Time and Space for Diving Deeply

There are two great misconceptions I often come across when introducing families to Steiner’s indications for education and development. The first is that the emphasis on play in the early years is strictly about delaying academics. The second is that the purpose of main lesson blocks in Steiner/Waldorf education serve only as a vehicle for the lessons and information we wish to impart on our children.

But there is a much greater impulse and intention behind these two important facets of the Waldorf pedagogy.

Before we dive in though, let’s take a moment to describe some of the learning habits that as parents and educators we often discuss we’d like to see children develop. Certainly, an interest in the world and a love of learning is always at the top of the list. The ability to be self motivated, to drive one’s own interests out of a state of curiosity and excitement. To be attentive, and have the ability and the drive to stick with a task to the end.

With those habits in mind, think now of the typical mainstream kindergarten or grades class. The childrens’ days are divided into roughly 40-50 minute sections, where they are introduced to a concept, given a few minutes to experience the concept, and are then moved off to the next item on the schedule for the day. They have breaks in the day that are similarly scheduled around lessons, and then they go home. The next day, or maybe even a few days later depending on the scheduling of the class, they are then required to recall what ever surface experience they have had to add to it another surface experience, culminating in many lessons where interest was just scratched but children are expected to have taken it in deeply enough to carry them from grade to grade.

On a different. very generalized note, children’s entertainment and media are created in the same vein. Toys make noises and create different reactions at every touch; children’s entertainment on television and streaming devices consist of brightly coloured, fast moving shorts, twenty minutes in length at most, sometimes within that twenty minutes even shorter clips with the main characters going through different themes are the norm. Often after school or daycare, children are taking part in extracurricular activities, which shorten their ability to have a lingering supper, play freely with their toys for an uninterrupted amount of time, and shortens the time they have their parents’ full attention.

If our hope for our children includes all those ideals listed above, how can they be nurtured to build those traits if their entire life is divided into snippets?

In the light of our present deeper understanding of human psychology one may question how any such indefensible arrangement as the traditional succession of forty minute periods ever found its way into favor. Such a practice completely disregards human nature and the laws of learning. To expose a child or adult to an interest in some activity only to tear him away from it after a few minutes and plunge him into another is to discourage all natural interest in learning, [resulting in healthy human beings that are crippled by nervousness.]

Marjorie Spock – Teaching as a Lively Art

Taking a step away from this culture takes courage and a deeply held belief that a child’s experience in life and learning must reach a much deeper level than the 40 minute time slots allowed in popular culture.

In Steiner inspired settings, whether at home or in a classroom, providing children with the time to fully immerse themselves in tasks is a cornerstone of the entire structure of “education”.

“The heart of the Waldorf method is that education is an art-it must speak to the child’s experience. To educate the whole child, his heart and his will must be reached, as well as the mind.”

Rudolf Steiner

When we keep learning to the head, focusing strictly on academics and the acquisition of facts, moving from one topic to the next each day so that children really only have minutes of exploration, we rob children of the opportunity to sink deeply into the experience of what is being taught with their feelings and their hands. The structured and guided play activities that are meant to be play based education do not fulfill this need because they are still within the frame of specific outcomes created by the teacher.

If we want our children to have an interest in the world, they need the time and space to explore the world freely. If we want our children to be self motivated, they need the time and space to be excited about their discoveries and to dig deeper to discover more of the mystery themselves, without prompts from adults. If we want children who are attentive, we need to nurture their attention by creating opportunities for attentiveness in the world around them.

So how is this accomplished?

In the early years, between birth to seven, children are immersed in the work of playing freely and experiencing the world around them. Adults are pillars of behaviour that children will imitate, and so one of our tasks is to allow children to see us immersed in our own work. If we are flitting from one activity to the other, never stopping and seemingly never getting anything accomplished, that will be the behaviour children will imitate and take on as their own. But when we are WITH the children, gardening beside them while they play outside, working on handwork while they play inside, showing them how to be still and attentive and deeply immersed in a task, that is what they will imitate.

During the next phase, from seven to fourteen, children take in the world through their feeling and imagination as well as through active participation. As they are now in the grades, they will experience the deep learning afforded through blocks of learning during main lessons that span two to six weeks of one topic. These blocks are a balance of hands on activities, imaginative stories and art experiences, and ever so slowly the introduction to more abstract concepts as the years go on. Children spend their mornings immersed in rich lessons brought artistically through the teacher’s understanding of the children and their needs.

As the children reach secondary school years, they are still immersed in deep lessons provided by block learning, albeit with more lessons in one day. The larger rite of passage of these year is students are now invited to enter the world outside of school with blocks of co-operative education and extended group trips. This time away from “the every day” during the year allows teens the space to fully experience the work of adults and independence with the guidance of mentorship.

The depth of time and space offered to students of an education influenced by Steiner’s indications carries so much more behind it than play based early years and longer lessons. These are opportunities to model and nurture traits and skills in children that will support them as they grow into adulthood. Skills that will carry them not only intellectually, but emotionally, because they have been spared the constant nervous energy of the merry-go-round of go-go-go in life and learning.

Warmly,

Marina