It is almost a cliché among Waldorf parents that it is the children who brought us to Waldorf. And it is also true that if you ask such a parent how Waldorf has inspired their children and influenced their family life, you will likely hear more stories than you would care to listen to. Here is one of mine:
A few years ago, we attended a reunion of my wife’s rather large and far-flung family. As expected on such occasions there was a lot of boisterous laughing, overflowing food and children running about. After a while of mingling I went to look for my daughters who were about 4 and 9 years old at the time. They had found their way to the room of the family’s old matriarch, and there atop her sickbed, I saw them listening raptly to her retelling stories from her youth. Everyone else at the party did not want to be around the idea of infirmity and sickness (and in truth of the tired recounting of stories) so it was just the three of them there.
My daughters did not see the sickness so much as hear the stories. And they wanted nothing more at that time than to be with someone who could not enjoy the party like the others. To them, they were with the most interesting person there. I knew then that we as parents had done something right, for it was clear that these two children had a capacity for human empathy that so many in our broken world have lost. Where did this capacity come from? We would like to think that it comes naturally in children, and encouraged from the example of the people they see everyday, in school and at home. My wife and I take great comfort that despite our many shortcomings as parents, we have at least done right by our children in sending them to a Steiner school.
Nearly every parent who sends her children to a Steiner school will have such stories. The Kolisko School in Quezon City is no different. It is in fact their collective experience of their children’s unfolding that prompted twenty or so parents to found this particular Steiner school. They wanted this wonderful kind of education to be accessible to families who would normally not be able to afford it. Kolisko School, in turn, would like to take the universal themes in the curriculum (which traces its roots to Stuttgart, Germany) and give it a Filipino face.
In a very real way, the Kolisko School is an experiment in idealism and hope. Can we take what is truly one of the best kept secrets in education and make it accessible to the Filipino child? Can we establish a school that can serve as a template for other areas in the city and the country? That is our hope and we have worked hard over the last three or four years toward this goal.
The Kolisko School then is one of the newest members of the fastest growing school movement in the world. As such we try to be a true alternative to the kind of traditional schooling that is the norm today. There are no books (except those that the students make themselves); there are no grades; teachers stay with her class through multiple grades, thus knowing their children in a very deep way; art permeates everything that they learn and do; music is an important component a student plays at least two instruments by the fourth grade. Reading, math and the sciences are experienced as well as taught.
Ask a Waldorf parent of an incident of child burnout and she will be hard put to think of one. Incredibly, Waldorf children will learn everything they are supposed to and they will be able to do very well in traditional school later in life. More than that, it is our ambition that these children in time become men of women of high purpose, who because of the way they grew up will be in a position to make a meaningful contribution to the world. We have every reasonable hope that they will continue to be life-long learners in the spirit of the verse that children of the first to fourth grade recite every morning:
Morning Verse
The sun with loving light
Makes bright for me each day.
The soul with spirit power
Gives strength into my limbs.
In sunlight shining clear
I reverence, O God,
The strength of humankind
Which thou, so graciously,
Hast planted in my soul
That I, with all my might,
May love to work and learn
From thee comes light and strength
To thee rise love and thanks.
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