CfA's Online Op. Ed.

It’s 4 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon in late January. Snow has started to fall and the wind picks up as the 7th grade class from Northeast Woodland Chartered Public School in Conway, NH crosses the frozen ponds of Carter Notch.

Waldorf education for adolescents can meet the outer and inner, spoken and unspoken needs of young people. And yet, like every generation of teenagers, Waldorf education needs reimagining.

An Introduction to Emergency Pedagogy by Franka Henn (May 5, 2023) How can we use pedagogy to deal with the consequences of war and trauma? At the Rudolf Steiner House on May 9–10, there will be a double lecture and seminar with Berndt Ruf. Ruf is well known as a doctor in anthroposophical emergency and trauma education which he advocates for with the initiative ‹Emergency Education Without Borders›. In two seminars on Tuesday evening from 6 pm, he will be speaking about trauma caused by war, and fleeing from it, and then about the possibilities offered by emergency pedagogy. The following morning from 10 a.m., the seminar will focus on dealing with traumatised children and young people. Open to everyone, the events are primarily intended as an introduction to people working with traumatised children and youth. The event is organised by MenschMusik Hamburg and Gesundheit Aktiv Nord. – Reprinted from the Das Goetheanum Newsletter

The last few years have brought unprecedented challenges to schools, especially to our teachers and administrators. Layered over long-standing issues of low pay, long hours, helicopter parents, shared governance (and confusion over roles and authority), schools have had to navigate a third year of covid while enhancing their DEI activities and working with new financial constraints, to name but a few issues.

This is the season of light. Which is a paradoxical way to describe––at least here in the northern hemisphere––the darkest time of the year. So, what does it mean to refer to this time as the season of light? To use an example you all will know: you enter a dark room, light a match or click the flashlight button on your phone, and suddenly the room is illuminated. The light overcomes, in other words, the darkness.

Siegfried Finser It was a matter of synchronicity. Just as I happened to rediscover tubes of my Grumbacher water paint, brushes, and paper, the New York Times ran a story about “NFTs” (non-fungible tokens). I rarely buy newspapers, but Singsong, my canary, needed fresh paper for lining the bottom of his cage. I knew the cheapest paper was in value packs and other advertisements, but Singsong is an aristocrat and deserves something better, so I splurged on a copy of the New York Times. And there it was! A prominent artist had painted several thousand simple pictures and offered them online for a fixed price. He gave his ardent collectors the choice of having the real painting or the virtual representation, known as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token). To his surprise and mine, many buyers preferred the virtual version and purchased them at the same price as the physical version. After all, the virtual one required no physical space for hanging, special storage to maintain its quality, or concern about ownership and security. These, it turns out, are some of the many benefits of NFTs and the underlying record-keeping system, called blockchain technology.  The most well-known blockchain for such transactions is...

During the first 100 years of the international Waldorf movement, we had much to be proud of––a century of striving to meet the true physical, soul, and spiritual needs of individuals and the planet. And now, here we are, post 100-year anniversary, approaching post-Covid-19, ready to look ahead to prepare for the future, rather than look back to celebrate the past.

Genevieve Dagobert, a graduate of the Waldorf Program at Antioch University New England, describes her voyage to a school in the foothills of India's Velliangiri Mountains, where children learn seven days a week, four months at a time, in a parent-free, multi-age sibling atmosphere

Just a few years ago, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the very first Waldorf school in the world in September of 1919 as well as the birth of the worldwide Waldorf movement inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. Today, there are more than 1,090 Waldorf / Steiner schools in 64 countries, and 1,857 Waldorf kindergartens in more than 70 countries, plus Waldorf associations and teacher-training centers for Waldorf educators and Waldorf teachers around the world.

During the first 100 years of the international Waldorf movement, we had much to be proud of––a century of striving to meet the true physical, soul, and spiritual needs of individuals and the planet. And now, here we are, post 100-year anniversary, approaching post-Covid-19, ready to look ahead to prepare for the future, rather than look back to celebrate the past.