Just Believe!

  So how does man fit in to the system that is Nature? What is his role in that system?  How do we educate for that role?  These are all deeply philosophical questions and are difficult to address without some form of postulation. I begin by seeing education as being concerned with the whole being . Whatever the whole being is, it is something we are born with, nature gave it to us so if we know what the whole being is, then educating that whole being has to be part of nature.   So what is this whole being? I intend to address 3 aspects of humanity - mind, energy and body, and initially not address the question of r eligion or spirituality (as I develop consideration of the mind that will become clearer). Let us begin first by addressing the question of the body . In recent times in the West we have begun to see deterioration in the condition of the human body. Whilst science has made huge advances in medicine the human body has become subject to more and more di...

1 Your kids are not your mates Something I'm starting to hear with worrying frequency within the primary school setting is "my daughter's my best friend". Often, this rings alarm bells. Your kids aren't your mates. You're their parent, and your responsibility is to provide them with guidance and boundaries, not to drag them into your own disputes. Your 8-year-old doesn't need to know about your bitter feud with his friend's mother, or which dad you've got the  hots for at the school gate. In the years to come he or she may realise that some of  their own problems (social alienation, in its various forms, being a prime example) might have something to do with exposure to that sort of talk at an early age. Continue at your own risk. 2 Data levels aren't everything Here's one to think about for the start of next term. At the autumn parents' evening my agenda tends to look something like this: "How is settling in...

        I do not know how many of you know about the works of this brilliant person that wrote so many wonderful things in the 20s.       The lecture I am referring to today was written in 1922 and it is a great example of in-depth analysis of understanding Antroposophy or Spiritual Science, that is the science that can help the teacher recognise in single concrete instances the connection between body, soul and spirit in the child. I will offer you some interesting ideas taken from his lecture.        The teacher who lets the anthroposophic knowledge of man work upon his thought and feeling, comes, as we have seen, to a kind of artistic vision of the growing child, who is to him as individual, as full of mystery and enigma, as is every great work of art. But this is not all. Out of such a vision of the child proceeds also the manner in which the lesson is handled, the actu...

A pupil learns a thing far better if, in his soul, he can apply it in different directions. You will be able to say to him: “Look, there you have made an English sentence and a Romanian sentence; in the English sentence, if the first person is referred to, we can hardly ever miss out the ‘I;’ in a Romanian sentence the ‘I’ is there already inside the verb.”  You do not need to go a step further; in fact it is not at all wise to go further, but it is a good thing just to touch on this difference, so that the pupil comes to have a certain feeling for it; then from this feeling there emanates a living aptitude to understand other things in grammar, and I beg you to absorb this fact and to think it over very deeply, namely, that it is possible, in a stimulating, living lesson, to develop during the lesson the faculty necessary for teaching. The fact is, if you have only touched, for instance, on a thing, and have not enlarged on...

          Let us discuss in our own language some subject or other, anything which the child can think over and feel with us. And then let him try, in terms of his mastery of the language at this stage, freely to recount in the foreign language what we have discussed. In this way we shall find out how far the child who has come to us from some other class has mastered the foreign language.    You cannot study a foreign language in school without really practising grammar — ordinary grammar as well as syntax. It is especially necessary that children after the age of twelve are made fully conscious of the value of grammar. But here, too, you can proceed with extreme economy. You form conclusions in everyday life and then pass on to “judgement” and “concept,” you cannot of course give the child this logical teaching, but it will underlie your teaching of grammar. You will be wise to...

In the past, messages from the school to the home relied heavily upon ‘pupil post.’ But this was often frustrating to both schools and parents as letters rarely arrived home in one piece, with many not showing up at all. This method of communication provided a natural barrier to developing any sort of relationship between the school and the home, while the alternative face-to-face meetings were a logistical nightmare to arrange, and as such, were only held to mark important events. In recent years, technology has played an increasingly key role in bridging the gap. Parents need to be able to both receive information from and pass information to the school in a range of ways convenient to their circumstances. Schools have been harnessing the power of technology to open up a simple, effective channel of communication. Through various technology-enabled initiatives, contact can be established with parents, irrespective of location – so parents living apart, or even pare...