Our Children
Our guides toward becoming truly
humanBy LOUISE DEFOREST
We have to push ourselves
into activity. We must work consciously with spiritual forces and work on our
own inner development with great resolve. When I was a new teacher, my mentor
said that an early childhood teacher has to be willing and able to sacrifice
one’s adult needs. In our adult lives, we crave stimulation, spontaneity,
change, novelty, and we digest our experiences through talking; but these are
not good things for our classroom. The rock we live on in our classrooms is
rhythm and routine. These are cornerstones of each day. A good day in the
classroom is one in which time ceases to exist and yet somehow, miraculously, we
have snack at a reasonable time, circle and story flow, and the children are
ready to go home when the parents arrive. We are quiet in the classroom, always
doing tasks, and hopefully our every word and gesture is imbued with
intentionality.
But we need to go deeper than this. We need to overcome
adult attributes that we associate with modern-day adults—such as being
critical, wanting to define and categorize, and wanting to fix. None of these
will serve us in working with the children. We must free our thinking if we are
to respond to the call of the future. With our thinking we can enter into the
realm of ideas and ideals, and it is within our powers to be able to find the
essential within these realms. Thinking is an active meditation, allowing us to
be instigators of metamorphosis. If we can commit our thinking and feeling to
something outside of ourselves, this will bring forth life-giving forces into
our work. The more we can remove ourselves from sympathy and antipathy, the more
easily can empathy arise in us. We need to develop what Henning Kohler describes
as active tolerance.
When we have answers, it is an egotistical act that
does not enter the reality of the other. Every child has a reason for
incarnating as he has. If there is a hindrance, we can offer help and support
but the child may or may not choose to change it. Active tolerance means that we
leave others free to be themselves in all their individual expressions. It means
we observe and think about them with gentle and unprejudiced interest and that
we strive to understand them enough so that we can honor their way of being and
behaving without judging them by our own standards or forcing them to meet our
expectations.
Far too often we are reactive to life, including the
children in our groups. Even after the first day of school, we can hear teachers
saying, “Oh, my goodness” about a child, a group, or a situation. Even if we
think we have an ideal class, we are defining. It is important how we think
about our children; they are particularly dependent upon our regards for them.
The child’s social development is aided by the fact that she lives into the soul
life of the adults around her. Through ourselves we enable the connection
between child and self. We are the self that the child is eventually able to
find within herself.
In
Life Between Death and Rebirth, Rudolf Steiner
said, “For something to happen in the spiritual world, it is essential that
there be absolute calmness of soul. The quieter we are, the more can happen
through us in the spiritual world—that is what is creative in the spiritual
world.” In calmness of soul we can learn how to respond rather than react. We
can look at a child with an inner quiet that allows us to go from seeing to
beholding. Perhaps a silly child is not being silly to annoy us or to disturb
the class; perhaps his senses are so overloaded that he can do nothing else. A
child who does not imitate may have been awakened too early into intellect and
is paralyzed by living in a very chilly sheath. This child should not be sent
out of the group but embraced in a warm soul environment. Most of the difficult
behavior we see in the classroom is due to fear and pain. Every child wants to
be seen by us and will show in his behavior where his difficulty lies. But it is
up to us to learn that language. When we find fault, it is we who lack insight.
We must ask whether a child can meet the expectations we have set. Wrong
expectations have consequences; they can affect the child’s self-concept for
many years.
As early childhood teachers, we are soon forgotten and we may
not see the fruits of our labors. When children move on to the grades, they can
pass us in the hallways with no recognition. This is good, because the child has
moved on, feeling at home in his group and looking towards the future, and we
can rejoice for them. But in the early years our lives spill over into the lives
of others and we are a kindling force and a revealing power in the lives of the
children we have cared for. This life on earth is only a span of time in an
endless spiral of striving; everything we do to help will help
forever...
This article is a brief excerpt from
The
Journey of the "I" into Life: A Final Destination or a Path Toward
Freedom?, published by WECAN. The book contains lectures from the 2012
International Waldorf Early Childhood Conference at the Goetheanum by Louise
deForest, Dr. Michaels Gloeckler, Dr. Edmund Schoorel, Dr. Renate Long-Breipohl
and Claus-Peter Roeh.
It's available from WECAN Books
here.Louise deForest was an early childhood educator for many
years. She now dedicates herself to the mentoring and evaluating of teachers and
programs and is actively involved with teacher training in the US, Canada,
Mexico and Europe. She is a board member of WECAN and a North American
representative to the IASWECE Council.
The images that accompany the article are from the Holywood Steiner
School in County Down, Northern Ireland and the Live Oak Waldorf School in
Meadow Vista, CA.
