Spotlight, Educate for peace
School autonomy. Education between self-organisation and external control
School autonomy – this former motto of school reform seems to have turned into a simple concept of control and heteronomy. While the original idea was to give schools freedom of choice, e.g. in the use of financial resources as a basis for productive educational action, something quite different can be observed today: schools have been forced to submit “autonomously” to the paradigm of standardisation, evaluation and accountability. This development is increasingly spreading to independent schools. [more]
Editorial
Rethinking school
Professor Giovanni Maio, head of the Institute of Ethics and History of Medicine in Freiburg, recently spoke out clearly in an interview with the newspaper Badische Zeitung (23 September 2021) about the social exclusion of people who are not vaccinated, their worse position in health care and their financial disadvantage. [more]
Rethinking curriculum

What should Waldorf schools educate for today?
Never before in history has there been such an acceleration in the field of science and technology, as well as in the field of money and banking, as there is today. In this respect, a decade of the present must be compared with at least a century of the past. [more]
Rethinking curriculum

Dealing with the “curriculum” – a question of attitude
In conversation with Christoph Doll, class teacher for many years at the Waldorf school in Karlsruhe and at the intercultural Waldorf School in Mannheim, co-founder of the intercultural Waldorf school in Berlin as well as the Waldorf school in Alanya/Turkey. Since 2010 director of the Seminar for Waldorf Education in Berlin. His keynote presentation on “Questions regarding an adequate approach to contemporary issues in our system of education”, which he gave at the curriculum symposium in Kassel, prompted us to ask him a few questions. [more]
Waldorf worldwide, Rethinking curriculum

Aregnasan. The Waldorf school in Yerevan defies the crisis
Current situation The year 2020 was extraordinarily difficult for all of Armenia. First, the already weak economy contracted sharply in spring 2020 because of the pandemic. In one fell swoop, a third of the parents became unemployed and unable to pay, and another third got into serious difficulties paying the full school fees. The school’s administration was inundated with requests from parents for a payment break or reduction. Some parents also refused to pay in full because, of course, with online teaching the Waldorf quality disappeared completely. The school was in financial difficulties, an existential crisis was looming. The situation deteriorated drastically once again when the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh flared up again at the end of September. The... [more]
Spotlight, Rethinking curriculum

Online grooming
Online grooming is increasingly entering the public consciousness but the term doesn’t always mean a great deal to a lot of people. [more]
Editorial
The child is the curriculum
Initially there was no Waldorf curriculum, only Rudolf Steiner’s suggestions. Caroline von Heydebrand summarised them for the first time in 1925, EA Karl Stockmeyer systematised them by subject in 1955. Several editions of the so-called Richter curriculum followed, which is still in constant development as a project today. The information and recommendations on the horizontal and vertical curriculum have grown over the decades into a book of over 700 pages. [more]
Body, Soul & Mind

Not uniform but multifaceted
Rudolf Steiner based Waldorf education on a teaching of so-called anthropological threefoldness. It includes not only the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit, but also the associated activities of thinking, feeling and volition. As a class teacher, how can we find an approach to it and become educationally effective in such a way that the children can feel at home in their body, soul and spirit? [more]
Body, Soul & Mind

Learning to accept otherness for independence
At the 24th Kassel Youth Symposium in June this year, New York author and essayist Siri Hustvedt gave a series of lectures on what it is like and what it means to be human. At the same time, the event honoured 100 years of upper school teaching at Waldorf schools with the question: How can we, as learners, engage with new and different things in order to expand our knowledge and transform ourselves? Can teaching open up the opportunity for us to face ourselves anew as we learn? [more]
Body, Soul & Mind

The medium is the message
“The medium is the message” was one of the fundamental insights of the Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan (1911 – 1980). According to McLuhan, media are not only about the content conveyed, but above all about the respective device that makes the conveyance technically possible. [more]