What is free intellectual life and how can it be financed?
As essential as it is for the collective public financing of education to remain: the claim derived from this that the state should also regulate the content of education or other intellectual questions is levelling down and counterproductive. Because an outside determination of the socio-cultural system (“intellectual life”) has developed which stops the latter’s nourishing, regenerating and innovating functions in the social organism. [more]
Vouchers instead of taxes
Our school and education system is state controlled as if we were still living in pre-First World War Wilhelmine Germany and not in a European civil society. Time to change that and move from state direction of education to a system which places responsibility into the hands of the people concerned, the parents and children. The means of choice to achieve this goal is the education voucher. [more]
Fundraising means finding friends
Everyone’s doing it – all the time. Every time you tell someone what you do, when you report about your school, your kindergarten, you are simultaneously doing public relations, are indirectly asking for goodwill, interest and support for your school. And that is fundraising! [more]
How the free Waldorf schools see their role in society
The following propositions are the result of joint work undertaken by the “Education law working group” of the council and conference of the German Waldorf School Association. Their goal is to counter with facts the image sometimes presented in the media that Waldorf schools are elitist private schools. [more]
Early childhood
In the beginning there is misunderstanding
What parents and early years teachers can contribute to children developing an age-appropriate relationship with sexuality is illustrated by Elke Rüpke, a lecturer at the Waldorf Early Years Teacher Training Seminar, in this contribution. That includes not just good and honest concepts, an examination of our own attitudes, and permitting doctors and nurses games, but also stories which make the questions of the child accessible through images. [more]
Spotlight
Against the educational tyranny of PISA
Heinz-Dieter Meyer, sociologist and education researcher at the State University of New York, wrote an open letter to the “father” of the PISA study, Andreas Schleicher, together with the New York school principle Katie Zahedi in May 2014 which was signed by over a hundred personalities from science and education. [more]
Editorial
Appealing freedom?
What would education be without freedom – and without trust in the future? For all our forecasting we are no clairvoyants, for it lies in the nature of human freedom that people act unpredictably. If everything went to plan we would not develop and nothing new would ever enter the world. [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.