Waldorf Education and Science

Waldorf education holds that development has a meaning which cuts across different time scales and different kinds of being. The mythical and religious content of the earliest grades bring the child to the same wellsprings from which humanity began its great journey into awareness. Myth and religion are the parents of art and science, delivered of them by that dubious midwife, philosophy. Today art and science eclipse and usurp their elders, as if they were themselves characters in a Greek myth or tragedy. They have empowered us to stuff our world with facts and artifacts at rates whose increase may well prove pathological.

What we can make and what we can know are taken more and more as the only evidence for what we are. This journey, regardless of the risk, is not optional. We are thrown on our own resources, and both the artist and the scientist, in different ways, come to meet nature as their equal. For both it is a matter of confidence in their faculties and a relentless tension between imagination and reality. Science has shown again and again that imagination gives us the keys to reality, but matching them to the locks never stops being challenging. The physicist Richard Feynman critiqued a colleague's idea with: That is a crazy idea, but I don't think it's crazy enough to be true."

For children, as for humankind, science means different things at different ages. And, as always, it is a Waldorf teacher's vocation to discern the potentialities belonging to the child's own interests and enthusiasms and draw them toward investments that will send them strongly where they are going. Natural history places us in a living world and awakens a positive awareness of senses which were made by and for that world. Mechanics explores a doing which our ideas can take complete possession of. Nutrition and hygiene begin to explore the peculiar way the body belongs on the one hand to oneself and on the other to processes that are impersonal or public or woven into a fabric shared more deeply than anything we can name.

For teachers, science is about the kinds of challenges that forge a sense of reality out of conflicting inclinations: Conceptual intoxication versus sober observation, for instance, or what seems true to one person versus what seems true to someone else. Measure was an idea central to Greek thought, but it was left to Shakespeare to frame the special human importance of 'Measure For Measure.' Was our faith in yesterday's science misplaced? How much can we rely on what they are telling us today?

Children in a Waldorf school should be able to experience science as a journey which gives them confidence in their own measures of things; and, here is the nub of it, in their own sense of evidence wrought from challenges which have had meaning for them. It isn't having the answers that counts, nor even having the questions, but having a sense that one's own experience pertains to both the questions and the answers in a way that unfolds as evidence.

In addition to a comprehensive emphasis on participatory observation and experimentation, the science curriculum in Waldorf schools follow two of the most basic guidelines of Waldorf education:

• Ordering the kinds of learning most relevant for development, most suited to the kinds of questions and involvement children will be able to call their own.

In the later grades, a Waldorf teacher is called to find approaches to science that answer both the developmental challenges of pre-adolescence and the scientific competencies necessary for subsequent schooling. Science and mathematics teaching in Waldorf schools function as prologues to the demands made by higher education for intensely abstract learning. That capacity naturally gains strength with adolescence.

Before then, many aspects of Waldorf education cultivate competency for abstraction even through arts, music, movement, and games. When the time comes, a Waldorf educated child will typically be able to draw a powerful sense for the abstract from elements of many of the creative skills in which they have become proficient. At the same time, responsible science education in the middle school may have to take account of where science appears to be heading, and what kind of inspirations will serve to maintain interest in science over the long run. From this perspective, what appears important is a sense for the purpose of science: a quest for truth and for the improvement and protection of humanity.

The Waldorf schools typically guide participation in ecologically oriented projects in order to awaken and sharpen an idealism which will consolidate the motivations fueling a career of abstract learning. Our objective is that students be strongly interested and excited by science, have the personal resources to succeed in learning what will show itself as worth learning, and have the confidence and originality to distinguish what is worth learning from what is not. The specialized languages, rapid change, and institutionalization of contemporary science in fact require that students be always able to renew their own motivations when encountering it, be more able to learn new science than contain old science, and be able to distinguish the science that extends human understanding from that which merely proliferates as an academic business.

• Working from the whole to the part.

In science, where the criteria of comprehension hinges on the ability to apply conceptual abstractions, we feel that it is on the basis of encountering phenomenal wholes that a sense for the kinds of abstractions which are most relevant emerges. One way to emphasize wholeness is to insure that engagement with the subject beings from sense and feeling as well as abstract thought. In biology, organisms and their life-cycles and the ecologies in which they participate are given attention before organ systems, cells, and molecular biology: until there is a feeling for LIFE, the instrument readings by which life's components are analyzed invite reductionisms which are neither accurate nor pedagogically nourishing.

Likewise in physics, we find it important that warmth is felt, sound is heard, and light allows us to see: should these phenomenal fundamentals be neglected, the mystery of nature - the awe which has motivated the scientists to which we owe most - become nothing more than moving magnitudes and magnitudes of motion. Thus the geometries of soap bubbles can become a more effective introduction to the principle of least action than a mathematical account of Newton's apple.

In science, wholeness is found not only in the phenomena it treats, but also in its own story. Waldorf education is profoundly humanistic but this does not mean it under emphasizes science. As Gregory Bateson often remarked, one can turn a science into a humanity by teaching its history. Waldorf education finds wholeness in science by showing science's own development, and by telling stories of its discoveries and discoverers. By the time science becomes a focal part of the Waldorf curriculum, Waldorf students are already connoisseurs of storytelling: they have experienced dramatic shifts over the years in the kinds of stories that are brought to them and are ready, when new kinds of stories are brought, to unfold new ways to approach learning.

In science they encounter stories where learning and discovery are center stage in such a way that the truths and errors belonging to individual experience come to be sharply defined, and the questions hiding behind every answer are themselves shown to make history. The individual discoveries of science are by this demonstrated to be only part of the truth of their subject. Should a Waldorf teacher, for example, choose to introduce the Linnean taxonomy or the Periodic Table of the elements, (s)he might be careful to show how the sciences and times of which they were part needed to approach things by means of classifications - and how the 'truth' of such an approach could also be soon seen as holding back and slowing down what would be the next important understandings of their subjects.

Clifford Skoog

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