Research Bulletin

By Arthur Auer

Download the article: Reading in Waldorf Schools, Part III: Beginning in Sound and Form

Children, and Lessons a Musical or Sculptural Flowforms
Warm flow, movement, and rhythmic circulation are the means by which the human spirit builds and sculpts an embryo and a growing child, washing out unneeded hardening elements. Teachers join in this awe-inspiring work of nature and spirit by meeting a child—who is made up of a much higher percentage of water than an adult—with moving, breathing lessons that embody musical flow and that shape sculptural forms. In almost all of his major lectures on education, Rudolf Steiner speaks of lively new
processes by which to teach writing and reading.1 Each time Steiner approaches the subject, he does so undogmatically and from a new angle. For me, a key to all his suggestions about method is the way in which movement magically congeals into visible form. Both of these elements, movement and form, are accompanied by sound. Steiner’s demonstration to teachers in Switzerland illuminates these three principles using two different approaches:

We must give [the child] an opportunity to give vent to this innate artistic drive by, for example, letting him run a curve (see diagram). When we draw the child’s attention to the fact that his legs have run such a curve on the floor, we lift up his will activity into a semiconscious feeling. The next step would be to ask the child to draw the curve he had run into the air, using his arm and hand. Now another form could be run on the floor, again to be “written” into the air. Thus the form that in the first instance was made by the entire body of the running child is subsequently reproduced merely by the use of his hand. The teacher asking the child to pronounce words beginning with the letter “L”could follow this. (The German word for run, laufen, begins with “L”.) Gradually, under his or her guidance, the child will find the link between the shape he has run and drawn, and the sound of the appropriate letter “L.”

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By Douglas Gerwin and David Mitchell

Download the article: Standing Out without Standing Alone: Profile of Waldorf School Graduates

Rudolf Steiner did not live to celebrate the first Waldorf school students who, by the early 1930s, had received the full twelve years of Waldorf elementary and high school education, even though several high school classes had graduated from the original Stuttgart school by the time of his death in 1925. He could only imagine how the pupils of the very first grade in 1919 would fare and what they would make of their radically new education.

Since the advent of Waldorf high school education on this continent in the early 1940s, Waldorf teachers and parents have carried the question: What happens to these Waldorf school graduates after they leave high school? To date, most answers to this question have been anecdotal, at least in reference to the North American Waldorf high school movement as a whole, which in this decade has grown to a total of 37 schools. Now, a newly published survey, spanning more than 60 years of Waldorf graduates, provides a detailed picture of where Waldorf students go and what they do._¹

The survey describes what Waldorf school graduates most love to study, which professions they select, what they think of their Waldorf education, and what they value as adults. The survey–– the first of its kind in North America––was conducted by the Research Institute for Waldorf Education and parallels a recent study of German and Swiss Waldorf graduates. The North American survey details the college life, job life, and personal life of Waldorf school graduates, starting with the first Waldorf school senior class in 1943 and culminating with the class of 2005.

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By Stephen Sagarin

Download the article: From the Editor

As I write, we are enjoying April snows and flooded streams here in New England; nothing balmy about it. An inner balminess blows through many of the articles in this issue of the Bulletin, however, and that will suffice for now. Reading through the contents this season, it is striking how our writers refresh our engagement with Waldorf education. We present here a spring cleaning, if you will, or at least some directions for how to find one. Enjoy the balm.

Arthur Auer, continuing his series on teaching reading, expands our understanding of Steiner’s work, calling our attention to the various modes—too easily smothered by simply drawing pictures for each letter—by which Steiner pictured the teaching of writing and reading. Running and playing in the mud (or clay) do as well as beautiful beeswax crayon drawings to reinvigorate children as they learn the dull conventions by which we adults communicate.

In a report on her work as a speech artist and teacher, Helen Lubin details the ways in which speech supports, informs, and revives our work in Waldorf schools from early years through high school and into teacher education. In particular, she notes objective and subjective elements present in all speech, poles between which individuals mediate experience of the world and communication occurs.
A centerpiece of this issue is a summary report of the Research Institute’s Survey of Waldorf Graduates by Douglas Gerwin and David Mitchell. The authors’ clear presentation of significant data on Waldorf school graduates serves to dust away cobwebs of false belief—for instance, that Waldorf students don’t “do” science—and adds color to a picture of who it is we have been teaching all these years.

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By David Mitchell and Douglas Gerwin

Download the article: Report from the Co-Directors

The Survey of Waldorf Graduates, Phase II, has consumed our attention this year. We gave a PowerPoint presentation to the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) Board of Trustees and the AWSNA Delegates. We have been invited to make presentations at several Waldorf schools in North America. We will hold seminars at this summer’s AWSNA Teachers’ Conference at the Highland Hall Waldorf School in California, and at a gathering of world leaders in Waldorf education next autumn at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. You may download electronic copies of the Survey, the Abstract of the Survey, and the PowerPoint presentation from either of the Research Institute’s web sites, www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org or www.waldorflibrary.org. You may purchase a hard copy of the full survey from AWSNA Publications by e-mailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We are enthusiastic about our continued collaboration with research centers in Germany, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand. One joint project will examine the effects of high-stakes testing on children. The project’s immediate goals are to provide Waldorf school communities, and a wider audience, with an up-to-date, comprehensive summary of the known effects on children of testing and to build a clear picture of educational assessment that does not use testing.

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"Teaching Sensible Science" Heads West by Michael D'Aleo
In October 2007 a new cycle of the “Teaching Sensible Science” course––the first on the West Coast––began at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California. Present were 18 experienced class teachers from British Columbia, California, Colorado, Oregon, and the state of Washington. This group represents the largest enrollment to date in the program, now in its third cycle.

News From the Online Waldorf Library by Marianne Alsop

Profits and Paradigms, Morality and Medicine by Philip Incao M.D.
We often hear and read today about moral lapses in medical practice and in medical research. In “Corporate Greed Infects Medicine,” Richard Fried states, “It never fails to amaze me how cheaply doctors can be bought.”_¹ In recent years several books have detailed the corruption of medical research by the lure of profits. In his book Science in the Private Interest, Sheldon Krimsky shows us that the prime driver of scientific research today is the hope of commercial gain, and not the pursuit of “pure science” as it once was. Academic and research institutions are no longer in a protected ivory tower but are increasingly influenced by the profit motive of our economy. _²
In his 1920 lecture, “Hygiene as a Social Issue,” Rudolf Steiner warned: “If the profit motive continues to prevail in our economic sphere, then the economic will become master over the spiritual [sphere]. This must not happen!”_³ Sadly, this is precisely what is happening, and not only in medicine and scientific research, but increasingly in education, too, which presents a serious challenge to Waldorf schools. Education and medicine belong to the spiritual sphere of the social organism and, in order to function in a health-giving way, they must remain as free as possible from political and economic influences.

Visions of Peace: Joining Tibet and Hawai‘i in Social Exchange by Michael Mancini
Waldorf education is based on the principle that education should make possible healthy changes in society, often referred to as “social renewal.” What does social renewal look like today? Surely it is different than it was at the time of the founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919. As well, it may differ depending on our location on the planet, influenced by our cultural surroundings. I continue to discover that the specific needs for social renewal change and evolve, based as they are on our sense of culture and place. In Hawai‘i, where I live, the needs for social change are evident because a reviving indigenous people and culture are surrounded by a wave of modern technological advancements.

" A Still Small Voice": Three Tools for Teaching Morality by Patrice Maynard
Stories full of powerful and beautiful images build a child’s imagination. Artistic practice in digesting experiences of the world builds a child’s idealism with inspiration and a yearning to make the world more beautiful. Moral adults, who work on inner strength and self-development, give children these activities of self-discipline and self development to emulate. As they emulate they build their intuition and sense the rightness and beauty of life on earth. These three—stories, artistic practice, and self-discipline—make a gallant start in understanding the teaching of morality to children. These can build the moral capacity of children more deeply and effectively than any lesson on moral living or cartoon about “Goofus.” They speak to a child’s developing awareness of his or her own “still small voice” and engage a child’s yearnings to be good.

From Virtue to Love by Arthur Zajonc
Around 1300 the Catholic Church faced a moral dilemma. One of its most pious members, Margarete Porete, had written a book in which she described her dramatic conversion from a parishioner in the “Little Church” of obedience to the “Great Church” of Love. As a consequence of learning to “love Love,” she wrote: “Virtues, I take leave of you for evermore. Now my heart will be freer and more at  peace than it has been.” In other words, Porete sought to live the maxim of Augustine, “Love, and do what you will.” The conventional moral teachings and rules of the Church were no longer binding on her. She was a moral universe unto herself through her direct and loving relationship to God. Her every action would be right and true not because it was endorsed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church but because it flowed directly from her union with Love.

By Rudolf Steiner

Download the article: Religious and Moral Education in the Light of Spiritual Science

The following is excerpted from a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner at the Hague on November 4, 1922. It
appears for the first time in English translation as part of a collection entitled Education, Teaching, and the
Practical Life (available from AWSNA Publications).

An artistic element, I might call it a mood of piety toward the human essence, belongs in education, in teaching. This is particularly the case if we direct our gaze at the religious and moral education we want to bestow on the child. And here anthroposophical spiritual science shows us that especially when it comes to the religious and moral element, there is something in the human time-body that is of great significance for the life span on earth of the entire human being. If one can recognize the small child’s mood as that of an essentially imitative being imitating the outer world, and if we can put ourselves in this mood, the only way to characterize it is this—the child is completely open to the outer world; the child gets lost in the outer world. Just as the eye loses itself in the outer world of color, the outer world of light, so too the child loses itself in the outer world. The inner world dawns in the child only gradually. Specific mental representations emerge little by little out of dreams, which still completely live and weave in the
outer world.

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By Trevor Mepham

Download the article: The Riddle of Teacher Authority: Its Role and Significance in Waldorf Education

The following excerpts examine the relationship of Steiner’s concept of teacher authority to the modern
world. The second half of the paper (not included here) examines Steiner’s work and the work of others on teacher authority specifically in Waldorf school classrooms.

The diverse nature and rapid pace of change in many areas over the last eighty years technological, geopolitical, social, and economic, to name some—are key elements in a discussion of teacher authority. The dynamics of change raise questions concerning the continuing relevance of the concept of authority itself.

While Waldorf education continues to identify the concept of teacher authority as a guiding principle in the education of the child between the ages of 7 and 14,1 the term is rarely included in writing in the wider educational community. There are several possible reasons for this: the waning of formal position and status in society over the last hundred years; the growth of progressive, liberal ideas in social and economic policy; the emergence of concepts of non-hierarchical forms of management and organization, the development of political and legal frameworks for the progressive realization of universal human rights, and respect for the dignity of the individual. Against this mosaic of developments, the term “authority” has tended to be associated, rightly or wrongly, with outmoded concepts of power, position, and patronage.

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By Christopher Clouder

Download the article: Transformative Education and the Right to an Inviolate Childhood

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s earliest memory reaches back to when he was three years old. He was brought into a room by his governess and asked, in the presence of some guests, to say his evening prayers. Kneeling before the icon he began, “Dear Mother! God, all my hope is in Thee—give me shelter under Thy wing.” This prayer he never forgot. He taught it to his own children and repeated it throughout his life._¹
This event, from the early decades of the nineteenth century, is far removed from the experience of most children of today. A deep-seated attitude of reverence, nurtured and developed in the early years, is for nearly all the world’s children a thing of the past. The tensions and turbulence of our times leave little space for such attitudes to be fostered. Hence the growing debates about spiritual values in education and the raising of children have become important aspects of current concern.

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By Magda Lissau

Download the article: Can Moral Principles Be Taught?

This article is extracted and abbreviated from a chapter in Octave, a new book by Magda Lissau published in November 2007 by AWSNA Publications.

Pedagogy will bear fruit especially when the virtues of courage and moderation will be seen in the right light. These virtues need to be considered individually by educating children in such a way that they will retreat gradually from creating sorrows for themselves._¹

Rudolf Steiner speaks several times of virtues related to morality, virtues that were already recognized in antiquity, for instance by Plato._² Steiner describes these virtues and connects them with human physiology, for the constitution of the physical body itself has been endowed with the potential of serving human beings in developing morality. One aspect of helping parents and teachers to help children
develop a moral outlook is to understand how the human constitution is related to these virtues, because the physical body in its essence supports the essentially human, which, by its nature, is inherently moral.

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Octave is available as an ebook on this website.

Download the article: The Moral Reasoning of High School Seniors from Diverse Educational Settings

Introduction
The impetus for my topic arose from personal observations made while my two daughters attended the Haleakala Waldorf School on Maui, Hawaii. During that time I was employed as a school psychologist and had daily contact with students from a number of diverse educational settings. The differences I observed between my daughters (and their Waldorf school classmates) and students in other settings puzzled and intrigued me.

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Download the article: Human Development and Moral Force: An Anthropology of Moral Education

This article was extracted from Moralische Erziehung by Ernst-Michael Kranich,
translated by Jon McAlice and published in Waldorf Journal Project #10.

Among the notes and fragments of the German poet Novalis we find the following remark: “Rightly understood, morality is the actual realm of life for a human being.”_¹ What we call morality begins when we look beyond our narrow, personal wishes and interests; when we free ourselves of the bias of egotism; and when other persons, other beings, become important to us and we feel the urge to share their experiences. When empathy and caring move us to dedicate our lives to others, to place ourselves at the service of our fellow human beings and our surroundings, then the realm in which we live can be called moral. It is easy to imagine that life in this realm can grow ever stronger and more powerful. As this happens, we move from having a childlike dependency on our environment to taking on a co-creative role. We can experience how our actions flow from a living center, our own “I” or ego._² Through this living center we are able to gain insight into the nature of things, to see the spiritual in outer manifestations. In this living center, this ego, we experience the inspirations of our artistic creativity. We can sense that human nature reaches its highest form of expression when we connect ourselves with our surroundings through moral forces and impulses. When this occurs, the illusion of separation disappears. The moral realm is related, too, to the element of warmth, which, with its invigorating force, penetrates the surface and reaches deep within us.

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Download: From the Editor

In this issue of the Research Bulletin we take moral education as its theme. The centerpiece of the issue is Ernst-Michael Kranich’s article on moral development, describing how the very growth and development of our physical bodies make possible our simultaneous growth and development as moral beings. Implications for teachers abound. An analogy occurred to me as I read Kranich’s work over and over, part of the editorial process: Plants show in their physical forms how they are affected by the world around them. Climate, soil, wind, and water all contribute to their health and growth or disease and stunted development. We can “read” in the form of a plant its life in the world. Children are not so easy. Outwardly, their forms do not change much whether or not we nourish them soul-spiritually. They are resilient. They maintain their ten fingers and ten toes. But, given the details of Kranich’s work, we must believe that internally they are plant-like, that what we do to or for them affects them deeply, even if the results remain invisible.

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Articles in this issue include:

Report from the Co-Directors by David Mitchell and Douglas Gerwin
From the Editor by Stephen Keith Sagarin
Human Development and Moral Force: An Anthropology of Moral Education by Ernst-Michael Kranich
The Moral Reasoning of High School Seniors from Diverse Educational Settings by Christine Hether
Can Moral Principles Be Taught? by Magda Lissau
Transformative Education and the Right to an Inviolate Childhood by Christopher Clouder
The Riddle of Teacher Authority:Its Role and Significance in Waldorf Education by Trevor Mepham
Religious and Moral Education in the Light of Spiritual Science by Rudolf Steiner
Work of the Research Fellows:
Profits and Paradigms, Morality and Medicine —Philip Incao
Visions of Peace: Joining Tibet and Hawai‘i in Social Exchange —Michael Mancini
“A Still Small Voice”: Three Tools for Teaching Morality —Patrice Maynard
Blinking, Feeling, and Willing —Eugene Schwartz
From Virtue to Love —Arthur Zajonc
Reports from Current Projects of the Research Institute:
“Teaching Sensible Science” Heads West—Michael D’Aleo
News from the Online Waldorf Library—Marianne Alsop

Autumn 2007, Vol. 13 #1: Report from the Co-Directors

Download: Report from the Co-Directors

Several new publications and a second sortie into the archives of the Rudolf Steiner Library have highlighted the activities of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education (RIWE) during the first part of this academic year. We can report the printing of Education, Teaching, and the Practical Life, one of Rudolf Steiner’s last remaining collections of lectures on education not previously translated into English.
Selections from this volume have appeared in the last three issues of the Research Bulletin, including this one. Most of these lectures were given in the early 1920s as new Waldorf schools were springing up in Germany, Holland, and other parts of the world. Although there is some overlap in content from one lecture to another, it is a delight to sense the joy and warmth with which Steiner spoke about the potential of Waldorf education in its early years. The book, which provides many examples and clear observations concerning childhood, is available from AWSNA Publications.

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The Power of Grammar: A Working Weekend by Anne Greer
Waldorf high school teachers share a deeply held belief that our task is to awaken students to life-long questions: How do I know what I know? How can I be a conscious participant in my own experience?
We ask such questions and, with our students, struggle toward answers through language. How then do we come to understand language and its role in what we know and how we know what we know? What is the meta-language with which we can talk about language?

Teaching Sensible Science by Michael D'Aleo
The flow of the day in the Teaching Sensible Science course is central to helping teachers experience, understand, and embody the experience and concepts that they will later present to the students. The morning sessions, led by Michael D’Aleo, investigate the nature of our experience through observational exercises, discussions, and presentations. These are aimed at helping each teacher consciously awaken to his/her own inner activities of perception and conceptualization. It isn’t new thoughts that are being developed but the activity of thinking that is being encouraged.

Report on the Online Waldorf Library by Marianne Alsop

Learning, Arts, and the Brain The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition by Patrice Maynard
A recent report from the Dana Foundation, whose mission focuses on sharing knowledge about and sponsoring research on the brain, immunology, and arts education, offers the results of three years of research in seven areas concerning education in the arts and brain development. These areas of research include: how arts training influences cognition; music as it influences mathematical cognition and cognitive systems; dance and the development of the brain and of memory; and training in the arts and reading skills.

Waldorf Around the World by James Pewtherer
A meeting of the Hague Circle1 took place recently at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, within the context of the biennial “Pedagogical Section Working Days.” These large meetings provide an opportunity to delve more deeply into topics of importance for the worldwide Waldorf school movement, which now officially includes more than 1,000 schools.2 This time we took up these three topics:
• Criteria for Waldorf Schools;
• Surveys of Waldorf Graduates in Germany, Switzerland, and North America; and
• An Introduction to Portfolios and Projects in Assessing Student Learning.

The Intercultural Waldorf School of Mannheim, Germany by David Mitchell
In an age of globalization, in which the world’s population is growing and distances are shrinking, teachers have to find fresh ways to bring together highly disparate cultures. For instance, children from very diverse religious and cultural backgrounds can be brought together to study under the same roof, allowing children to experience––and come to respect-––a great array of cultural traditions and festivals. A new inner city Waldorf school in Mannheim, Germany, is attempting to form such a community. In the changing face of modern Europe, Mannheim is a city that has a total area of more than 90 square miles and a population of 324,000; of this total, twenty percent are immigrants attracted by the job market and fourteen percent are on welfare. This combination creates many social challenges.

The Health and Heartiness of Waldorf Graduates by Douglas Gerwin
Do Waldorf graduates enjoy better health as they age, compared to others in their peer group?

A recently published survey of graduates aged 21 to 82 from Waldorf schools across Germany concludes that former Waldorf students suffer fewer incidents of chronic ailments such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart conditions including angina pectoris, and “arthrosis” or a general hardening of the organism. According to the survey, Waldorf graduates report a significantly lower number of these ailments even when compared to the top socio-economic stratum of German society, in which these conditions are generally less prevalent.

Download the article: Disturbances in the Child’s Relationship to Inner and Outer Pictures of Reality

Two pediatricians from a German municipal health office studied the capacity for pictorial perception among two thousand preschool children ages five and six prior to school entrance. In order to determine the children’s cognitive maturity and their pictorial perception and reproduction abilities in particular, they administered the so-called draw-a-person test, in which the children were to draw pictures of a person. The drawings were later evaluated by the pediatric medical doctors according to specific criteria, e.g. head-torso relationship, number of fingers on each hand, dynamic or static quality of the drawing, depiction of eyes and noses, and so forth. In this manner, it was possible to distinguish high-performing from low-performing children in each of the tested areas. The children’s scores were then compared to their average daily consumption of television and (in row C, below) to the daily extent of their “passive smoking,” that is, the number of cigarettes smoked by their mothers and fathers in the children’s presence.

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Keywords: children's drawings, media, television, video games

Download the article: Cultivating Humanity against a “Monoculture of the Mind”

Dry, rigorous, and, in the end, philosophical, Bo Dahlin’s study on Waldorf education in Sweden nonetheless provides a ringing endorsement for the power of Waldorf schools to humanize students, for the possibilities of Waldorf teacher education programs to meet state requirements, and for the necessity to preserve and support holistic and other non-mainstream pedagogies in the face of a developing global, technocratic “monoculture.”

Between 2002 and 2005, Dahlin, Professor of Education at Karlstad University, and colleagues conducted a study to compare Waldorf schools, including students, teachers, and parents, with Swedish “municipal” (public) schools in three areas: pupils’ knowledge attainment; relationship of the schools to society; and teacher training.

The study, released in preliminary reports on results for each of six questions, was based on questionnaires and interviews with students, parents, and teachers. These findings were supplemented with classroom and school observations; in addition, some data were generated by including test questions and other assessments in questionnaires.

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Keywords: results of Waldorf education, Waldorf graduates, Waldorf teacher training, teacher education

Download the article: What Have We Learned?

Comparing Studies of German, Swiss, and North American Waldorf School Graduates

Waldorf education is a riddle of modern civilization. In a world in which accomplishment is thought to be quantifiable, where the only outcomes that matter are those that can be measured, this school movement has struggled to find its guidance in the immeasurable. This may be changing. A series of studies published in various countries appears to offer quantifiable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of Waldorf education.

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Download the article: The Art of Education as Emergency Aid

How Waldorf Education Enables the Souls of Traumatized Children to Breathe Again

A team of six educators, an anthroposophical doctor, and a helper traveled in the name of the Friends of Waldorf Education (Freunde der Erziehungskunst Rudolf Steiners) to Beirut in October 2007 to help traumatized children. It was the first deployment of a new branch of our work—pedagogical emergency aid—with the task of helping as many children as possible to stabilize themselves following trauma. Barbara Schiller led the team.

It was strange to sit in Berlin, Stuttgart, or Munich and try to imagine the emotional consequences for children and young people who survived the war between Israel and Lebanon last summer. Naturally, there are also traumatized children in Germany. But what would it be like in Beirut? All of us––eight persons who are normally active in various Waldorf education and curative settings––thought about this in the weeks leading up to our departure. First Step Together Association (FISTA), an organization that represents various curative institutions in Lebanon and which has been in contact with the Friends of Waldorf Education for many years, had requested our help. The idea behind our project was that through artistic therapeutic work with the children we could gain pedagogical therapeutic insight into how we could help heal the emotional wounds of these children and youngsters. Our work was to be spread among four locations—in the curative Rudolf Steiner School, in a curative kindergarten, in a kindergarten and meeting place for children in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, and in a small school in the south of Beirut.

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Download the article: Thinking and the Consciousness of the Young Child

Recently while observing young children in a child care situation, I watched one little boy around the age of two who was totally immersed in moving blocks into various positions. He stayed absorbed in his activity without looking up or saying a word. Was he thinking? Something was happening within this child that I wanted to understand in order to adjust the environment around him so that nothing would disrupt his concentrated activity.

My own study of the subject of thinking set me on a journey: I re-read essential works on the first three years, looked at developmental research, and observed children whenever the opportunity arose. Here I would like to share some aspects of my work in progress that relate to coming to terms with thinking as an adult, the development of thinking as a process during the first three years, and events occurring in the third year of life.

To put it bluntly, thinking is not a favorite activity of our time. While we are surrounded by an endless variety of products based on sophisticated human thought and created by a fairly small group of highly trained engineers and designers, the actual process of thinking for oneself is experienced as stressful by many contemporaries.
Students often find it strenuous to pursue a train of thought related to a question, and teachers find it difficult to engage students in processes that require concentrated thinking activity.

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Download the article: Rhythm and Learning

We might be inclined to define rhythmical phenomena as periodically oscillatory processes. A moment’s thought, though, proves this statement to be incomplete. Taking the natural pattern of the course of the sun, for example, we could surely define it as a periodical feature that brings us day and night, but at the same time it is characterized by its fixed itinerary in the sky. Its position is predictable and no major deflection from physical laws is ever likely to occur. By the same token, many processes in our technical world imply a periodicity—such as clocks and turn signals on cars—but, again, they follow a standard sequence that can be correlated to physical laws. These periodical processes are fixed; no mutation is possible. And rightly so. If a clock were not accurate, it would be of little value, and if the sun were to cease following its fixed course, we would quickly recognize that the world was “out of joint.”

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Download the article: Assessment without High-Stakes Testing

Protecting Childhood and the Purpose of School

In the final analysis, educational reform is the task of a school’s circle of educators, not of a government’s house of legislators. Teachers need to be charged with the task of studying their students, deepening their expertise, and developing appropriate methodology as a result. They can then set appropriate educational policies based on freedom and cultural pluralism. The task of the government is not to guarantee equal schooling for everyone; rather it is to guarantee equal access to the kinds of education that parents believe right for their children.

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Download the article: From the Editor
Owen Barfield pointed out that we need at least two words to say what we mean by “heart,” one for the muscular organ in our chests and one for courage, sympathy, and other qualities associated with feelings in and around the muscular organ. In earlier times these meanings were tightly bound. To speak of one was to speak of the other; material and immaterial meanings were virtually identical; quantity and quality were inseparable. Our present world favors material meanings and quantity over immaterial meanings and quality. Qualities are believed to be secondary characteristics, illusions, subjective perceptions, or “mere” metaphors. Several of the articles in this issue of the Research Bulletin address this imbalance of meaning around the word “heart,” implicitly and explicitly.

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Download the article: Report from the Co-Directors
Since the publication of the last Bulletin, the leitmotif for the work the Research Institute for Waldorf Education has been “reaching out.” Late autumn and Easter saw trips and presentations in Germany and Switzerland. In Stuttgart we met and had fruitful conversations with the Board of the Pädagogische Forschungsstelle—the European equivalent of the Research Institute. We also visited Kassel and met with leaders in the phenomenological scientific work at the teacher training seminar there. We presented the Survey of Waldorf Graduates, Phase II at the world leadership gathering of the Pedagogical Section and a gave a course on “Will-Developed Intelligence” at the eighth World Teachers’ Conference, both events at the Goetheanum.

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