TALE OF TWO DONKEYS
Humor as Therapy and as a Disciplinary Aid
So, why all the jokes in a book about discipline?
The control and pastoral care of children and teenagers is a very serious business: so it is ironic that the most effective single weapon in the teacher/parent arsenal is humor. A sharp and contemporary sense of humor is the teacher’s secret ingredient in his/her authority (or to use Rudolf Steiner’s term, loving authority) over primary children, and to-exert a positive influence over adolescents. It is difficult to be disrespectful to someone who makes you laugh, so it is important, according to The Doctor, to render the class, or even the single child, legless with mirth at least once every lesson. In fact, he even went so far as to say that “Laughter is the spiritual manifestation of man’s striving for liberation.” – and you can’t get much more important than that!
This is true pedagogic therapy. How effective if is to dampen an unruly situation in class with a quick-witted humorous riposte.
In fact, the first principle of comedy, since early Greek times, is the process of influencing a situation to move from “chaos into calm”. Tragedy, alas, is the opposite, from calm to chaos, as timeless plays like Antigone clearly illustrate. Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, holds the burlesque or ancient clown mask. I knew a teacher who took the educational advantages of humor so seriously that she would often wear a funny – clown-like – hat into the lesson, in the Patch Adams style, to both surprise and delight her pupils.
Of course, an overdose of merriment can slip into hysteria – back to chaos again! This is especially the case with girls, the word hysteria (as in hysterectomy) meaning “womb”, as it does.
Another timeless canon of comedy is that of the “banana skin”, where only the pompous and pretentious, like a top-hatted banker whom one regards as morally lower than oneself, slips on it.
Tragedy, meaning “he goat”, is again the opposite; it’s just not funny to see a blind person, for instance, slip on a banana skin!
This principle can underpin the actions of the adult who intentionally plays the fool to create a momentary change of status between him/herself and the class. This goal of being deliberately funny for children can also be seen in the plays we adults write and perform for them. I was just finishing my (I thought!) hilarious depiction of the Dollar Toller Bird, strutting around in my glossy-bossy green boots, banging my plywood tollgate, and singing my song, “I am a Dollar Toller Bird, and me you must pass …”.
A serious-faced kindergarten child in the front row looked up and said in a puzzled voice, “You’re funny Alan.”. If l was so funny, why wasn’t he laughing?!
Spontaneous laughter in children and teens facilitates the all-important “breathing out” of a balanced learning process. Or in more physiological terms, the expulsion of carbon build-up that low-impact respiration desk-bound activity so readily creates.
It is also vital to respond with good humor to the Children’s own, if at times naive, jocose attempts to brighten the learning atmosphere. Once my Class 6 was having a last, vital play rehearsal, when one boy made a mistake, creating “chaos”, as it were, for the whole cast. To their collective glares, he, standing alone on stage, merely shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”.
For some reason this sent us all into fits of laughter, his condemnation immediately erased. I guess it had something to do with the timing. Not so funny? – I guess you had to be there!
The response of a teacher to humor in the classroom must be of the good-hearted kind; children really don’t like cynicism or sarcasm. As for the dour, humorless teacher, Steiner warned of the damage people visit upon the young when they enter the classroom as if “sucking a lemon”. Yes, damage! A light-hearted disposition is not only one of the most effective disciplinary tools, but also a therapy for both body and soul.
The word humor is from the Greek root meaning liquid. There is no more delightful sound than the rippling, bubbling, babbling, tinkling music of children’s laughter. When they’re laughing with you – not at you, in derision at least – the last thought in their heads is to shatter the magic by being naughty.
The Greeks, masters in such matters, considered four basic body fluids, bile, blood, phlegm, and black bile, to govern the four temperaments, or “humors”, and the temperaments to govern the eponymous four kinds of humor. In the same order the four temperaments are: choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, and melancholic.
The predominant fluid force determines first the temperament, then by extension, the humor type – particular one’s sense of humor. We can recognize these, even in our children, by the way they laugh. The choleric bile has the full belly laugh; the sanguine blood giggles (the natural laughter of primary children), the eponymous phlegmatic can barely muster a chuckle, and the melancholic (meaning “black fire”) merely smiles, no matter how funny the joke! Theatrically the choleric loves slapstick, me sanguine farce, the phlegmatic dry, dead-pan wit (to counter their “wet” nature), and the melancholics, above all else, enjoy biting satire. It is good for a teacher to keep these eternal verities in mind when directing one’s humor therapy in the classroom.
Steiner was a consummate funny man himself, feeling levity to be such an important element with which to balance the gravity of spiritual things: an example being too often insert a short, funny segment in a eurythmy performance. He also placed a small face representing humor at the top of his mighty wooden statue, “The Representative of Man”. Being a St. John, Patron Saint of Writers, or The Word (“In the beginning was The Word …”) initiate, he loved playing with language, amusingly titling one lecture “The Feverish Pursuit of Health”!
At one distinguished gathering he passed a toddler, who stopped and looked quizzically up at the great man and said “You’ re a donkey!” Of course, the cheeky imp was ignored as the embarrassed mother bustled him off. That is until a short time later, when the two crossed paths again. “You’re two donkeys!” said the emboldened little boy. At this, Steiner laughed out loud, entranced not just by the funny, if uncomplimentary, image, but the inventiveness in doubling the insult. Marie Steiner, however, was not amused, “What a rude little boy” she sniffed.
Important Earthschooling Notes
Copyright Alan Whitehead & Earthschooling: No Part of this book, post, URL, or book excerpt may be shared with anyone who has not paid for these materials.
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.
END NOTE
Alan has presented dialogue in his writings in an expressive form, where he tries to capture the accent of the person he was with to give his writing more authenticity and to allow the reader to “be with him” in his experience. In no place in his writings is he using expressive language to make fun of or demean the speaker. So, as a person with a linguistics and anthropology degree I find this enriching and informative to me as the reader. Thus, we have made the decision to leave all expressive writing in its original form.
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