Publisher's View, Pure Garments
Attitude – unfaked
A few weeks ago I visited the director of our Waldorf100 films in California and experienced the deep shame of many Americans about their president. [more]
Publisher's View
Envelopment
“Today it’s the school’s birthday!” calls Lena full of anticipation as she puts on her costume for the class play with which she and her class 2 will welcome the new and muuuuuch younger class 1 pupils in an hour. [more]
Publisher's View, Challenge & Support
Good news
It happens – rarely, but not never – that an article in Erziehungskunst really annoys me. That includes an interview with Daniele Ganser which was published in 2016 shortly after I had had cause to warn the Waldorf schools against inviting “any old conspiracy theorists” and instead appealed for well-founded social studies lessons. [more]
Publisher's View, We and the bees
On the test rig
In mid-February, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper published an interview with the Tübingen academic media expert Bernhard Pörksen. He attested that as a result of the unrestricted access to and constant availability of the media there was a mood in our society in which people were constantly agitated and scandalised and that it was developing into a “democracy of outrage”. [more]
Publisher's View, Elements
Leisure 4.0
“Time doesn’t pass any faster than before but we pass by it in a greater hurry,” said George Orwell, world-famous author of the books 1984 and Animal Farm not long before his death in 1950. [more]
Publisher's View, Working & Learning
Elective affinities
A sociologist from Quito reported on what had impressed him the most when he moved from Ecuador to Germany. “In Ecuador,” he said, “95 percent of my best friends are members of my family. This is how it is there, friends are often siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, members of the family. In Germany, it is a very different state of affairs. Here, many of your children have no siblings at all, as well as no cousins, aunts and uncles. And if it does happen to be the case that they do, then they live all over the place, completely separated.” [more]
Publisher's View
G20 and the life that fits
Eighty years ago Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant film Modern Times put its finger on a question which has continued to grow in importance: are we heading towards a standardised, anonymous mass society in which the individual person is degraded into a tiny cog in the machine, one interchangeable production factor among many others? [more]
Publisher's View
What’s your belief?
My dear old aunt Ninne in Hamburg slept feet first towards the open window so that when she was called to heaven on Judgement Day she would not go head first through the window pane. [more]
Publisher's View
Keep dancing!
The birds are singing, the trees blossoming, the bees humming, the moles digging, the wren is peeking out of the old wood pile and the squirrels are flitting about the trees – spring! ... and I am incredibly grateful and happy about it! In 1962 the ecological best seller Silent Spring was published by the biologist Rachel Carson and its title still makes me shudder: what if spring really did remain silent? [more]
Publisher's View
Moving mountains
“This class is impossible to teach!” With these encouraging words, a colleague handed me the list of names of my new class 1 pupils the last time I took over a class. [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.