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, Perspectives
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, Gender*
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, Cultivating Leisure
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, Digital Educators
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]
Publisher's View
It’s down to all of us
There are going to be elections all over Europe in 2017, and not everyone is worried about that. [more]
Publisher's View, Social Threefolding
Nothing is allowed to happen anymore
America is usually a little ahead of us: On the 4th of July 1776, on Independence Day, the United States officially adopted its Declaration of Independence in which it declared that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”. [more]
Publisher's View, Time
Magic moments
Sacred moments sometimes occur in the life of a class. They cannot be summoned, planned or, least of all, held fast, but we can hold the door open for them and be vigilant that they don’t pass by unnoticed. What constitutes such sacred moments? [more]
Publisher's View, Essential Waldorf
Daughter of freedom
In 1819 the Swiss educator and social reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi wrote to James Pierrepont Greaves, a British educator, socialist and mystic: “I need not remind you of the importance of music because it is able to generate and support the highest feelings of which human beings are capable.” [more]
Publisher's View, Work & Family Balance
Waldorf box of tricks
Maria R. has four children with the eldest one starting school after the summer holidays. She has stopped work to have time for her children. [more]
Bund der Freien Waldorfschulen e.V.