Our Children

Our Children
Our guides toward becoming truly human

By 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.