Transhumanism
If we could do what we wanted. The challenges of transhumanism
Transhumanism is a spreading philosophical and cultural movement and worldview which has set itself the goal of transcending the human being. This is to be done with the help of modern technology which is developing so rapidly today that it is difficult to predict how much it will soon allow us to do. [more]
Transhumanism
Thinking and artificial intelligence
Computer programs attempt to map the laws of human logic. Artificial neural networks go deeper: they imitate the brain processes when a person thinks. Although the programs are written by humans, the networks are trained by them until they run by themselves. Much human thinking has flowed into artificial intelligence but it is frozen in the latter. What, then, distinguishes real human thinking? [more]
Transhumanism
Steiner’s surprising assignment
The inhabitants of coastal areas in the eastern Indian Ocean learnt the lesson from the great flood disaster of Christmas 2004. In Thailand and Indonesia, reliable tsunami warning systems were installed with German assistance by 2008 and the way that houses were constructed was adapted in such a way that the water masses were able to flow through below the now firmly anchored raised buildings without causing major damage. Emergency ladders and bridges were built everywhere. [more]
Waldorf worldwide, Transhumanism
Waldorf education in Kiev
On 25 and 26 November 2019, a two-day international conference took place in Kiev on occasion of the hundredth anniversary celebrations of Waldorf education; the first day on the premises of the Ukrainian National Academy of Educational Sciences (NAES) and the second at the Sofia Waldorf School in Kiev. [more]
Series, Transhumanism
Two sisters and a legacy. Waldorf education in New Zealand
Anthroposophy came to New Zealand as early as the second decade of the twentieth century through Emma Richmond. Her daughter, the teacher Rachel Crompton-Smith, together with her husband Bernard Crompton-Smith opened the small St George School in Havelock North in 1917 at which girls and boys were taught together, something extraordinary at that time. This impulse was taken up by Ethel Edwina Burbury and Ruth Nelson who founded the anthroposophical Taruna centre and a short time later the first Waldorf school in Hastings. [more]
Editorial
Deus in machina
The philosopher Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) wrote in his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man: “You yourself shall determine your [nature] without any restriction and limitation as you see fit. [...] We have created you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you by yourself, as your own creative fashioner, may give yourself the form you desire by your free and honourable choice. You may degenerate into brute bestiality; but you may also be reborn to something higher, to the divine if your soul thus resolves.” [more]
Real life to the full
We learn in images. It’s just that we’ve forgotten it. While the exact lexical concept encapsulates the point, an image requires context. If you say: “I’ve no idea what that means,” then the link to the concrete concept is missing. When you say: “I cannot picture that,” then the concrete connection with the whole is missing. [more]
From image to concept
From image to concept in lower and middle school
Whereas in lower school an experience of the world is encouraged which is as comprehensive as possible through activity and the development of the mind through living ideas, the focus in middle school lies in thinking about the content and experiences communicated by lessons in an ever larger context of ideas. [more]
From image to concept
Growing concepts. Theory of colour in upper school physics
It is not just in lower school but also in upper school that the path of knowledge leads from the image to the concept – at first to an abstract one as a law, then to a living one as the reality in changing phenomena. The optics main lesson in class 12 can illustrate how upper school pupils can be led to living concepts. [more]
From image to concept
The image we present
On the poster I pass daily, I see the face of a politician. I don’t see their eyes – I see how they want their eyes to be seen. I don’t see their smile – I see how they want it interpreted. I don’t see the background landscape against which the photo is taken – but that the background sends a message. I feel empathy with the human face that is exposed to everyone’s looks and thus loses its innocence, and that is how I feel – I may well be oversensitive – about all faces in an advertising context, even portraits on CD or book covers. I always see the calculation. Is my perception overwrought – or my reflection? [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.