might cause them to reconsider their intentions of lying-in wait for her.
After all, a modern education is more than merely about the three Rs; in terms of the above, it can also be about life and death.
My contribution to White Ribbon Day in particular, and the welfare of women in general, is to have introduced a unit of teaching to Australian high schools titled variously Child Care, Pediatrics or even Women’s Studies. The following is an overview of this vital unit, taught to all boys and all girls in Class 9, at around 15-years-of-age.
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The cynic would assert that one of the only reasons we care so well for our children is so that they will be better equipped to care for us in our old age. Naturally, the motive for bringing a 3-week middle lesson on Child Care to 15-year-olds has no such duplicity! In the spirit of the ‘specialist’ teacher in secondary education, I felt somewhat inadequate – too vulgar even! – to present such holy ideas and ideals as specific women’s needs, contraception, conception, gestation, birth and infant care to my class; so, I called in the expert.
Susan Whitehead always had a loving focus on small children. As a teenager she helped raise her two toddler brothers: she was a Sunday school teacher for years; and she worked in a child-care center in her late teens. Susan’s vocation became personalized when she had her own two children, at the relatively tender age of 19 and 21. Having raised them to school age, she became a kindergarten assistant at Glenaeon-Dalcross Steiner School; and eventually in 1972 began her own kindergarten in Lorien Novalis, where she reigned supreme for the next 14 years. Child Care expert indeed!
Her kindergarten was looked after by her own assistant for the one-and-a-half hours each day for the three weeks she taught my class. These were the usual rambunctious adolescents, who became increasingly more sensitized by this enlightening and humanizing lesson; a counter to the normal hardening social pressures assailing them at this time of life.
Child Care is programmed as a Social, not a Natural, Science due to its human emphasis. It is a middle rather than main lesson, as it focuses on ‘heart’ or feeling experiences.
These finer feelings are necessary to dominate those of the head when in the holy aura of babies and the very young. Intellectual concepts, whether issuing from a university-based outlook, or an over-diligent parent, do more damage to young children than almost any other cause – in our ‘developed’ society at least.
In the four middle lesson streams of Professions, Cultural, Service, and Industrial, Child Care in programmed in the first, that related to the ego in the four ‘bodies’ correlation. This is because, in the spirit of middle lesson education as primarily to introduce students to a wide range of vocations, a goal in the presentation of this unit is to give them a taste of the Child Care profession.
Although we soften concepts in teaching Child Care, we actually heighten self-consciousness – or ego. After all, we are in the presence of the greatest mystery in the universe, the conception, birth, and growth· of a human being. This is reinforced by programming the unit in the ‘Human’ strand of the three Professional streams, that calling on Spirit of the three fundamental aspects of Man – body, soul, and spirit.
With the young child, we are principally concerned with a spiritual being, one who gradually loses touch with the essence of the Godhead and becomes, as the years pass, an increasingly myopic denizen of Earth.
Social Science, in the 12-Subject Zodiac, is informed by Gemini, with its Sense of Ego – of Man. It is the Study of the human being per se; and in this case, the Study of the Child in an even more pure one. The consonant of Gemini is ‘H’, the first sound the babe emits as it expels it$ first breath.
So why Class 9? Well, this lesson could be profitably taught in any high school class, but not so in primary. Adolescents are unfolding the Astral, Soul or Sentient Body, and the world of reproduction, birth and infant nurture has a distinctly astral ambience. 14 to 21-year-olds are equipped with the necessary faculty of objective compassion to study this sacred content, something as yet undeveloped in primary children.
Class 9 is the Renaissance Year in Spiritual Science’s view of the human being’s evolution revisitation. One can see in the European art of the time how obsessed this culture was with mothers and babies; expressed so often, as they are, in the ubiquitous Madonna and Child depictions.
An exploration of this subject in earlier Medieval (most of the Northern Hemisphere had a Medieval period) art has the Madonna, or its Eastern equivalent, depicted as a queen of heaven rather than a mother – the child an aloof homunculus, a little adult! Rudolf Steiner informs us that Gabriel was elevated from Archangel to Archai status in 1510, at the height of the Renaissance. He became the Zeitgeist or cultural ‘Time Spirit’ for the period, pouring in his unique blend of beauty, gentleness, tone – and most important in our context, the realm of genetics and babies – to a soul-sclerotic world.
The Gabriel (or Astral) Gospel is that of St Luke; gospel of the hearth’ as The Master calls it. This is the archetypal baby tale, with the birth in a stable (the only gospel that tells it thus) with its shepherds, (astral) animals and angels. A reading of this heart-rich document is wonderful preparation for the lesson. This story brought an unequalled humanizing force to the Western soul, as this unit does for our teens.
Gabriel is the archangel of the Moon; it is this planetary force which holds regency over matters genetic. In his exposition of the Seven Life Processes, based on the functions of the etheric body in its relation to the seven planets, Rudolf Steiner ascribes Reproduction to the Moon.
The timeless symbol of the Moon as a cradle is evidence of this. The other six life processes, to give Moon-Reproduction its context, are: Mercury-Growth; Venus-Sustenance; Sun-Secretion; Mars-Warmth; Jupiter-Nutrition; Saturn-Respiration. These relate to the maintenance and quality of life for both the individual and collective humanity; however, the soul, or astral world has another and higher reality. Steiner calls this the Seven Cosmic Emotions. Again, these relate to the planets, and this time the Moon is that of Gratitude.
This is the cardinal emotion, or profound feeling, which should pervade all our associations with babies. We should give heartfelt thanks that divine worlds have seen fit to privilege us with the gift of one (or more) of their own. How often is this sadly not the case, where a new baby’s conception and arrival is met with resentment and rancor – ‘turned away from the inn’!
Destiny is the underlying moral tone of the lofty Steiner maxim “We should have reverence for the child’s past (incarnationally speaking), protection for its present, and optimism for its future.” The knowledge, wisdom and compassion the students receive in this lesson unit will hopefully carry forward into their adult lives; and in time to those of their own children.
“As light divides itself from darkness, so does womankind possess the gift to divide in man good intent from the thought of evil. Your noblest thoughts all belong to woman. Gather from them moral strength, which you must possess to sustain your near ones. Do not humiliate her, for therein you humiliate yourself; through this you shall lose the feeling of love, without which naught exists upon the earth. Bring reverence to your wife and she shall defend you. All of which you do to mother, to wife, to widow, or to another woman in sorrow – that shall you do also to the Spirit.” Nicholas Roerich, as taught by Issa (Jesus in the Himalayas).
Stephen Whitehead with son Mars, 1996. Stephen was one of the lucky 15-year-old students who participated in the 1982 three-week unit described, above; one which, hopefully, made him not only a better father, but a better man, especially where women were concerned.
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