As parents we are keenly aware of the destructive influences that reduce human beings to objects, consumers, and voyeurs, and that promote divisiveness and destruction. We are also aware of the many human beings who, in small ways and in large movements, are able to counter and transform these destructive influences with compassion and creative action.

We can protect our children from many of these unhealthy influences when they are young, but at some point we must send them out into the world with confidence and trust. How can we help our children to live happy and meaningful lives? How can we help our children to develop the ability to see what lives behind seductive images and rhetoric? How can we help them to see themselves and others and the natural world as they truly are, in all of their glory, rather than as defined by others? How can we help our young people draw upon their highest natures so as to transform what is potentially destructive into something creative and life-giving?

In this course we will look at how Waldorf pedagogy responds to these questions. Rudolf Steiner created an educational process that, when understood and worked with rightly, awakens the capacity for moral seeing/feeling, moral thinking/imagining, and moral acting (moral in the sense of life-giving and life-evolving). It is critical that teachers continually work to develop these capacities in themselves so that they can foster these capacities in the children with whom they work. We will also draw from the contributions of some of our greatest artists and writers as we explore together the potential for artistic activity to awaken moral impulses in us and in our young people. We will experience how interest and devotion affect our ability to see, our ability to imagine, and our ability to create something new, be it a work of art or a life-evolving solution to a question or problem.

Suggested text:

Rudolf Steiner Education — An Introductory Reader. Ed. C.Clouder. Sophia Books