“…to their full potential”
Matriculation in a Steiner High School
Disclaimer: Opinions in this article on the state of Australian high schooling should be viewed in light of my own 1950s NSW secondary ‘education’; one in which I was singularly undistinguished, and from which, at a tender 16 years, I departed in disgrace.
All high schools promise to educate their students “to their full potential”. My first grievance with this is that it’s tautological! The second and more important, however, is that fact that the reality, alas, can never be achieved in our severely limited, elective-subject system, as designed to meet the demands of the HSC.
Even though as a teenager I had a wide horizon of interests, these barely included the five ‘elective’ subjects I was compelled to study for the Leaving Certificate, as the matriculation was then called. The only area in which I actually excelled was Drama; a tiny slice of the English course. I would have been a high-achiever in Art as well – had I been permitted to take it!
Unbelievable as it sounds today, I was sternly informed that this subject was only for girls. So I had to study maths instead; in which I was a sorry performer indeed. Even more astonishing from a modern perspective, only girls took Biology – the life sciences again being an area of personal interest – with boys confined to the stultifying world (in my teachers’ dead hands at least) of Physics and Chemistry.
So to spite my persecutors, after I left school I became a graphic artist – and later dramatist!
As I passed through the frowning school portals – sans Leaving Certificate – the only firm conviction I had about my future vocation was that I would never become a schoolteacher. So to spite myself this time, I later did just that; a high school art teacher in fact.
This is a Rudolf Steiner school, where I became one of the founding teachers of the first Steiner high school in Australia. (See details in my memoirs, A Creative Life.)
Sadly, the school chose (against my objections) to be an accomplice in the state’s elective exam system. This was in contradiction to the Steiner way, initiated in Stuttgart in the early 1920s, of a universal – all boys and all girls study all subjects – non-exam curriculum: Steiner’s inspired solution to the higher-education entry problem being the “13th year”.
Here students, after having been truly, universally educated through their five secondary years (14 to 18), could be – if they wished – tutored through the nominal 19th year for the matriculation. This has worked a treat both overseas and in Australia (at some Steiner schools only) for over eight decades.
To add insult to injury, to teach at the school it was insisted upon that even I had to obtain my Higher School Certificate! As a mature-age student, I galloped through this with ease in a short nine months.
So after some years of success, but disillusion with an exam curriculum, I initiated the first Steiner high school in Australia to implement The Master’s original non-exam, universal-curriculum reforms. This was Lorien Novalis School in rural Dural, north-west of Sydney.
A pressing incentive was my own two young teenage children, who became joyous traveling companions on this exciting journey. Both are today prospering in the world, even though neither availed themselves of the 13th year – hence neither have their HSC.
Indeed, both chose, in spite of promised support from their worried parent, a non-university path in life. More important even than wealth and qualifications (which neither have!), both are fine, talented, honorable human beings.
Details of the many intelligent and innovative graduation options provided by a – true – Steiner high school education can be found in my book, “A Steiner High School?”.
One of these is the Equivalent Higher School Certificate; another, and perhaps the most successful has been the Report Folder. This is opened, by the teacher, at the very start of the student’s 5-year odyssey. It contains a detailed statement on every unit taught; some 200 in all!
Each Report included a precis of the 3-week lesson content (all subject except Games/Sport in Steiner education are ideally taught in 3-week (approx..) units, rather than the time-wasting, discredited ‘period’ teaching).
Then there is a positive comment on the student’s achievements, and examples of work, like photos, poems, references, certificates, artwork, and so on. My own two children easily obtained quality employment in their early post-graduation years with their voluminous and highly-impressive Portfolios. Here there is so much more relevant information to assist a potential employer or tertiary assessment functionary than in a mere piece of paper with its short subject list and arcane numbering system.
However, the most important issue in the exam verses universal education is a moral one.
The first, exams, is predicated on competition, with its then cream of achievers rising to the top of the educational jug, the rest having to be satisfied with at best mediocrity, at worst abject failure. A system which actually factors in such inevitable parlous outcomes for our young people is not only unconscionable, but morally bankrupt.
In Steiner secondary education, however, everyone is a winner because the fundamental principle is co-operation; enhanced by the whole-person benefits of universality and liberalism. Only such an enlightened program can claim to educate its students “to their full potential”.
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