Not all Ukrainian children like going to school. Long hours of sitting at desks, packed classes in urban schools, noise, and lack of one-on-one attention from teachers can dampen a child’s ardent desire to acquire knowledge. Many years ago the German educator Rudolf Steiner decided to test a different approach to education by adjusting the teaching process to the specific features of juvenile development, not the other way around. Thus, if a six-year-old child can remain attentive only for 10 minutes, it is not necessary to make him sit quietly in class for 35 minutes.
In 1919 Steiner organized the first Waldorf (Steiner) School in Stuttgart, in which the system of instruction and education differed cardinally from the conventional German school. (The name “Waldorf” comes from the name of the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory, where Steiner set up his first school.) Over the next 80 years some 1,000 Waldorf schools were established throughout the world. There are many in Germany, the Netherlands, US, and Ukraine-in Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kyiv, and several other cities.
How does a Waldorf school differ from others? I recently had an opportunity to familiarize myself with the alternative educational system in Kyiv’s private Michael Waldorf School, which obtained its license from the Ministry of Education and Science three years ago. The school is actually an experiment in adapting this system to the Ukrainian secondary school system.
WHAT ARE HOLIDAYS FOR?
The compulsory set of school supplies for a first-grader attending the Waldorf School includes colored chalk (at this age the child’s hand is not ready to handle a pen, says the school’s founder), and several large copybooks. During the school year parents buy additional school supplies.
The first lesson of the day lasts two hours. This is an epochal class in that subjects like arithmetic, Ukrainian, and English are taught every day at the same time. During the lesson the children spend a maximum of 35 minutes at their desks. The rest of the time they play games designed to help them learn arithmetic and the flute.
Learning to play the flute in the first grade is a must because it develops an ear for music and has a beneficial effect on the respiratory organs. As a rule, the lesson ends with an informative story, fairy tale, biblical parable, etc.
School principal Serhii Shcherbyna estimates that during the two-hour lesson the children change their activities eight or nine times; they write, play, listen, and sing. After an intellectual, emotional, or volitional exertion comes time for a so-called rest; so-called because it is actually a change of activity, followed by another period of exertion, then another rest. It is akin to inhaling, then exhaling. This instructional method does not tire the children. If you’re standing by the door to the first grade at this school at around 2:00 p.m., you will hear the teacher say, “Now we will close our copybooks. We’ll continue tomorrow.” Then you hear the children say in unison “No!”
The Waldorf School in Kyiv may be described as a family one. Celebrations are an essential element of the learning process. Children never prepare for school celebrations on their own; their parents know about all school events and try to help as best they can. A lot of time is spent on excursions and hikes, especially in June (classes are held until mid-June, and the children don’t even want to go away on holidays).
ALL SUBJECTS ARE IMPORTANT
As a rule, ordinary schools have “important” subjects (especially in senior grades), like mathematics, physics, foreign languages, and “less important” ones, like singing, physical education, painting, and vocational training. In a Waldorf School all subjects are important, and the creative aspect (painting, knitting, sculpting, and music classes) are an important part of the curriculum. All subjects learned are united holistically.
Painting or sculpting helps develop children’s willpower that will later help them solve math and physics problems. Art is the best way to obtain results; an hour earlier a painting was simply a blank sheet, a clay figurine-a lump of clay, a piece of woolen cloth-a thread. All these things have been created by the child. This is much more important for developing self-awareness, creative thinking, and especially willpower than making the child sit obediently at his desk for 35 minutes, say the teachers at Kyiv’s Waldorf School. Incidentally, all the materials used in this school are made from natural raw materials.
HISTORY ACCORDING TO HERODOTUS
Children at the Waldorf School are not graded and they don’t use ordinary school textbooks. The children’s textbooks are their own copybooks, which contain everything that they write in them. Of course, they use exercise books and reference books, but the teachers conduct classes using primary sources. For example, pupils learn about ancient Scythia not from a chapter in a history textbook but from Herodotus’s famous History.
Like the teachers in his school, Shcherbyna did his apprenticeship in similar schools in Europe (Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands). He told The Day how ninth-graders study the 1919 German revolution. Every pupil receives a set of materials: photographs of people who were living in those days (e.g., a student, an officer in the Kaiser’s army, a bourgeois, a worker, etc.). In the form of a letter or a skit they must demonstrate everyone’s attitude to the revolution in Berlin. The lesson turns into a game. The children are thrilled, and this learning activity helps them uncover their acting or literary talent.
THE SOCIETY OF “EXECUTORS” IS DISAPPEARING
A few words are in order about what opponents of Waldorf schools say about this teaching system. Will children who have never experienced teachers’ rudeness, who have learned to speak their mind and judge phenomena by the results of their work adapt to our life? Fortunately, the modern market-based society is demanding increasingly fewer “executors,” people who want to have everything ready for them. On the contrary, any field of endeavor needs talented organizers, resourceful managers, creative administrators-so-called creators-people who will have to create something new and original. This need is very topical.
As a rule, Waldorf schools in Ukraine are financed by parents (in Germany the state provides 75 percent of funding for these schools). Our society generally believes that private schools are meant for children whose parents are rich, so if they are rich, they should pay for such schools. That couldn’t be further from the truth. About one-third of all Waldorf pupils come from families that pay according to a sliding scale-often to the detriment of school revenues-or pay a symbolic amount (e.g., families with many children).
CAUTION
Parents enroll their children in this school for a variety of reasons. Some want to help them uncover their talents; others want their children to receive more attention from teachers. Some parents say their children will be mistreated in ordinary schools.
However, all parents must realize that after this kind of experimental schooling, their children will find it difficult to adapt to an ordinary school (if they have to). Such cases have cropped up over the years. The principal of the Michael Waldorf School told The Day that a family moved to Dnipropetrovsk, and the parents had to find a similar school for their child. Another family moved and was forced to bring their child to his old school located in a different district.
No one knows yet how Waldorf graduates will feel in Ukrainian high schools, because the Kyiv-based school has existed for only eight years and no one has graduated yet. No matter, parents are the ones who have to be prepared for the prospect of turning out an unusual Waldorf-taught child. They have to weigh all the pros and cons before exposing their children to educational experiments like the Waldorf one instead of relying on good state-run schools.
