Waldorf Library

From the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1Douglas Sloan

The Vital Role of Play in Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3Joan Almon

In What Respect Are Star Children Different? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19Georg Kühlewind

The Hague Circle Report to North American Waldorf Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . .24James Pewtherer and Monique Grund

Special Section: The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: Taking a Careful Look . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28Editorial Note:

Moving in Slow Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29Barry Sanders

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A Risk Factor in Child Psychopathology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37

Sharna Olfman

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: Critical Issues and Concerns . . . . . . . . . . .41Nancy Carlsson-Paige

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: The Loss of Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44William Crain

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A View from Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46Christopher Clouder

Book Review:Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in Our Achievement-OrientedSociety. By William Crain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53Reviewed by Edward Miller.

Correspondence: No Such Thing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55The Online Waldorf Library Project—A Progress Report . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57

Marianne Alsop

The Research Institute for Waldorf Education —Looking Toward the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59Susan Howard, Director

About the Research Institute for Waldorf Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63

Contents

From the Editor

Douglas Sloan

It is a pleasure to inform the readers of theResearch Bulletin that, beginning with thisissue, Christopher Clouder of Great Britain is

joining the work of the Research Institute forWaldorf Education as the new European Editor ofthe Bulletin. Christopher Clouder has for manyyears been the Editor of Paideia, the distin-guished English journal for Waldorf education.He is also head of the Steiner Waldorf SchoolsFellowship for the United Kingdom and Ireland,the director of the European Council for SteinerWaldorf Education, and a co-founder and facilita-tor of the Alliance for Childhood. The introduc-tion of this additional editorial role represents anew step in the efforts of the Research Institute tosupport and report on research in Waldorf educa-tion world-wide. With Christopher Clouder’s edi-torial help, the Research Bulletin will also reachout to those previously served by Paideia. Welook forward to working with Christopher Cloud-er as our new colleague.

The articles in this issue attempt to look at thegenuine needs of the young, growing child—social,emotional, and cognitive needs—especially in lightof the myriad pressures being brought uponchildren by a modern culture that seems obliviousof or directly antagonistic to what children truly

need. Throughout the modern world pressuresgrow to “hothouse” young children by imposingabstract, academic subjects on them at an ever-earlier age. This is compounded by demands forstandardized testing of all children at every agelevel and grade—testing that increasingly involveshigh stakes decisions about an individual student’spromotion, graduation, or placement in low-taskclasses on the basis of a few tests, or often even asingle test. The push for academic hot-housing andhigh-stakes, standardized testing comes fromgovernment officials (from presidents on down),corporate leaders, and national and state depart-ments of education, frequently with the complicityof departments and schools of education. To thishas been added, again coming from the highestpolitical and educational, bureaucratic levels, aconcerted push for the teaching of formal literacyto children at the earliest possible ages.

All of this is being done in spite of extensiveresearch on the early importance of play, bodymovement, oral story telling, handwork, and thearts for the development of full-fledged social,emotional, and intellectual capacities later on.Much of this research has been done withinmainstream education and in many respectsrepresents a remarkable convergence with long-

2 • From The Editor

standing Waldorf theory and practice. Yet, littleconsideration is given by the pressing interests tothe potentially harmful effects of these hot-housingpractices on the children’s physical and emotionalhealth, to say nothing of their long-range detri-mental influence on the development of creativecognitive capacities themselves (ironically the mainthing these current emphases are intended topromote). Political pressures and pedagogicalignorance conspire, it seems, to prevent main-stream education from following its own bestresearch. And since Waldorf education is notimmune to pressures of political imposition andcultural ignorance, it must remain ever attentive toits own central insights (now increasingly con-firmed by much of the best, albeit widely neglect-ed, research stemming from non-Waldorf sources).

The articles in this issue deal almost entirely withvarious aspects of what is currently being imposedon children and what for their healthy developmentthey genuinely need.

We hope to expand the regular features of theResearch Bulletin, the book review and correspon-dence sections in this issue being examples in point.

“The ability to play is one of the principal criteria ofmental health.” 1

I n over 30 years of working with children, fam-ilies, and teachers in Waldorf kindergartens allover the world, I have observed one consistent

feature of childhood: creative play is a central activ-ity in the lives of healthy children. Play helps childrenweave together all the elements of life as they expe-rience it. It allows them to digest life and make ittheir own. It is an outlet for the fullness of theircreativity, and it is an absolutely critical part oftheir childhood. With creative play, children blos-som and flourish; without it, they suffer a seriousdecline. I am hardly the first to note this fact. Thecentral importance of creative play in children’shealthy development is well supported by decadesof research. And yet, children’s play, in the creative,open-ended sense in which I use the term, is nowseriously endangered. The demise of play will cer-tainly have serious consequences for children andfor the future of childhood itself.

Parents, teachers, and mental health professionalsalike, are expressing concern about children who donot play. Some seem blocked and unable to play.Others long to play, but policies and practices athome and in school have driven open-ended, self-directed play out of their lives. Children no longerhave the freedom to explore woods and fields andfind their own special places. Informal neighbor-hood ball games are a thing of the past, as childrenare herded into athletic leagues at increasinglyyounger ages. Add to this mixture the hours spentsitting still in front of screens — television, videogame, and computer — absorbing other people’sstories and imaginations, and the result is a steadydecline in children’s play.

Increasingly, preschool and kindergarten childrenfind themselves in school settings which featurescripted teaching, computerized learning, andstandardized assessment. Physical education andrecess are being eliminated; new schools are builtwithout playgrounds. While allegedly, theseapproaches are providing “quality education,” theytrivialize and undermine children’s natural capaci-ties for meaningful and focused life lessons throughcreative play and this leaves many children pro-foundly alienated from their school experiences.

The Vital Role of Play in Early Childhood Education*

Joan Almon

* Printed with permission of the author fromSharna Olfman, editor, All Work and No Play:How Educational Reforms Are Harming Our Pre-schoolers. Westport, CT: Greenwood PublishingGroup, forthcoming.

I have observed the steady decline of play over thepast 30 years, but even I was astonished by a recentcall from a counselor in an elementary school inVirginia. She had been talking with a first grade classand used the word “imagination.” When they staredblankly at her, she explained its meaning, but thechildren continued to look puzzled. “You know,”she said, “it’s when you pretend to be someoneyou’re not,” and she gave an example from her ownchildhood when she loved to play Wonder Woman.She would put on a cape and fly down the hill nearher house with arms outstretched, pretending to bealoft. “That’s imagination,” she explained. “But wedon’t know how to do that,” said one child, and allthe others nodded their heads in agreement. Notone child in that first grade seemed to know whatimaginative play is.

The Nature of Play

If we are to save play, we must first understand itsnature. Creative play is like a spring that bubbles upfrom deep within a child. It is refreshing andenlivening. It is a natural part of the make-up ofevery healthy child. The child’s love of learning isintimately linked with a zest for play. Whetherchildren are working on new physical skills, socialrelations, or cognitive content, they approach lifewith a playful spirit. As a friend said of her eight-month-old recently, “It just seems that she’sworking all the time.” But is it work or play? Inchildhood there is no distinction.

Adults are convinced that we need to “teach”young children. It is certainly true that we need toset an example in all kinds of activities. We also needto create appropriate spaces where children can playand learn, and we need to lend a helping hand —and at times even intervene when things are goingwrong. But mostly we need to honor the innatecapacity for learning that moves the limbs and fillsthe souls of every healthy young child.

Nathan at one year came with his parents to thesummer house we share as a family. He was delight-ed to find several staircases in this house, for in hisown home there was only one step, and he hadlong since mastered it. Now he gave full vent to hiswish to climb stairs. Over and over he would climb

up and down. We took turns standing guard, but herarely needed our help. He was focused and con-centrated, and did not like to be taken away fromthis activity. He gave every sign of being a happy,playful child while climbing, yet he was also clearlyexploring and mastering a new skill and one thatwas important for his long-term development. Mostimportant, it was a task he set for himself. No onecould have told this one-year-old to devote hours toclimbing. He did it himself, as will every healthychild whose sense of movement has not beendisturbed.

Here is another example of child-initiated playthat is also work. Ivana at age four came to kinder-garten one Monday morning and proudlyannounced that she could tie her shoes. I musthave looked skeptical, because it is beyond the skilllevel of most children her age. Ivana — deter-mined to demonstrate her new prowess —promptly sat down on the floor and untied andthen retied her shoes into perfect bows, looked atmy astonished face, and beamed. Later in the day Iasked her mother how Ivana had learned to dothis. Her mother laughed and described how overthe weekend she had pretended that she was goingto a birthday party. She folded scraps of paper intolittle birthday packages. She then raided her moth-er’s yarn basket and used pieces of yarn to tie thepackages with bows. She probably tied 60 or 70packages during the weekend until she had at lastmastered the art of tying bows. She clearly feltready, and she did her work in the spirit of play. Ifinstead, someone had required Ivana to learn to tieher shoes before she signaled her readiness andinterest, and proceeded to give her formal instruc-tion, learning would have been transformed into atedious and stressful task.

The simple truth is that young children are bornwith a most wonderful urge to grow and learn.They continually develop new skills and capacities,and if they are allowed to set the pace with a bitof help from the adult world they will work at allthis in a playful and tireless way. Rather thanrespecting this innate drive to learn however, wetreat children as if they can learn only what weadults can teach them. We strip them of theirinnate confidence in directing their own learning,

4 • The V ita l Role of P lay in Ear ly Chi ldhood Educat ion

hurry them along, and often wear them out. It isno wonder that so many teachers complain thatby age nine or 10, children seem burned out anduninterested in learning. This is a great tragedy,for the love of learning that Nathan and Ivana dis-played can last a lifetime. Furthermore, it is inti-mately bound to our capacity to be creative andpurposeful.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified acreative state which he termed “flow,” and which Ibelieve is comparable to the state that children enterinto, when deeply engaged in play. In their bookCreative Spirit, Goleman, Kaufman and Raydescribe the state of “flow” as the time “whenpeople are at their peak.2 Flow can happen in anydomain or activity — while painting, playing chess,making love, anything. The one requirement is thatyour skills so perfectly match the demands of themoment that all self-consciousness disappears.”3

Csikszentmihalyi recounted the following vignetteto illustrate the nature of “flow.”4 A neurosurgeonwas deeply engrossed in a difficult operation. Whenthe procedure was finished, he inquired about a pileof debris in the corner of the operating room. Hewas informed that part of the ceiling had caved induring the operation. The surgeon had been soengaged in the flow of his work that he had notheard a thing!

Children engaged in healthy play display a depth ofconcentration that can also be characterized by“flow.” I think of five-year-old Peter watchingintently as two girls in the kindergarten werecreating an especially beautiful play scene on atabletop. They were deeply engrossed and so washe. It happened that on that day the fire depart-ment descended on us, because one of the teachershad called them after noticing an electrical odor inher room. Three fire engines roared up our drive-way. Peter’s friend Benjamin ran up to him, crying,“Peter, Peter, the fire engines are here!” But Peterwas so intent on watching the play scene that hedid not respond. Benjamin tried again with thesame result. He shrugged and rushed back to thewindow to watch the firemen arrive. Finally, Peteremerged from his concentration, saw the fireengines, and hurried to the window.

The state of flow experienced by scientists, physi-cians, artists, and others can be intimidating. Do wewant to enter so wholeheartedly into life andlearning? It does not fit the contemporary picture of“multi-tasking” where one is doing many things atonce, but usually none of them very deeply. Yet it isan important state of being if we want to flex ourinner capacities to the fullest and offer our greatestgifts to the world.

The Development of Play

The secret to helping young children thrive is to keepthe spirit of creativity and of playful learning alive andactive. An important ingredient in this is our ownwork as adults, for children naturally imitate grown-ups. This inspires their play. Their learning is acombination of their own deep inner drive to growand learn coupled with their imitation of the adultsin their environment. These two elements interweaveall through early childhood. They provide theunderlying basis for play, yet their outer expressionchanges year by year as children develop.

An important milestone in play, the capacity formake-believe play — also known as fantasy play —occurs at around two and a half or three years ofage. Before that, children are more oriented to thereal world: their own bodies, simple householdobjects like pots, pans, and wooden spoons, andsimple toys like dolls, trucks, and balls. Toddlersimitate what they see around them; common playthemes include cooking, caring for baby, drivingcars or trucks, and other everyday events.

These themes continue and expand after age three,but now children are less dependent on real objectsand create what they need from anything that is athand. Their ability to enter into make-believe allowsthem to transform a simple object into a play prop.A bowl becomes a ship, a stick becomes a fishingpole, a rock becomes a baby, and much, muchmore. The three-year-old becomes so engaged inmake-believe play that objects seem to be in aconstant state of transformation. No play episode isever finished; it is always in the process of becomingsomething else. The playful three-year-old oftenleaves a trail of objects as her play evolves from onetheme to the next.

Joan Almon • 5

In contrast, four-year-olds are generally morestationary and thematic in their play. They like tohave a “house” to play in, which might also be aship or a shop, and many enter the “pack-rat” stagewhere they fill their houses with objects so that itseems they cannot freely move around. This doesnot bother them at all, however. Like three-year-olds, they are inspired in the moment by the objectsbefore them. They are quite spontaneous in theirideas for play.

The fantasy play of the five-year-old is characterizedby the ability to have an idea and then play it outrather than being inspired in the moment by theobject at hand as is the case with three and four yearolds. Often, five-year-olds will announce what theywant to play as they enter the kindergarten. Theirmothers report that the children wake up in themorning with an idea for play in mind. Althoughthey may play out the same theme for several daysor weeks, subtle variations emerge as they gainfocus, come in touch with their own ideas, andacquire the will to carry them out in playful detail.

There is one more important aspect to the develop-ment of make-believe play that usually does notoccur until children are six years old. At this age theywill often play out a situation without the use ofprops. They may build a house or castle but leave itunfurnished, then sit inside it and talk through theirplay, for now they are able to see the images clearlyin their minds’ eyes. This stage can be described asimaginative play, for the children now have thecapacity to form a well articulated inner image. It isaround this time that a child will say something like“I can see Grandma whenever I want. I just have toclose my eyes.” Or she may set up a play scene withher toys but close her eyes and play it out “inside.”5

In all of these stages of dramatic play children mayplay alone or with others. However, the way childrenengage in social play with others changes over theyears. The one-year-old tends to play alone, whilesocial play of two-year-olds is generally called parallelplay, for young children play side by side withoutfully interacting with each other.6 I would character-ize the play of three and four year olds as playmateplay. The children enjoy playing with each other(with occasional squabbles as part of the play experi-

ence), but generally they are not deeply invested ineach other. They enjoy playing together when theyare in nursery school, but tend to forget about eachother when they are apart. An exception to this, inmy experience, occurs among children whose familiesare friends or who carpool together. In such situa-tions, life thrusts the children together outside theusual play times, and playmates become more likefamily members who play an important, abiding rolein a child’s life. Normally, however, children of thisage happily play with their playmates in school andforget about them for the rest of the day.

The social play of five and six-year-olds is different.The doors to deeper social relationships are openingfor them. They form friendships and talk abouttheir friends at home. They think about theirfriends when they are apart. They may want to callthem on the phone or visit in their homes. Motherslaugh over the social calendars they have to main-tain, for suddenly their six-year-olds want to spendmuch time outside school with their friends. Thismay sound like a preview of adolescence and thisstage is sometimes called “first adolescence.” Thesociodramatic play of this age group is rich andvaried, and it is a great tragedy that so few childrenin the United States have a chance to fully experi-ence it, for their time in kindergarten or first gradeis generally fully devoted to academic subjects withlittle time left over for play. The absence of play inchildhood may have long-lasting repercussions onthe child’s overall social development.

The Social, Emotional, andIntellectual Benefits of Play

In the 1970s and 80s, Israeli psychologist SaraSmilansky conducted groundbreaking research onthe role of dramatic play and sociodramatic play incognitive and socio-emotional development.7 Shedefines dramatic play as having four elements: thechild undertakes a make-believe role; the child usesmake-believe to transform objects into thingsnecessary for the play; verbal descriptions orexclamations are used at times in place of actions orsituations; and the play scenarios last at least tenminutes. In socio-dramatic play these four elementsare present plus two more: at least two players


interact within the play scene, and there is someverbal communication involved with the play.

Observing three to six-year-olds, Smilansky devel-oped a method of assessing children’s play in pre-school settings. Using her assessment tools, she andother researchers observed and assessed childrenfrom three to six at play in a number of pre-schoolsettings in the U.S. and in Israel, observing childrenfrom a variety of socio-economic settings. They alsoassessed children’s ability to organize and commu-nicate thoughts and to engage in social interactions.In one study children were followed and tested insecond grade in literacy and numeracy. Children’sability to engage in dramatic and sociodramatic playwas found to be directly linked to a wealth of skillsall of which are essential for academic success.Smilansky’s findings are summarized below:8

Gains in Cognitive-Creative ActivitiesBetter verbalizationRicher vocabulary Higher language comprehensionHigher language levelBetter problem-solving strategiesMore curiosityBetter ability to take on the perspective of anotherHigher intellectual competence Better peer cooperationReduced aggressionMore group activity

Gains in Socioemotional ActivitiesMore playing with peersBetter ability to take on the perspective of othersMore empathyBetter control of impulsive actionsBetter prediction of others’ preferences and desiresBetter emotional and social adjustmentMore innovationMore imaginativenessLonger attention spanGreater attention abilityPerformance of more conservation tasks

Smilansky concludes: Sociodramatic play activatesresources that stimulate emotional, social, andintellectual growth in the child, which in turn

affects the child’s success in school.9 We saw manysimilarities between patterns of behavior bringingabout successful sociodramatic play experiences andpatterns of behavior required for successful integra-tion into the school situation. For example, prob-lem solving in most school subjects requires a greatdeal of make-believe: visualizing how the Eskimoslive, reading stories, imagining a story and writingit down, solving arithmetic problems, and deter-mining what will come next. History, geography,and literature are all make-believe. All of these areconceptual constructions that are never directlyexperienced by the child.

Smilansky’s research points to the fact that imagina-tion is as important a medium for learning in theelementary-school years, as is make-believe for thepre-school child. If a child has been allowed toengage in make-believe play during the nursery-school and kindergarten years and to develop innerimagination before entering first grade, she is thenripe and ready to learn. While one or another mayhave a learning difficulty, their enthusiasm forlearning — and for overcoming difficulties — isenormous. By contrast, when a child has not hadrich play opportunities, and/or the curriculum failsto engage the imagination, learning is a dull affair.My own experience has also been that the childrenwho were the most active players in the kinder-garten were also the most active learners in elemen-tary school.

A study conducted in the 1970s in Germany, at atime when many kindergartens were being trans-formed into academic rather than play-orientedenvironments, bears out the relationship betweenpreschool play and elementary school success. Thestudy compared 50 play-oriented kindergartenswith 50 academically oriented ones. The childrenwere followed until fourth grade, at which point thechildren from the play-oriented kindergartensexcelled over the others in every area measured —physical, emotional, social, and intellectual develop-ment. The results were especially striking amonglower-income children, who clearly benefited fromthe play-oriented approach. The overall results wereso compelling that Germany switched all its kinder-gartens back to being play-oriented.10 They have

Joan Almon • 7

continued in this mode until the present time,although during recent visits to Germany I hearmore of the rhetoric one hears in this country: thatto prepare children for a globalized economy theymust get a head start on literacy, numeracy, andother subjects.

The benefits of play-oriented preschool programswere also established in a series of studies thatexamined early childhood programs in Ypsilanti,Michigan. In one study, 69 low-income three- andfour-year-old children, who were at high risk forschool failure, were randomly assigned to one ofthree types of programs: the High/Scope programand a traditional nursery school both encouragedchild-initiated play activities, while the DirectInstruction approach did not. I.Q. scores rose in allthree programs, but various social indicatorsshowed that the children in the programs encour-aging self-initiated activity, including play, were far-ing significantly better than the children in themore academic, Direct Instruction program. At age15, the following results were noted:

Initially, all three curriculum approachesimproved young children’s intellectualperformance substantially, with the averageIQs of children in all three groups rising 27points. By age 15 however, students in theHigh/Scope group and the Nursery Schoolgroup …reported only half as much delin-quent activity as the students in the DirectInstruction group…11

Findings at age 23 continue to support the conclu-sion that the High/Scope and Nursery Schoolgroups are better off than the Direct Instructiongroup in a variety of ways. Either the High/Scopegroup, the Nursery School group, or both, showstatistically significant advantages over the DirectInstruction group on 17 variables. Most important,compared with the Direct Instruction Group, theHigh/Scope and Nursery School groups have hadsignificantly fewer felony arrests of various kindsand fewer years of special education for emotionalimpairment. In addition, compared with the DirectInstruction group, the High/Scope group aspiresto complete a higher level of schooling. It thusappears that preschool programs that promote

child-initiated play activities contribute to thedevelopment of an individual’s sense of personaland social responsibility.

A recent study by Rebecca Marcon of theUniversity of North Florida found similar resultswhen children from different pre-school programswere followed through fourth grade. Those whohad attended play-oriented programs where child-initiated activities predominated did better acade-mically than those who had attendedacademic-oriented programs.12

The Demise of Play in EarlyChildhood Education

Given the compelling evidence for the importanceof self-initiated creative play for social, emotional,and intellectual growth, it is alarming that play haslost so much ground in young children’s livesduring the past 30 years. Since the 1970s, it hasbecome common for public kindergartens in theUnited States to focus so strongly on academicachievement that there is little or no time devotedto self-directed play.

Kindergarten teachers in Pennsylvania told me thatin their school district the kindergarten curriculumhad been prescribed by the state legislature. Eachmorning children were to spend 20 minutes eachon reading, writing, arithmetic, social studies, sci-ence, and so on. One teacher looked nervouslyover her shoulder and whispered, “I break the lawevery day and let my children play for fifteen min-utes.” The other kindergarten teacher sadly admit-ted that she only managed to bring in play twice aweek for short periods.

That was in the mid-1980s. Since then the situa-tion has become even more grim. The first-gradecurriculum has become entrenched in the kinder-garten. With standardized testing starting ever ear-lier — for five-year-olds in some districts — anatmosphere of hurry and pressure pervades thekindergarten. To ease the pressure a bit many stateshave raised the entrance age for kindergarten sothat the youngest children are usually five whenthey enter rather than four years and nine months,


as was the case when I was a child. On the otherhand, there is such concern about five-year-oldslearning enough that many school districts areswitching to full-day kindergartens. One mighthope that half the day would be devoted to playand the arts, but I have not heard any reports ofthat being the case.

Even when opportunities for play are made avail-able to children in the classroom, chronic mediaexposure has a direct negative effect on their abilityto make use of these opportunities. As a kinder-garten teacher it became easy for me to recognizewhich children were “television children,” that is,children for whom TV was a steady influence intheir lives. Such children often had difficulty find-ing their own ideas in play and were prone to act-ing out the ideas they had seen on the screen. Insevere cases, these media children could only playout roles they had seen and became very upset ifother children wanted to change the play scenario.

In What Happened to Recess and Why Are OurChildren Struggling in Kindergarten? Susan Ohan-ian takes a hard look at what is happening to youngchildren in school today. She refers to New YorkPublic School 9, which is bucking the trend byproviding kindergarten children with recess: “In aseven-hour day, they get 25 minutes free from aca-demics.”13 Anyone who has had experience withfive-year-olds will know that 25 minutes of freetime in a seven-hour day will not suffice.

Ohanian also describes the situation in Chicago’spublic kindergartens, referring to a report in theNew York Times by Jacques Steinberg:

The teacher knows it’s the 53d day because“Day:053” is printed at the top of the recom-mended lesson plan open on her desk, a thickwhite binder crammed with goals for each dayand step-by-step questions given to her andthe city’s 26,000 other teachers by the schoolsystem’s administrators at the start of theschool year. The page also identifies thesection of the Iowa Test of Basic Skills towhich that day’s entry corresponds …. Everyteacher in Chicago gets this day-by-dayoutline of what should be taught in language

arts, mathematics, science and social studies.The New York Times reporter notes that somesee this as the logical outcome of the stan-dards movement, providing “an almostironclad guarantee that all students will beexposed to the same material and that allteachers, regardless of qualification, will knowexactly how to present it.”14

In the face of such demands on five-year-olds andtheir teachers, to speak of play seems almost frivo-lous. Yet five-year-olds are young children. Wheredid we ever get the idea that they should be on thefast track to high scores and global careers? We areon a slippery slope heading downhill, and the paceis accelerating. Must we find our children brokenon the rocks of our fears and ambitions before wecall a halt?

And we’re not at the bottom yet. In the name ofearly literacy, plans are being developed to refocusnursery-school children away from play andtoward early reading. There are aspects of early lit-eracy that young children need: a rich experienceof language spoken by caring adults, nurseryrhymes and verses, storytelling and puppetry, andbooks read aloud. All these lay a vital foundationfor a lifetime love of language and reading. Butthe term “early literacy” is coming to imply some-thing much narrower than that.

As this is being written in the winter of 2003,Head Start is scheduled for reauthorization byCongress during this year. On January 17, 2003,the Washington Post described the President’sintention to have all four-year-olds in Head Startassessed as to how much they learned in terms ofearly literacy and early numeracy. The purpose is toevaluate the success of Head Start programs. Asalways, there is something positive to be said aboutassessment, but when the stakes are too high andthe means of measuring too narrow, serious abusesenter the system, and it is the children who bearthe brunt of the problem. Many Head Start teach-ers are already feeling considerable pressure to giveup play time and focus on early literacy, and thissituation will only grow worse.15

Joan Almon • 9

Even before the new plan for assessment wasannounced Susan Ohanian wrote about the grow-ing stress on early literacy in Head Start in thisway:

With all good intentions the current Bushadministration is advocating a rigorous skillmodel for Head Start preschool programsacross the country. Three- and four-year-oldsare drilled about letters, dividing words intosyllables and spelling. The plan is that this willprepare poor children to learn to read whenthey go to kindergarten. The Department ofHealth and Human Services, which overseesHead Start, is developing a curriculum thatevery Head Start teacher will be expected tofollow.16

It is not just the 900,000 children in Head Startthat are being targeted for early literacy programs,however, it is all young children in the U.S. Inspring 2002, legislation was introduced by the Sen-ate H.E.L.P. Committee, then chaired by SenatorTed Kennedy, to make more funds available toearly education programs in each state. A total ofone billion dollars per year was anticipated. Thelegislation, initially called S.2566, Early Care andEducation Act, addresses the importance of physi-cal, social, and emotional development as well asearly literacy.17

While in theory, this is a positive development, inpractice, the legislation calls for bonuses to be givento states that can show gains in children’s schoolpreparedness. This will almost certainly result in asharpened focus on early literacy activities for three-and four-year-olds. Much more time will be spenton learning the alphabet, breaking words into parts,basic reading skills, and the like. We have seen thispattern before in kindergarten: soon there will beno time left for play in preschool literacy.

Children are not machines. You cannot simply addmore fuel and speed them up. They are governedby internal processes that are sometimes called thelaws of child development. We cannot ignore thesenatural developmental timetables without doingserious harm to children. This harm touches many

areas of their lives — physical, emotional, social,and intellectual.

The Alliance for Childhood, of which I am theU.S. coordinator, submitted a position statement tothe Senate committee that was drafting the EarlyCare and Education Act mentioned above. Thestatement was endorsed by some of the leadingexperts on child development in the U.S., includ-ing T. Berry Brazelton, David Elkind, Jane Healy,Stanley Greenspan, and Alvin Poussaint. It read, inpart:

The key to developing literacy –- and all otherskills –- is to pace the learning so that it isconsistent with the child’s development,enabling him or her to succeed at the earlystages. Ensure this initial success and thechild’s natural love of learning blooms. Doomhim to failure in the beginning by makinginappropriate demands and he may well beunable to overcome the resulting sense ofinadequacy. This is especially true of childrenwhose families are already under social andeconomic stress.18

There are many individuals and organizations com-mitted to restoring play to young children’slives. One reason it is difficult to make progress,however, is that many parents misguidedly preferthat their young children focus on academics. Theirconcern about their children’s future easily turns tofear. They then place considerable pressure on nurs-ery and kindergarten teachers. An October,1995, report by the National Center for EducationStatistics (NCES) entitled Readiness for Kinder-garten: Parent and Teacher Beliefs found that

Parents of a majority of preschoolers believethat knowing the letters of the alphabet, beingable to count to 20 or more, and using pencilsand paint brushes are very important oressential for a child to be ready for kinder-garten, while few kindergarten teachers sharethese beliefs…[C]ompared with teachers,parents place greater importance on academicskills (e.g., counting, writing, and reading)and prefer classroom practices that are moreacademically oriented. One reason for this


may be that parents perceive that there arespecific activities they can do to teach theirchildren school-related basic skills, whereasways of changing the social maturity ortemperamental characteristics of their childrenare less apparent.19

If there is one piece of advice I would offerparents regarding play and early academics, itwould be to relax and stop hurrying theirchildren. Children have such deep resourcesfor growth and learning that with goodnurture and reasonable help, most willsucceed wonderfully. Some will need specialhelp and can be given it. This is a hardmessage to convey however, especially inAmerica, where we are committed to growingour children faster and better than anyoneelse. There is a story that Piaget, the greatSwiss psychologist, did not like to speak toAmerican audiences. After he had describedthe natural pattern of children’s development,Americans would invariably ask, “Yes, buthow can we get them to do things faster?”Compared to the young of other mammals,our children take much longer to mature. Ourchildren deserve the right to grow and ripenat a human pace. A major part of this isallowing time for play.

The Demise of Play and Children’sHealth

The absence of play is generally a sign of illness inchildren. Parents, for instance, will often describethe severity of a child’s illness in terms of whetheror not the child continued to play. “He had chick-en pox,” a parent might report, “but it wasn’t tooserious. He was playing the whole time.” Or anoth-er mother might say of her child, “She was reallysick. She didn’t want to play at all.”

Parents’ instinctive wisdom that links play andhealth was confirmed by Stuart Brown, a retiredpsychiatrist who founded the Institute for Play inCarmel, California.20 As a young doctor in Texashe worked with very ill children, some of whomdid not recover. Over time, Brown began to notice

a pattern. Occasionally, a very sick child woulddevelop a playful gleam in his eyes. He wouldcheck the charts and find that although the child’sfever was still high, or the blood tests still worri-some, usually within a day’s time the outlookwould brighten. He came to realize that the returnof a playful spirit was an excellent predictor ofrecovery in his young charges.

Given the relationship between health and play, whatthen are the implications of the demise of play forchildren’s mental and physical health? Are thereaccompanying signs of illness in children today?Research does in fact indicate that this is the case.The growing number of suicides among children andyouth is a powerful and tragic indictment of contem-porary trends in childhood. Between 1952 and1996, rates of suicide among adolescents tripled.Suicide is currently the fourth leading cause of deathamong children between the ages of 10-14.21

In recent years, former Surgeon General DavidSatcher sounded the alarm about children’s physicaland mental health. In 2001, he issued a “Call toAction to Prevent and Decrease Overweight andObesity” which stated that in 1999 about 13% ofchildren and adolescents were overweight.22 Since1980 this number had doubled for children andtripled for adolescents. Type 2 diabetes, previouslyconsidered an adult disease, and closely linked tooverweight and obesity, has increased dramaticallyin children and adolescents.

In 2000, Satcher organized a conference to addressthe growing crisis in children’s mental health. Areport on his Web site states the following:

The nation is facing a public crisis in mentalhealthcare for infants, children and adoles-cents. Many children have mental healthproblems that interfere with normal develop-ment and functioning. In the United States,one in 10 children and adolescents suffer frommental illness severe enough to cause somelevel of impairment. Recent evidence com-piled by the World Health Organizationindicates that by the year 2020, childhoodneuropsychiatric disorders will rise propor-tionately by over 50 percent, internationally,

Joan Almon • 11

to become one of the five most commoncauses of morbidity, mortality, and disabilityamong children.23

In the past decade growing numbers of childrenhave been diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) andseveral million receive potent stimulant medicationsuch as Ritalin each year. The Center for DiseaseControl reports that the American PsychiatricAssociation estimates 3 to 7% of children sufferfrom ADHD and that some studies show an evenhigher percentage.24

Diagnoses of Autistic Spectrum Disorders inchildren (Asperger’s Disorder in particular) havealso increased dramatically. In the State ofCalifornia for example, cases of autism grew from3,864 to 11,995 between 1987 and 1998, anincrease of 210%,25 and the median age of thepatients dropped from 15 to nine years of age.26

A striking feature of these health trends is that,unlike the traditional illnesses of childhood that areespecially prevalent among poor children in devel-oping nations, the health concerns I refer to areaffecting children across the socio-economic spec-trum in technologically advanced nations, oftenbeginning in the United States, and then slowly“spreading” to other technologically advancednations.

It is crucial that we ask ourselves the difficultquestion, What is it about our contemporarylifestyle that is causing or contributing to so muchillness in children? I wish I could report on onesingle cause, for then we could turn our full atten-tion to it and eradicate the source as we have donewith small pox and other illnesses. Rather, chil-dren’s lives have changed significantly in myriadways during the past 50 years and many of thesechanges are stressful. Healthy children can copewith one or two stressors — and one can even arguethat they grow stronger through some adversity. Yetfew children can cope well with five or six unhealthyfactors that are constant and permeate their lives.

This is especially true when the most basic of allhuman needs is not being met — the need for

consistent love and care of devoted parents andother adults. Thus, when the home life is stressedor too hurried, when childcare is of mediocrequality with little possibility for lasting bonds withloving caregivers, when pre-school demands “toomuch too soon” in the areas of literacy and numer-acy, when hours are spent each day sitting still infront of screens, and the diet is frequently filledwith too much sugar, fat and food additives, wehave a situation that is bound to wreak havoc on ayoung child’s health. Stressors affect each of usdifferently depending on our underlying tempera-ment and constitution, and so we see a range ofstress related illnesses in our children. This is ahealth picture in urgent need of further investiga-tion, and it would be excellent if the SurgeonGeneral along with national health organizationscould work together to define the scope of theproblem and the contributing factors. We may notlike their conclusions, however, for it is a hardtruth to swallow that our current lifestyle isharming our children even as it is harming ourenvironment and our global relations with others.The decline in play appears not only to be a seriousproblem in itself, but it may also be the canary inthe mineshaft that is pointing us toward muchmore serious, lasting problems in children’s lives.

Fostering Healthy Play in thePreschool and KindergartenClassroom

The Physical Environment

In order to foster healthy play in the classroom, it isimportant to create an optimal environment. To alarge extent, any space will do if the right mood andorientation for play exists. I once taught in asummer program for young children that took placeon a large college campus. There was no fencedarea for the children or other obvious safe space fortheir play. There were, however, two mounds ofearth left from a construction project. Knowing thatyoung children love to play on hills, we adoptedthese mounds as our playground. My co-teacherwould seat herself on the grass between the moundsand weave wonderful grass nests or make other


simple toys from the grass. The children happilyplayed on the mounds for at least an hour a day forthe three weeks of the program. They also went forwalks across the campus but were always verycontent to come back to their small and simple playarea. This was an unusual situation and certainly notone to normally recommend, but it was a wonder-ful lesson in how little space and equipment chil-dren actually need to be engaged players. It alsoechoes the experience of children in poor countriesplaying on the garbage heaps that litter theirlandscape. Their toys are the objects of the trashheap, such as tin cans. Their surroundings may beunhygienic and even dangerous, but in many casestheir lives are rich in play.

By contrast, many children today are bombardedwith an overabundance of toys and other playobjects as well as by an overload of sense impres-sions. These can actually interfere with their play.The newborn’s cradle, for instance, is often sofestooned with patterns and prints, mobiles andtoys that one wonders how the poor baby will findpeace for sleeping. It used to be that an infant’scradle was protected by draped cloths that kept theworld a bit away and created a sense of peace. Thisis no longer the case.

By the time the child is in nursery school or kinder-garten, he is surrounded on every side by wallscovered with pictures and charts with bright colors,words and numbers. There is often not a squarefoot of peaceful wall space where a child can safelyrest his gaze and daydream. Everything is designedto wake the child up. Stimulation is the call of theday, but in truth it amounts to massive over-stimulation of the young child’s nervous system.Few adults would choose to work in such anenvironment, for they would find it impossible toconcentrate; yet we subject children to it daily.

It is also true that you can create environments thatare under-stimulating for children, and I have beenin such environments in some of the townshipEducare programs in South Africa where the roomsare bleak and there is nothing adorning the walls.There are also few toys or other play materials. Ihave seen 50 or more children in such a room andto keep order the teachers insist that the children

stay in their chairs most of the time. That is clearlyan unhealthy situation with far too little activity orsense stimulation of any kind for the children. Butwe need to realize that over-stimulation can be justas much of a problem as under-stimulation and paymore attention to our excesses.

In my early years of teaching I experimented withdifferent play environments. I gradually found thatthe children were most relaxed and played best ifthe space was fairly simple but pleasing to thesenses. It should be calming and lovely, but not sobeautiful and complete that the children hesitate tomove anything or disturb the order. Play is a messybusiness in the best sense of the word, for it is hardto create without making a mess. A good playenvironment invites you to come in and change it— but it is orderly enough that it is easy to clean itup again. There’s a place for everything and itbecomes fun for the children to know where eachobject lives and put it back at the end of play time.When clean-up is handled through imitation ofadults who enjoy it and do it in a cheerful mood,most of the children participate as wholeheartedlyas in play itself.

For pre-school children, the simpler the playmaterials the more effective they are for stimulatingcreative play. A variety of plain cloths, for instance,can be used in dozens of ways — from capes andgowns to the roofs and walls of houses. Simple logsand stumps serve as building materials. For a fewyears I had both wooden “unit” blocks and woodenlogs in my kindergarten for building. I observedthat with the unit blocks, the standard woodenblocks that are cut along mathematical principles torepresent one square “unit” or multiples of that,the children tended to use small cars and otherman-made materials. With the logs the childrengravitated more to natural materials such as shellsand stones and to simple handmade dolls andanimals for their play. The children also becamemore inventive with their play materials, making orfinding what they needed to complete their play.Gradually I disposed of the unit blocks (this ispractically a heresy for an American pre-schoolteacher to admit) and just gave the children logs forbuilding. They never complained and their playgrew stronger and more creative.

Joan Almon • 13

The presence of natural materials such as wool,cotton and silk, stones, wood and metals also filledthe environment with life. These provide a healthystimulus for the senses and the children quicklylearn that things feel different and have differentaromas and qualities, such as being cool or warm tothe touch. Most kindergartens today are filled withplastic that is cool to the touch and does not warmup as children handle it. In addition, everythingends up feeling much the same whether it is a truckor a doll.

Boys, in particular, are strongly drawn to wheeledvehicles and will often play with nothing else if a caris at hand. I wanted the children in my kindergartento explore the full range of play materials and after awhile I eliminated all wheeled vehicles from mykindergarten. The children created their own carsfrom logs and boards when they wanted one. A sideblessing was that with the absence of cars most ofthe machine noises that the children made toaccompany their car play also disappeared.Eventually the only wheels we had were on ourcarpet sweeper which may account for why the boysespecially loved to clean the carpet.

Generally within 15 minutes of the children’sarrival, the kindergarten would be completelytransformed with almost everything in use. Agroup of 20 children could easily create six orseven play areas for themselves. There was a fairamount of negotiation that took place as theysorted out who was going to use what and inwhich area. Occasionally they needed help withthis process especially in the beginning of theschool year, but they soon developed their owntechniques for dividing up the materials.Adjustments were sometimes made as the playtime progressed, especially if one group had clearlytaken more than they needed while others wereundersupplied.

The Role of the Adult in a Play OrientedClassroom

The role of the adult in a play oriented preschool orkindergarten is critical but subtle. A teacher caneasily dominate the play situation, overriding thechildren’s own initiative, or through frequent

questions and conversation, can force children tobecome too conscious and purposeful in their play.The latter is a common situation in play programstoday.

Offering Children Suggestions: Sara Smilanskyresearched the impact of adult intervention onchildren’s play and demonstrated that when adultsencouraged children to role play, enact fairy talesetc., there were significant gains in children’s abilityto play. Yet through questionnaires given to 120preschool teachers, half in the U.S. and half inIsrael, she found the following:

All reported that there was a playhouse corner intheir room and that children could play in it for atleast 30 minutes each day; however, most thoughtplay was only good for developing personality andfurthering social and emotional development. 90%said they did not feel it prepared children for futuresuccess in school.

They assumed children would learn to play bywatching other children and that they did not needto do very much to help children play.

None of the teachers had been trained in the use ofplay. They did not remember a university course onthe importance of play or on how to help facilitateplay.27

Smilansky concludes that, “Basic attitudes clearlyneed changing… It is clear that play expresses thechild’s ongoing intellectual, social and emotionaldevelopment and growth. This growth, like anyother, can be aided by teachers with sensitivity tothe child’s needs, wishes, and current status.”28

Modeling Healthy Work: Decades of classroomexperience, and observation of Waldorf kinder-garten teachers both in the United States andEurope have convinced me of the central impor-tance of imitation for stimulating healthy play.Young children are physically active, and have astrong but usually unfocused will, which con-tributes to the turbulence of their behavior. Youngchildren are inspired by the sense of purpose thatadults bring to their work. When the teacher spendstime each day engaged in the practical household


work of the kindergarten such as cooking, sewing,gardening and woodworking, the children use thisas a model for their own focused play, and the moredeeply focused the teacher is in her work, the morefocused the children are in their play. In addition,young children have a strong desire to imitate theteacher and will work alongside her for a period oftime which draws the children into a closer relation-ship with her, while acquiring new skills.

A recent experience in Tanzania helps illustrate therelationship between adult work and children’s play.During a recent visit to a Waldorf school in Dar esSalaam, I was scheduled to spend a couple of hourswith a new kindergarten teacher who had beenspecially trained to work creatively with smallgroups of children. It was a wonderful experienceto watch her playfully interact with one or twochildren, but a class of 25 active children was ratheroverwhelming for her. Each time I passed herkindergarten I could hear the sounds of chaos. I feltgreat sympathy for her because it reminded me ofmy own early kindergartens, but I was perplexed asto how to best help her in such a short period oftime. On the morning of my visit to her kinder-garten, I arrived early and asked the teacher if therewas some work I could do. She looked rather blankand said she did all her work for the kindergarten athome in the evenings and there was no work to bedone. “No, no” I declared without much tact, “inthe kindergarten we do the work in front of thechildren. That inspires their play.”

I looked around her rather sparse kindergarten forsome sort of work materials such as sandpaper orfurniture polish. Any meaningful work would do,but all I could find was a basket of yarn scraps froma project that was underway. The tangle of yarnpieces, each perhaps 18 inches long, was not tooinspiring but better than nothing. As the childrenentered, they found me at a table untangling theyarn and winding tiny balls of yarn while singing alittle song. The children were fascinated and soonall 25 were gathered around the table watchingintently. When the last little ball was rolled, thewhole class turned, like a flock of birds, and spreadinto every corner of the room, rearranging thefurniture and props into play structures includinghouses, shops, a bus made of chairs and a plane

made of a table. For the next hour they played withall the focus and vigor one could ever hope for froma group of three to six year olds.

The Art of Intervention: It is critical that theteacher has her ears wide open to all the sounds ofthe kindergarten so that she knows when interven-tion is necessary. Some children get over-excited orupset in play but can work this out themselves. Inother cases the teacher needs to intervene quicklybefore chaos results and a child gets hurt. Graduallythe teacher comes to know the sounds of herkindergarten as a mother knows the sounds of herchild’s cries. She knows when to help a particularchild and when to sit still.

Direct adult intervention is needed if a child isabout to hurt himself, another person or an object.Sometimes it suffices to simply redirect a youngchild. For children age five and under one can teacha great deal about appropriate behavior through the“royal we” as in “We don’t take other children’stoys, hit children, etc.” By age six children generallywelcome a quiet but more direct “no” and clearindications as to what is possible.

If a child needs to be removed from a turbulentplay situation, bringing her to the teacher’s worktable or providing her with a quiet space and abasket of smaller play things, such as little logs,polished stones, dolls and animals helps her toreengage in play albeit in a more quiet and focusedway. After a short while, the child is sufficientlycalm and centered to play with others.

Supporting Healthy Play at Home

Parents today feel tremendous pressure from manydirections, including from government agencies andcorporate advertisers, to stimulate their childrenand promote their intellectual development at everyounger ages. While some children do need addi-tional stimulation, there are many who are beingover-stimulated. It is important that parents seekthe right balance for their own children, a balancethat allows for growth and development withoutstress and ample time for play each day.

Joan Almon • 15

There are a number of things parents can do athome to support healthy play. One is to develop adeep appreciation of their child’s play, and the waysin which the child reveals his own unique naturethrough play. Through simple observation andquiet appreciation, parents communicate themessage that play is good. Giving space and timefor play is vital, especially in our over-filled lives, asis offering simple play materials, often drawn fromhousehold objects. For example, babies and tod-dlers love playing with pots and pans, woodenspoons and other commonly used objects. Childrenengaged in imaginative play love having a sheetdraped over furniture and creating tents, housesand ships.

Including purposeful, physical work in the dailyroutine of the home is a great help in inspiringchildren’s play. It is important for parents orcaregivers to spend time each day working withtheir hands at comprehensible tasks, in the presenceof their child, whether it is raking leaves, baking, orhammering a nail. The old adage of “whistle whileyou work” has meaning here, for although one doesnot need to actually whistle, a happy mood whiledoing work draws children near and motivates themin their play, while a grumbling, unhappy attitudeon the part of the adult keeps children away.

A growing problem for young children today is theamount of time they spend in front of screens —television, video, and computer. TV Turn-offNetwork cites figures from the Nielson Mediareport of 2000 which indicate that children from 2to 17 spend on average 19 hours and 40 minutesper week (or nearly three hours per day) watchingtelevision. Combining videos and computers,children spend a total of nearly five hours per day infront of screens.29

In addition, many children are profoundly influ-enced by the often violent, fast paced and sexualcontent of television, films and computer gamesthat they are routinely subjected to. This precociousexposure to the world around them can engenderfear and mistrust, rendering it difficult for them torelax and imitate their caregivers and teachers. Inimitation there is a breathing in and out of oneanother, which requires a relaxed state and a trustful

outlook. In addition, when children observe theirparents at home, they are often sitting in front of acomputer screen performing an abstract task thatdoes not offer the raw materials and physicalgestures necessary to inspire focused, creative play.

The weakening of imitation makes it far moredifficult for children to play, but it also makes ithard for them to relate to other human beings inthe simple, relaxed way that children normally have.This can have long-lasting implications for theirsocial and psychological development. For all thesereasons, it is of the utmost importance that parentsboth minimize and supervise their children’sexposure to screen based media or, better yet,eliminate it altogether from their children’s dailyroutines. Most children show wonderful signs ofrecovery within a week or two after the removal ofscreen time from their lives, especially if there is anincrease in human interaction.

As a kindergarten teacher committed to helpingchildren with creative play, I was struck by howquickly one could see the difference in children’splay according to whether their media viewing athome was growing or declining. Research could bedone on this that could help parents and educatorsunderstand the direct negative relationship betweenmedia engagement and self-directed, creative playon the part of young children.

Launching a National Effort toRestore Play

As play disappears from the landscape of childhood,we need to recognize that its demise will have alasting impact. Decades of compelling research haveshown that without play, children’s physical, social,emotional, and intellectual development is compro-mised. They will develop without much imaginationand creativity. Their capacity for communicationwill be diminished and their tendency towardsaggressiveness and violence will increase. In short,human nature as we have known it will be pro-foundly altered, intensifying many of the problemsthat are already afflicting children and society. If wedo not invest in play, we will find ourselves invest-


ing much more in prisons and hospitals, as theincidence of physical, and mental illness, as well asaggressive and violent behavior escalates.

It is not too late, however, to commit ourselves toreestablishing play in children’s lives. Here are somesuggestions:

• Study the importance of play in children’slives. Appoint a blue ribbon commission ofrespected individuals with expertise in childdevelopment, play and education, includingthose representing national organizations thatfocus on these areas, to thoroughly investigatethe importance of play and its essential nature inearly childhood, underscoring, as appropriate,the message that it cannot be displaced withoutdoing serious harm to children.

• Assess early literacy and numeracy. An honestassessment is needed of the success or failure ofdirect instruction and other early academicapproaches in kindergartens and nursery pro-grams. We must stop politicizing education andinstead focus on the question of what childrenneed for their long-term healthy development.

• Clarify the health picture of children today,including the increase in mental illnesses.Appoint a blue ribbon commission with the Sur-geon General and other prominent health careprofessionals from the National Institutes ofHealth, the Department of Health and HumanServices, and national organizations such as theAmerican Psychological Association, the Ameri-can Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychia-try, and the American Academy of Pediatrics toelucidate and draw attention to the dramaticincrease in psychological disturbance amongchildren.

• Organize a massive public education cam-paign about play. Before it is too late and playhas completely slipped out of the lives of youngchildren, we need to organize public awarenesscampaigns about play’s importance, directed atparents, teachers and policy makers. How tofund such a campaign? Perhaps we should imi-

tate California in this regard; through Proposi-tion 10 the State has levied new cigarette taxeswith all the funds raised being earmarked forearly childhood programs.

These are major national efforts, and they will takemuch focus and energy, but the old adage stillholds that where there’s a will there’s a way. If wewant to help today’s children, we will need tomove quickly. It is hard, although not impossible,to reawaken the spirit of play in an adolescent or anadult through story telling, the arts and othermeans if they did not experience play in childhood.It is important that we bring play to those whomissed it, but even more important that we protectchildren’s right to play through a concerted effortin homes, schools and communities. In light of theconcerted effort of corporations and governmentagencies to banish open-ended creative play andreplace it with much narrower, defined play orfocused learning of letters and numbers at ever ear-lier ages, it has become imperative that we bandtogether and create a protective circle aroundchildhood and the child’s need and right to play.

References

1 A. Montagu, Growing Young (New York:McGraw Hill, 1981).

2 D. Goleman, P. Kaufman, and M. Ray, The Cre-ative Spirit (New York: Dutton, 1992).

3 Ibid., p. 46.

4 Ibid.

5 F. Jaffke, Toymaking with Children (Edinburgh:Floris Books, 1988). Combines experience andconversations with experienced Waldorf kinder-garten teachers such as Elizabeth Moore Haas ofSwitzerland, Freya Jaffke of Germany, MargretMeyerkort of Engand, and Bronja Zahlingen ofAustria.

6 E. Hyun, Making Sense of Developmentally andCulturally Appropriate Practice (DCAP) inEarly Childhood Education (New York: PeterLang, 1998).

Joan Almon • 17

7 S. Smilansky, “Sociodramatic Play: Its Relevanceto Behavior and Achievement in School,” Chil-dren’s Play and Learning, eds. E. Klugman andS. Smilansky (New York: Teachers College Press,1990), p. 19.

8 Ibid., p. 35.

9 Ibid., p. 25.

10 Der Spiegel (Nr. 20, 1977): pp. 89-90.

11 High/Scope Summary. Different effects fromdifferent preschool models: High/Scopepreschool curriculum comparison study. Drawnfrom works by L.J. Schweinhard and D.P. Wei-dart, et al, from http://www.highscope.org/Research/curriccomp.htm.

12 R.A. Marcon, “Moving Up the Grades: Rela-tionship between Preschool Model and LaterSchool Success,” in Early Childhood Researchand Practice, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2002).

13 S. Ohanian, What Happened to Recess and WhyAre Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten(New York: McGraw Hill, 2002), p. 11.

14 J. Steinberg, “Student Failure Causes States toRetool Testing,” New York Times (December22, 2000), cited in Ohanian, What Happened toRecess, pp. 11-12.

15 V. Strauss, “U.S. to Review Head Start Pro-gram,” Washington Post (January 17, 2003):A01.

16 Ohanian, What Happened to Recess. p. 10.

17 U.S. Senate Bill, X. 2566 (2002);http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi_bin/query.

18 Alliance for Childhood, Children from Birth toFive: A Statement of First Principles on EarlyEducation for Educators and Policymakers(2002). http://www.allianceforchildhood.com/projects/play/index.htm.

19 National Center for Education Statistics(NCES), Readiness for Kindergarten: Parentand Teacher Beliefs (1995). http:://www.educa-tionworld.com/a_curr/curr027.shtml.

20 S. Brown, State of the World Forum, WholeChild Roundtable, San Francisco, 1999.

21 Surgeon General, Call to Action to Prevent Sui-cide, Department of Health and Human Services(1999). http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/calltoaction/fact3.htm.

22 Surgeon General, Call to Action to Prevent andDecrease overweight and Obesity, Department ofHealth and Human Services (2001). http://surgeongeneral.gov/topics/obesity/calltoaction/CalltoAction.pdf.

23 Surgeon General, Summary of Conference onChildren’s Mental Health, Department of Healthand Human Services (2001).http://www.surgeiongeneral.gov/topics/cmh/childreporthtm#sum.

24 Center for Disease Control, ADHS—A PublicHealth Perspective (2002). http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/publichealth.htm.

25 California Department of Developmental Ser-vices, Changes in the population of Persons withAutism and PDDs in California’s DevelopmentalServices System: 1987-1998. A Report to the Legis-lature. http://www.dds.cahwnet.gov/autism/pdf/autism_report,199.pdf. p. 7

26 Ibid., p. 10.

27 Smilansky, “Sociodramatic Play,” pp. 36-40.

28 Ibid., p. 40.

29 TV Turn-Off Network, Facts and Figures aboutOur TV Habit. http://www.tvturnoff.org/images/facts&figs/factsheets/facts%20and%20figures.pdf.

Joan Almon is the Coordinator of the U.S.branch of the Alliance for Childhood, and formerchair of the Waldorf Early Childhood Associationof North America. She is internationally recog-nized as a consultant to Waldorf educators andtraining programs and the author of numerousarticles on Waldorf education. Ms. Almon is for-mer editor of the Waldorf Kindergarten Newsletterand a board member of the International WaldorfKindergarten Association.


People from different cultures often experi-ence difficulties understanding one another;they are often intolerant or hostile toward

one another. We can hardly stand it when peopleare different. Many exterminated groups of peoplewere not inferior to their executioners, just differ-ent and, above all — less egotistical.

This is not new. In the New Testament (John 15:25) we find the Lord saying, “they hated mewithout a cause,” which is a quote from twoPsalms (69: 4 and 35: 19). “Without cause,” butnot without ground. For what the Lord repre-sented was true humanity, true nondogmatic wis-dom and goodness of the kind which is not basedin texts but intuitively finds the moral, creativething to do in each situation. He reminds His fel-low human beings of what they could be; butbeing faced with the challenge to change in accor-dance with one’s own ideal picture easily tends tocall forth hatred against the one who represents

this picture. Christ purposely mentions the youngchild in the New Testament as a kind of ideal forhumanity (Matt. 18: 2; 18: 10; 19: 13; Mark 9:33; 10: 13; Luke 9: 46; 18: 15). And even amongHis disciples we see a failure to understand theessence of childhood (Matt. 19: 13; Mark 10: 13;Luke 18: 15).

Then, as now, the world of the grown-ups wasdifferent from the world of children. The differ-ence only increased with time. What exactly is thedifference?

The different, unnoticed...

Little children experience the world as one withthemselves; they identify with it. Grown-ups, onthe other hand, experience the world dualistically,in a subject-object relationship. A non-dualisticexperience means that there is no distance; arelationship is not established through thinking,but in a dreaming “clairfeelance.” The adult, too,makes an immediate connection through feeling;feeling bridges the gap because of the immediateidentification which takes place, as is the case inan emotion or in an artistic experience. The“separation” from the world is caused by theantipathy forces1, or, put in different words, it is

In What Respect Are Star Children Different?Studies concerning the extension of childhood*

Georg Kühlewind

* This article is published by permission of theauthor from Das Goetheanum: Wochenschrift fürAnthroposophie, Nr. 13, 30 March 2003.Translation by Jan Kees Saltet. Endnotes arereproduced as they appear in Das Goetheanum.

brought about by the building up of the “me-feeling.”2

The new generation can be broadly characterizedas lacking this built-up “me-feeling” in manychildren. The separation from the world —spiritual from physical — is in many cases lesspronounced than used to be the case with childrenof the same age in an earlier generation; as a result,the separating forces take effect later or slower. Inthis respect, these children are late compared to“normal” children; due to this lateness in develop-ment these children are fundamentally different innature. Sympathy forces predominate, resulting innumerous “deviations” from the usual capacitiesand achievements required at school, in thekindergarten, or at home.

These new children live in a picture-like3 orfeeling “thinking” instead of a linear, conceptualthinking (we can feel the meaning of a picture; itspeaks to us aesthetically). Being strongly con-nected with things, also with their own innergestures of consciousness, they have difficultiesforming concepts, which is the central aim ofeducation in most schools. Forming conceptsalways demands a selective narrowing of atten-tion. For example, when we try to awaken a sensefor the concept “smooth,” we will show the childseveral objects with a smooth surface; in theprocess, the child has to disregard form, size,substance and function of the object and focusinstead on the intended concept, namely“smoothness.” As long as the child still relates tothings by identifying, this “disregarding” cannotbe carried out; such a child will stay behind whenasked to form concepts, because it still experi-ences “world-inclusively.” This is the case withmany children who have symptoms variouslylabeled as ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, or Aspergersyndrome — and also with Star children.4 Theyhave difficultly adapting to the world of thegrown-ups. When this difference in constitutionis not understood by the parents and teachers,these children will quickly be labeled as “retard-ed,” “challenged” or in similar terms. In reality,these children are simply different; they havedifferent capacities that often go unnoticed.Going unnoticed, they are neither valued nor

nurtured. Instead, these children are usuallyblamed for their weak “achievements,” andjudged and treated as inferior. This often leads todepressions, inferiority complexes, or a lack ofself-esteem, all of which are compensated for byresistance, recalcitrance, aggression or a turninginward. A child who is really different in constitu-tion thus becomes a “difficult” child. Then comepsychological tests (in which such children oftencut a bad figure because they refuse to co-operate); they are given extra tutoring or sent tospecial schools where too little is demanded ofthem; they are treated with special drugs, and soon. This descent will easily lead to a collapse:many children end up in the hands of psychia-trists. A child who feels misunderstood will findno sense in life, will give up and withdrawcompletely, which is another form of beingdifferent.

Hyperactivity, too, can be seen as a continuation ofthe way toddlers live. Almost all healthy littlechildren are very active until the time they begin tospeak in sentences; people around them can hardlykeep up. We experience this enormous thirst forknowledge and experience as “normal.” When thisbehavior continues into school age, we speak of“hyperactivity.”

… and endangered world of thechild.

If the sense of self in a bodily sense (the me-feeling)is not built up strongly enough, the functioning ofthe senses will also be more like the earlier orienta-tion of the little child. Physical perception, based onthe physiological functioning of the sense organs, isreinforced by feeling components. As a result, bothover-functioning and under-functioning will occur,mostly in the realm of hearing; certain frequenciesand noises are heard by these children with painfulintensity. Asymmetrical distribution of hearing inthe two ears can also cause dyslexia, ADHD, andlearning difficulties.5 Strangely enough, thisabnormal hearing often goes together with abnor-malities in the function of other senses. Examplesare: excessive seeing,6 smelling, tasting and variousirregularities in the sense of touch and warmth.

20 • In What Respect Are Star Chi ldren Different?

When the child’s consciousness is insufficientlyindependent, being over-immersed in the surround-ings, the child will be unable to focus (on theteacher for example), and will be distracted fromeverything which happens around her (in theclassroom for example). Something will be happen-ing all the time: the noises of the turning of pages,the movements of children, street noises, and so on.In fact, these children do not have a lack, but ratheran excess of attention. The “butterfly-children” pickup much more in a short time (by means of theirfeelings) than the so-called normal children duringa much longer period of observation.7

All these irregularities can be traced back to aweakness in self perception (sense of their ownbodies, sense of self). At the same time unusualcapacities can be observed, especially wordlesscommunication without signals (“mind reading”),and the capacity to perceive the essence of otherhuman beings and look through them, be theypeers or adults. In society and in school, this canalso have its drawbacks. It is striking how manycreative people (in many realms) were dyslexic oreven autistic, in any case not “normal.”8

The insufficient “separation” from the worldmeans being less strongly incarnated — with allthe advantages (talents) and disadvantages (notliving properly on the earth) that come with it.We know of the many attempts to compensate forthis, such as self-destructiveness, aggression,compulsiveness, blind rage, fixations, inflexibleholding on to habits, obsession with order, andother symptoms.9 All these serve to replace themissing center, the everyday ego. The rightsolution would be to build up the real I or self,which the Star children seem to have to beginwith, something which shows itself in the self-assured and penetrating gaze, present immediate-ly after birth. The phenomena, showingthemselves with increasing intensity in the newgeneration of children, can be summarized in thefollowing insight. These children retain thecapacities of small children, and with it thechildlike relationship to the spiritual and physicalworld, longer, often much longer than grown-upsdo. In this sense one can speak of a slowing downor retardation.10 On the one hand this means a

more spiritual soul structure,11 on the other handan adaptation to the world of the grown-upswhich is initially slower or more measured. Bymaking the wrong judgment and taking inappro-priate measures, the former can be destroyed, thelatter made impossible.

A different way of being human:what to do?

It is no surprise that many parents, teachers andspecial education teachers do not see, or maybe donot want to see the change sketched above. Thischange is visible not only in the spirit and soulconfiguration of many children, but even extendsinto the biological realm with increased allergies andsusceptibility of life forces, various symptoms ofwhich occur more and more. It is hardly possible tounderstand these fundamental differences without aspiritually oriented psychology; we must also grantthat it is difficult to imagine such rapid changesoccurring in the development of humanity. We willleave developmental and scientific parallels in thehistory of mankind out of the present considerations.One shouldn’t blame specialists for misinterpretingthese developments, yet it becomes more and moredifficult to explain the increasing difficulties occur-ring in the schools and preschools as stemming fromenvironmental influences, not to mention geneticexplanations. Rather than discriminating againstchildren who deviate from the norm, prejudices haveto be put aside, for the time has come for a systemat-ic scientific study of these children.12

Couldn’t it be that we, who are older, have afeeling towards these children which is similar tothe feeling the contemporaries of the Lord feltarising in themselves towards Him? The childrenhold up a mirror to us, in which next to the idealpicture of the human being our real picture alsoappears, and it is hard for us to stand the differ-ence. These children say to us, “We show you adifferent way of being human, of living together;do you want to accept it? If so, you would have todo many things differently, and above all youwould have to recognize what we bring and stopmeasuring us with outmoded yardsticks. Look at us, before we become “difficult”, because

Georg Kühlewind • 21

afterwards we are always found lacking in manyrespects.”

At the end of this contribution, please allow me apersonal note. I would like to reassure all grown-ups who are confronted with the difficultiessketched above: they couldn’t have known whatcomes to meet them. On the other hand I willnever give up the hope that increasing numbers ofcontemporaries, especially among those who arefamiliar with Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science —despite its inherent special challenges — will get aglimpse of what is happening now between thespiritual world and the earth; will in fact gaininsights allowing a better understanding of Steiner.I beg you, dear parents, dear teachers: please give achance to the perspective which I have tried tostimulate with the considerations above! Perhaps itwill offer you helpful truths.

References

1 Rudolf Steiner in GA 306, lecture 2.

2 Georg Kühlewind,Das Goetheanum, 2001: num-bers 19–22, and Kühlewind, Aufmerksamkeitund Hingabe (Attentiveness and Devotion)(Stuttgart: 1998), chapter 6 to 8.

3 In the third chapter of GA 306, Rudolf Steinerdescribes this way of thinking as typical for chil-dren age 7-14; nowadays it is considered delayedbecause of the general acceleration.

4 Georg Kühlewind, Sternkinder (Star children)(Stuttgart: 2001).

5 Guy Bérard, Hearing Equals Behavior (Chicago:1993).

6 Ron Davis, The Gift of Dyslexia (New York:1994, 1997).

7 Georg Kühlewind, see footnote 2.

8 See footnote 6 and also Cornelia Janzen, Rätselder Legasthenie [Riddles of Dyslexia] (Stuttgart:2000).

9 So also Walter Holtzapfel, Der frühkindlicheAutismus als Entwicklungsstörung [Autism in theYoung Child As a Hampering to Development].(Stuttgart: 1981).

10 In the works of Henning Köhler concerning theproblems of these different children this concep-tion is sometimes expressed, but always in thebackground, as in his books Schwierige KinderGibt Es Nicht [There Are No Difficult Chil-dren], 1997; Was haben wir nur falsch gemacht?[What Have We Done Wrong?], 2000;WarMichel Aus Lönneberga Entwicklungsgestört?[Was Michael from Lonneberga Developmental-ly Retarded?], 2002.

11 Rudolf Steiner describes this more spiritual soulstructure in GA 317, 4th lecture, in which hefocuses on “crazy” and handicapped children.

12 We cannot fail to mention that an astonishingconservatism is to be observed in this area onthe part of the experts. There is a long list ofhealing methods and procedures to help affectedchildren, highly individual in nature and to alarge degree also dependent on those whoextend help. Thus, for example for people whodo not speak, supported communication (“Facil-itated Communication”—FC) is the only way tocommunicate and this method has been in exis-tence for about 14 years. Several books andpapers have been published about autism, forexample by Dietmar Zöllner, a veritable scientistof autism, who recently published his thirdbook, next to numerous other contributions,titled Autismus und Körpersprache [Autism andBody Language]. Then there are children wholearn to write completely independently, without“support.” There are effective therapies for hear-ing (AIT, which stands for Auditory Integra-tional Training; see footnote 5, and also AnnabelStehli’s books The Sound of a Miracle, 1991, andDancing in the Rain, 1995. The latter contains22 case histories with highly interesting observa-tions). In the area of the visual therapy MelvinKaplan (New York) should be mentioned, whohas essentially turned around the whole wayautistic (and “difficult”) children are diagnosed.Attempts have been made to treat the varioussymptoms with vitamins and nutrition. Holdingtherapy and learning to reach by means of pic-tures belong in this category. (Irina Prekop,Hättest Du Mich Festgehalten . . . [If Only YouHad Held Me . . .], 1999; Glenn Doman, Howto Teach Your Baby to Read).

22 • In What Respect Are Star Chi ldren Different?

Georg Kuhlewind is the author of over 20 bookson themes of linguistics, psychology, and epistemol-ogy. A professor of chemistry in Budapest, Hungary,for many years, he now teaches spiritual develop-ment internationally. He is the founder of the LogosFoundation, an international institute for thepromotion of developmentally appropriate childrearing and education.

Georg Kühlewind • 23

Twice yearly, a group of twenty or more Wal-dorf educators from around the world meetsunder the auspices of the Pedagogical Section

of the Anthroposophical Society to consider the stateof Waldorf education worldwide. Over three days, weshare observations, questions and implications ofsome of the experiences from Waldorf school com-munities so that we can anticipate the needs of chil-dren in the time to come. The North Americanschool movement is represented by Monique Grundof the San Francisco Waldorf School and JamesPewtherer of AWSNA and the Pedagogical SectionCouncil. The following is a report on some of theissues and ensuing thoughts raised in the meetings ofNovember 2002 in Stuttgart, Germany.

Strengthening our Teaching —Deepening our Work

What is it that makes the Waldorf school differentfrom other schools?

We have main lesson books which the children makethemselves. We have class teachers who lead a classfor eight years. We have a diverse curriculum that isbuilt on arts and practical work along with appropri-

ate academics. We offer eurythmy, unique amongthe arts in pedagogical work.

If we go somewhat deeper, we can point to ourconception of child development, with its focus onthe stages of learning according to the prevalence ofthe physical, etheric or astral body. We can point tothe focus which a teacher puts on each child,learning to read him or her, and in this reading,developing an educational plan that will be uniquelysuited to this child.

We can also cite the teacherly commitment to builda partnership with the parents in order to recognizeand support the children’s pre-earthly intentions asthey develop in the school years. We can note ourcommitment to an active meditative life as teachers,to keep ourselves open to perceive, understand andact out of insight which is bigger than any one ofus. Yet as important as all of the above are, we arecalled especially to one of the biggest tasks ineducation: the development and cultivation ofimagination, of fantasy in the children.

In our report of May 2002, I mentioned the HagueCircle’s work on the next World Teachers’Conference in 2004. The theme will be “The Forcesof Imagination in the Work of the Teacher,” and the

Hague Circle Report to North AmericanWaldorf Schools

James Pewtherer and Monique Grund

conference will take place in Dornach, Switzerland,from the 12th to the 17th of April, 2004. Ourdiscussions took us more deeply into the topic,exploring it not only from the point of view of workwith the children, but from that of teacher educationas well. If the teachers do not actively work withimagination themselves, how can they help tosupport it in the students?

Developing imagination is one of the most difficultcapacities to learn and to work with. It dies if youform it too much, yet it stimulates excitement,involvement, creativity and cutting-edge work whenyou have it. We might even say that it is one of thebest measures of your success as a teacher just by itsmere presence in a classroom. Working withimagination can feel as though you have grasped anidea by the tail, but an idea that is still becoming.You and the class have to be fleet of foot to stay upwith it and to work with it. Teachers and studentscreate a unique learning environment in everyclassroom where this kind of work exists. Yet itwould be erroneous to see it as ordinary academicwork. Imagination calls for a capacity which existsbetween the sometime polarity of work and play. Itmeans being willing to take an educated risk to letgo of the security of the known in exchange forwhat may come to be. Just as the good teachernurtures the children with his/her imaginativecapacity, the children feed the teacher with theirimaginative wisdom.

How can the teacher hope to develop and workwith imagination? The substance of this question isclearly a subject for an entire conference, but wewould like to share a few of the gems that emergedin our conversation on this theme.

• Imagination (“Phantasie” in German) is a cru-cial tool in freeing us from the materialism thatpermeates our society today.

• Meditating on the teaching year just passed, theteacher must decide whether to make judgmentson the coming year immediately or to wait tomeet the students at the beginning of the newyear. The latter allows for the kind of cross-fer-tilization between teacher and class noted above.

• Sharing your own research and discoveries withyour colleagues as an integral part of your facul-ty meeting is a crucial stimulus to imaginationand creativity for both the individual and thefaculty.

• Rudolf Steiner entreats us to work with the“Menschenkunde” (Foundations of HumanExperience/Study of Man) as the source of thisimagination and creativity in the classroom.Explaining this, he names three steps whichmust be taken for success in working with theseideas:

1. receive the “Menschenkunde” into yourself;

2. comprehend the “Menschenkunde” throughmeditating on it;

3. remember the “Menschenkunde”.

• He makes a strong connection between stepstwo and three: “It is not just common memory,but rather one that puts forth new inner impuls-es … meditative comprehension is followed byactive, creative … remembering which is at thesame time a receiving of what emanates fromthe spiritual world.”1 How do you as a teacherunderstand this?

• We should have the feeling in our work with the“Menschenkunde” that we can never get to thebottom of it, because the creativity of the indi-vidual is never exhausted.

• It is healthy to experience a kind of fear oruncertainty at the beginning of each new block,because it will bring something unknown. Whatis important is to accept this as a stimulant fornew ideas and a flow between children andteacher.

The Hague Circle would like to invite each school’sfaculty to focus on this central aspect of our work inthe school. While we hope that some of the fruits ofsuch work will be shared at the World Teachers’ Con-ference in 2004, we especially wish to have each schoolreflect on its own work in this regard. How does yourfaculty work to foster this capacity in your school?What have you discovered?

James Pewtherer and Monique Grund • 25

For the Waldorf school, these are the kinds of“standards” that we need to meet.

State of the Waldorf SchoolMovement Worldwide

• School growth around the world has stabilizedoverall; our growth phase has reached a plateau.

• Relations between teacher training institutionsand schools are often not very close; the needfor closer collaboration becomes increasinglyapparent.

• In Germany, the growth in the number ofschools has stopped for the moment but cura-tive schools continue to grow.

• Full-time trainings in Germany and Switzerlandare down in enrollment; Scandinavia does nothave enough EC teachers, but the Dutch train-ings are full.

• The call by schools for the establishment of atleast one teacher education center in each statein Germany stems from a recognition that hav-ing a teacher education center nearby strength-ens the work in a school. The Teacher Seminarin Stuttgart, as the main center in all of Ger-many, is trying to find a way to do this withoutunduly weakening the existing centers.

• Germany now has the first certified professor ofeurythmy in the world at Alanus University nearCologne.

• The European Waldorf schools are finding thatfewer teachers in the schools see teaching as alifetime career. Some additional phenomenaregarding teacher training at different placesaround the world include the fact that 85 per-cent of Waldorf teachers in Holland are women,and the fact that there is an apparent overalldecline in spiritual substance in the cooperativework of teachers. On the other hand, Austriareports that some university-trained educationgraduates have rediscovered a wish to teachafter spending a year in a Waldorf educationcourse.

• Living conditions are very difficult inVenezuela due to the economic crisis grippingthe country. Teachers and parents often barterto support the schools since no one has curren-cy available. As difficult as living conditionsare, the hard times have helped to bring peopletogether.

• President Bush’s reading and testing program(“No Child Left Behind”) is influencing coun-tries around the world to consider requiringtheir four-year-olds to meet similar standards.Increasing numbers of educators in these coun-tries are objecting to the premises behind thisearly instruction in conceptual learning.

The task of Waldorf educators and parents is agrowing one. We need to both protect children andeducate the public as to what education can andshould be. The materialism of our times cannot beallowed to swamp the human values that Waldorfschools embody. Each of us must commit to deep-ening our understanding of what we do, and thenfinding ways to share these views and work withothers. There are many people who are allies seek-ing the same goals.

As teachers, our task is not to allow ourselves tofall asleep to the needs of the times. Rather, ourresponsibility is to help to address these needsthrough the way we teach and the model ofhuman life and relationships that we present tothe children and the world.

References

1 Rudolf Steiner, Balance in Teaching (SpringValley, New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1982),42-43.

James Pewtherer is currently the Eastern RegionalChairperson for AWSNA. He was one of thefounding teachers of Hawthorne Valley School inHarlemville, New York. He has been a class teacherand high school teacher for 30 years.

26 • Hague Circ le Report to North American Waldorf Schools

Monique Grund has been a class teacher and anearly childhood educator since she began teachingin Chatou, France, in 1959. She grew up inDornach, Switzerland, and is a graduate of theRudolf Steiner School in Basel, Switzerland.

James Pewtherer and Monique Grund • 27

This special section of the Research Bulletin carriessome of the main proceedings from a researchconsultation held this past October (2002) atTeachers College, Columbia University. The topicof the consultation was “The Push for EarlyChildhood Literacy: Taking a Careful Look.” Itsconcern was to identify central issues raised by thecurrent pressures in American education—comingfrom all quarters of our culture—to teach literacyskills to young children at an ever-earlier age. Theconsultation involved about twenty personsrepresenting deep experience and knowledge in avariety of related areas, including among them,education, child development, psychology, andliterature. As the reflections of the participantspresented here indicate, the consultation attemptedto explore what is required for full and healthychild development in itself, as well as for theemergence of powerful, reading, writing, andthinking capacities in the growing child—and tobecome aware of serious threats to both posed bymuch of the early childhood literacy emphasis nowbeing enthusiastically championed by politiciansand many educators alike.

The consultation was sponsored by the Center forthe Study of the Spiritual Foundations of Educationat Teachers College, which is supported by the

Fetzer Institute, in collaboration with the Alliancefor Childhood. This was the culmination of severalsuch consultations on related topics held by theCenter at Teachers College over the past severalyears in cooperation variously with the Alliance forChildhood, Sunbridge College, and the ResearchInstitute for Waldorf Education.The keynote presentation at this consultation wasgiven by Barry Sanders, Peter and Gloria GoldProfessor of English at Pitzer College, author of Ais for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and theSilencing of the Written Word and of The PrivateDeath of Public Discourse. Barry and his wife Gracealso helped to found the Pasadena Waldorf School.Barry Sanders has been a much-valued participantin most of the Center’s earlier research consulta-tions, which he refers to in his talk, including theone at which the Alliance for Childhood was firstformally established. His keynote address is pub-lished here in the form it was given in order toconvey something of the immediacy of the consul-tation discussions and to set a rich context for thefurther reflections that follow.

Special Section: The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: Taking a Careful Look

Editorial Note

Iwant to start with three anecdotes, and thenmove into the more formal part of this presen-tation. Douglas has asked me to launch our

discussion and so with that in mind I have tried toconstruct some rather broad comments, and tocover just a few of the concerns that have interest-ed me since we last met. They all involve some ideaof motion.

Rodin and Motion. Rodin makes his comments inthe midst of the invention of motion pictures, inFrance, in the last part of the nineteenth century. Ilike his comments not just because they runcounter to the common-sense notions of motionpictures and what makes them move. But morethan that, Rodin himself is so wonderfully spiritualin his work—witness an entire exhibition in 2002at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on Rodin’sbronzes, titled “God’s Hands.”

The sculptor Paul Gsell questions Rodin about his“Age of Bronze” and “St. John the Baptist.” Gsellasks: “I am still left wondering how those greatlumps of bronze or stone actually seem to move,how obviously immobile figures appear to act andeven to be making pretty strenuous efforts… .”

Rodin answers: “Have you ever looked closely atinstantaneous photographs of men in motion? Wellthen, what have you noticed?”

“That they never seem to be making headway.Generally, they seem to be standing still on one leg,or hopping.”

“Exactly! Take my ‘St. John,’ for example. I’veshown him with both feet on the ground, whereasan instantaneous photograph taken of a model per-forming the same movement would most likelyshow the back foot already raised and moving for-ward. Or else the reverse — the front foot wouldnot yet be on the ground if the back leg in thephotograph were in the same position as in mystatue. That is precisely why the model in the pho-tograph would have the bizarre look of a man sud-denly struck with paralysis. Which confirms what Iwas just saying about movement in art. People inphotographs suddenly seem frozen in mid-air,despite being caught in full swing: This is becauseevery part of their body is reproduced at exactlythe same twentieth or fortieth of a second, sothere is no gradual unfolding of a gesture, as thereis in art.”

Moving in Slow Motion

Barry Sanders

Gsell counters: “So, when art interprets movementand finds itself completely at loggerheads with pho-tography, which is an unimpeachable mechanicalwitness, art obviously distorts the truth.”

“No. It is art that tells the truth and photographythat lies. For in reality, time does not stand still,and if the artist manages to give the impressionthat a gesture is being executed over several sec-onds, their work is certainly much less conventionalthan the scientific image in which time is abruptlysuspended.”

The End of Nature. An acquaintance, Bill McK-ibben, who writes about nature, tells the followingstory. By the way, McKibben is the person whowrote the book about watching television for onemonth solid, some eighteen hours a day, and whateffect that had on him and on his family, on hissense of looking once he ventured outside again.His reaction is in some ways incorporated in hisstory about taking a group of eight or nine ele-mentary school children from Maine out on anature walk.

After about thirty minutes on their outing, the stu-dents started complaining and wanted to go backhome. McKibben wanted to know why. They toldhim that they were bored. There was nothing todo, they whined, nothing was happening. McK-ibben then asked them to sit down on the ground,and to get very still. He then made them lookbetween the leaves of grass. Look, he said, every-thing is happening. There, hidden in the tufts ofgrass, all kinds of creatures were moving about. Butthe students had gotten their nature from theNature Channel, where movement involved a mon-goose doing battle with some monster snake, orfour tigers fighting over a game animal. They need-ed gross examples of action.

Hitchcock’s Actors. This third anecdote is aboutas unscientific as anyone could imagine, since itcomes from me. I teach a class on the films ofAlfred Hitchcock. Most of the films I show comefrom the fifties — “Strangers on a Train,” “RearWindow,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” andso on. Many of them are in black and white. Theyhave very little action. The sound is sometimes

brittle. While my students gradually come to likethese films, especially as final examination timeapproaches, they all agree that they would bombtoday. They lacked any real action — that was theiralmost universal complaint. They even asked me ifpeople moved more slowly back then, if theywalked and talked more slowly. My students had tolearn to have patience and to look –– steadily anddeliberately — for an extended period of time atimages. They had to learn to listen more intently.

Now, let me move to the more formal part of mypresentation; and naturally I hope to make a con-nection with my three anecdotes. I begin with twonotes of warning. First, there are many things wemight discuss this morning. At our last consulta-tion, some three or four years ago, we took up thevery pressing and very shocking question: Canchildhood survive? (We even tried to define thecharacteristics of childhood by listing them on theblackboard, to find out if there still was such athing called childhood.) We had the inclination,no, the luxury to ask that question, without think-ing of it as ironic or the slightest bit amusing. Sincethat time, terrorism and war, a perpetual state ofwar, has gobbled up our time and placed our imag-inations, as if in some kind of Guantanamo Bay,under arrest. Since we last met, the stock markethas plummeted, a number of CEOs have beenindicted or jailed for financial indiscretions, dittocertain priests for sexual indiscretions, unemploy-ment rates are up, basic civil rights have been cur-tailed, the government budget surplus has disap-peared, retirement accounts for many have gone upin a cloud of greed. It’s war with Iraq, no, withNorth Korea. It’s terrorism every time we turnaround: explosions, snipers, suicide bombers. Inthe midst of all this current tumult and angst, howlaughable, how refreshingly innocent, Y2K seems.As the twenty-first century nears the end of its sec-ond year, people seem fatigued — even exhausted.

A ray of hope for me: The other day on my Pacificaradio station, I heard that young woman, Julia But-terfly Hill, who took up residence 200 feet abovethe ground in a giant Sequoia tree to oppose clear-cut logging in the state of Washington. She wastelling an audience of college students about herimpulse. Look, she said, we can’t drink the water,

30 • Moving in S low Motion

we can’t eat the food, we can’t swim in a whole lotof the oceans, or eat much of the fish. Bio-tech haseven ruined the soybeans. Bush will not do any-thing about the poor and the homeless, or aboutlogging, she went on, or about our total depen-dence on fossil fuels. You want change? We have todo it ourselves. There must be a revolution ofyoung people, she charged, who take the reins ofpower and help to steer the world from a land ofaggression to a place of peace. She is young, shecan be easily written off; but there she is, at theend of the second year of the twenty-first century,tired but far from being bushed, exhorting heryoung friends to “read” the world anew. Sittingperfectly still in a tree, she helped start a smallmovement.

I ask you to imagine just how many tablets ofRitalin have been consumed by youngsters in ele-mentary schools since we last met, designed tokeep them sitting still; how many doses of Ecstasyhave been ingested, how much alcohol downed,and how many attempts at suicide since our lastmeeting. How many young people have been diag-nosed with ADD, ADHD, or some other learningdisability. The numbers must be colossal. I don’thave the exact figures. Not that it would muchmatter. I can tell you that since we last met, for thefirst time in our nation’s history, more young blackmales sit behind prison bars than behind collegedesks. America has over five million young adultoffenders — black and white and Chicano — eitherin jail, in probation camps, detention centers, orprisons. Add to that list those awaiting sentencing,or those who are out on probation or parole, andthe number reaches almost 9 million. The averagereading level for those incarcerated young people,whose ages range anywhere from fourteen to 22, isabout the fourth grade. The recidivism rate hoversaround 70% nationally. (The more education, bythe way, the lower the rate.)

I started a literacy program in one of those proba-tion camps; I teach in one of those camps, and letme tell you it is not a pretty picture, and thoseyoung people know it. They feel on the wholequite helpless. According to a 2002 Harvard study,completed fifty years after Brown v. the Board ofEducation, which purportedly put an end to “sepa-

rate but equal,” the majority of black youngsters inthis country still attend segregated schools. Thestudy found the most severe de facto segregation inschools in New York City.

In this country, prevention is the rule, incarcerationis the way. Parents, out of fear, I believe, out of adesperate fear that the world will pass their childrenby, want their sons and daughters to take up resi-dence behind a screen in kindergarten, if notbefore (after all, computer technology falls fromthe top of the line to the bottom of the heap in amatter of a few short months). Reading problems?Put those kids on a computer. Learning disabilities?Our college utilizes some five or six programs to fixthe students’ problems. Maybe they work. I havenot seen any positive results.

Given the state of the world, of this nation, parentscan care about their children only in what they per-ceive as the most protective, safest ways possible.Who can blame them? Parents are on perpetual redalert. Safety, no matter where we locate it — at anairport, at schools, around office buildings, thePentagon — is defined by the experts throughtechnology: metal detectors, retinal identification,PIN numbers, X-ray photos, magnometers, cardkeys, scanners, and on and on. Technology saved usin the nineties in the stock market; it certainly canhold those terrorists at bay, and it sure as hell willkeep guns and knives out of our schools. I cannotfault parents for reaching for what appears to bethe least porous solution to any problem. But I candoubt its efficacy. Like most institutional solutions,at some point they become counterproductive,leading me to wonder if young people do not actu-ally experience a rush of adrenalin entering schoolthese days; if they do not actually thrill to the dan-ger of crossing the threshold, in passing throughthe metal detector — who will get caught thismorning; who will beat the system?

My second warning: I am an historian, an historianof a peculiar kind. What interests me, as some ofyou know, is the strange career that ideas trace overbroad swaths of time. I think of myself as an histo-rian of “mental spaces.” How does cognition with-in orality, for instance, differ from that within liter-acy? This morning, in our consultation about chil-

Barry Sanders • 31

dren, about reading, about early reading, I want totake up what at first glance may not seem related toour subject. I think it is absolutely germane. In thecontext of this weekend’s subject, and keeping mythree anecdotes in mind, I am interested in lookingat the extreme edge of movement, a contemporarybrand of movement that technology has whippedinto a frenzy, and that the media choose — love —to call excitement.

Let me first say something about the oddity of theword, and why I have settled on it. “Excite”derives from the Latin excitare, to awaken, to callforth, instigate, set in motion. The word has noantecedent in Anglo-Saxon, appearing in Englishfor the first time in the fourteenth century as adecidedly religious term expressed in a grammar ofmystical proportions: “The singing of the psalmsexcites the angels to our help.” The angels getsung into being. They wing our way on a melodyof our making. From that early use of the word, asa verb, “excite” gets taken over by the scientificrevolution and turned into a noun, “excitation,” todescribe a state of electrical or magnetic alertness(as in phrases like “the air was downright electric,”or “excitement is in the air”).

Through analogy, the word moves, in the seven-teenth century, to physiology. First used by Shake-speare, “excitement” carries overtones of a vibrat-ing, aberrant behavior. It is Hamlet who first uttersthe word in this new sense, in Act IV, Scene 4 ofhis play: “A father killed, a mother stained. Excite-ments of my reason, and my blood.”

That line complements (in the sense of completing)his famous “to be or not to be” speech — the solil-oquy in which Hamlet tries to decide what itmeans to be human, what it means to act. Or, per-haps more precisely, how to act. In his madness, orfeigned madness, things visit him, events bombardhim; he has visitations, perhaps from angels, per-haps from demons. They may be the same — that’shis fear. He is frightened, desperately aware ofneeding to do something, but awkwardly frozen inplace. He cannot move, but he is fully ready tomove. Hamlet, like a filament in a light bulb, haspassed into a state of excitation: to be and not tobe at the very same time. He is still, in the dual

sense of that word: no movement, quiet — and allmovement: “are you still doing that?”

The “to be or not to be” speech, for me, is less anexploration of suicide and more an exquisite ren-dering of a state of pure potential, where anything(or everything) is continually possible. It’s neitheraction nor inaction, but the sheer tingling excite-ment of being alive — with all of its attendantproblems and possibilities, fears and failures — atwinning of the character into Hamlet and Ham-let’s self. But that moment in the word’s historyfades fast. Who can sustain such demanding excite-ment? By the nineteenth century, physicians use“excitement” to denote a state of abnormal activity,a pathology, in any organ.

In the modern sense, Hamlet is turned on, just asexcitement promises to turn us all on. We are notpassive agents in the face of it. We invoke it. DoesHamlet like the state of excitement? I do not know.Clearly, he helps to bring it on. He certainly feelsalive, so alive, so electrically charged, that he can-not stand it. Contrary to most interpretations thatHamlet feels dead and emasculated, I say he feelstoo much alive. He lives in that liminal state sus-pended between being and non-being, alive at anemotional midnight hour. I know that at least someof us in the room have experienced that state, read-ing a great writer’s sentences and having to dropthe book, not out of regret or repulsion, butbecause the pages just take our breath away and weneed for the moment to stop.

The soliloquy suggests a Hamlet beside himself,one who stands outside himself talking to his self.Hamlet more than feels. In his immobilized state,he is finding his deepest emotion. I do not say thisto make cute etymological distinctions. “Emotion”had not even entered the language when Shake-speare wrote Hamlet; it came as late as 1692, in abook by the political philosopher John Locke, enti-tled On Education.

It is a curious word, “emotion,” distant cousin toexcitement. Feelings need proximity; the ideainheres in the word itself (“I’m feeling bad; I’mfeeling badly”). But emotions need no such intima-cy to set them spinning and churning. I can be


touched from great distances. I can be moved with-out being physically touched. Emotion grows outof an internal motion. Likewise, emotion causesmotion, it moves me to action. To be touched car-ries two meanings; to be moved carries two mean-ings. None of this can happen without a highlyactive imagination, a rich, deep, interior life.

Excitement operates differently from emotion.Excitement arrives as both stimulation andemotion — one undifferentiated charge, a loud“wow” — a “rush,” young people call it. It comesin such a powerful, massive way, it’s difficult fora person, especially a young person, to have anynuanced emotional response. When we are young,emotion requires absolute motion. Learning tostand up, to walk, literally turns into a trip. Slightlylater for young people, excitement means goingsomewhere, some amusement park, for instance,where, because of the rides, parks become perpetu-al-motion machines.

Again, I am sorry for the long drawn-out prologue.I wanted to show something of the journey thatexcitement took from its earliest religious incarna-tion, to its disturbing enfleshment in the seven-teenth century, to all forms of contemporary enter-tainment — fast action, nastily violent entertain-ment. These days, judging from popular entertain-ment, killing, car chases, boat and plane crashes,mayhem and torture are all exciting. Fear Factor,Survivor, Extreme Games —anything is fair gamethat brings people to the brink, to the clear expec-tation that something gruesome and bloody justmight, with a little luck, fill the totality of whateverscreen they happen to be watching — and perhapsspill over into so-called real life. The titillation ofdisaster (how many times an hour did the TwinTowers collapse the day and evening of September11, 2001?) — triggers in us an excitation. Ofcourse the Twin Towers and even the White Househad already been blown into smithereens longbefore 9/11 in high-powered films like “Indepen-dence Day.” “High-powered” is a phrase used todescribe a wide range of things: rifles, cars, alcohol,armaments, football teams, espresso, and hot sauce.

In the Middle Ages people invoked excitement —they called it forward, controlled it — by singing

the psalms. Nowadays, we push a button, flip aswitch, swallow a pill, inject a needle, to have it paya visit — and the age of the user seems to matterless and less. The images come flying relentlessly bythe hundreds and thousands. The imaginationbecomes a warehouse for storing, rather than aninstrument for conjuring. One has to shake off therush of stimulated reality. It’s hard to return to aworld washed clean of special effects. The imageslinger from the electronic realm, the emotions stillstirred, demanding some discharge.

Elsewhere, I have argued for the imagination as theultimate prophylaxis against the relentlessness ofelectronic technology. At a certain moment, ayoung person must put down the mouse and pickup his own judgment. He or she must start think-ing. Even with the most sophisticated programs,one must ask, “What do I want to do?” Not “Whatcan the machine accomplish?” but “What do Iwant?”

I have also argued that the best, most strenuousexercise of the imagination comes through reading.But reading is slow and cumbersome; it lacks thepizzazz of thrill rides, extreme sports and videogames. Open a page: everything’s flat and utterlystill. The words do not move. If anything moves,it’s the reader. Just watch kids fidget when theyread; they read and rock, like Hassidic Jews prayingin shul. Anthropologists call it a psycho-motorresponse to the written word. Kids love to move;they need to. It’s in their bodies that they find therhythm of prose. After all, the music’s calledrock‘n’roll, hip hop. (The meter of poetry is divid-ed into feet, and those feet derive their names fromdance steps.)

But the great, important movement remains out ofview, invisible, acted out in the mind’s eye, orplayed out in the mind’s living room, rumpusroom or gymnasium. The reason so many novels,poems and fairy tales involve pilgrimages, voyagesand road trips — from Chaucer to Kerouac — isthat movement means that time has passed andelapsed time implies change, emotional change,one of the hardest things to dramatize. We seeHuck as a different boy at the end of his drift downthe Mississippi — he thinks differently, he feels dif-


ferent. He knows it. He wants more. He cannotget any bigger without lighting out for the territo-ry. Immensity is all. America’s the place to grow. Italways has been.

Listen to the metaphors we use to capture thenature of thought: I came to this decision, I arrivedat this conclusion, let me walk you through thisargument. They all circumscribe space. In theRenaissance, people devised mnemonic tricks asmemory aids. The favorite one involved making theinside of one’s head into a house, dividing it intorooms, and placing objects from a list that onewished to memorize in those rooms. To recall thelist, one merely walked through each room and re-collected the objects. Three hundred years ago,people played with interior space. They felt sofamiliar with it they used it as a form of entertain-ment.

When a thirteen-year-old girl with the code nameGenie arrived at the DPSS Office (Department ofSocial Services) in Monrovia, California, in 1977,she walked with her hands in front of her face. Herfather had kept her locked in her room twenty-fourhours a day, strapped to her potty seat during theday, and to her bed at night. She had no language;she had no depth perception. Kasper Hauser, too,without language, experienced the world in twodimensions. The world, he said, looked like some-one had tossed buckets of colored paint against awall. Think about diagramming sentences — gram-mar suspends sentences in space. A distance sepa-rates subject from verb from object. Farther outthere, barely visible from where we stand at thesubject end of the sentence, waits the lonely,dependent object.

In that space, thoughts move. In that space, ideaswork themselves out. That mentalized, interiorizedspace gets generated in the act of silent reading.“Silent” of course misstates the case, because inter-nalized vocalization excites images in just the waypsalms excite angels. Why not think of angels andimages as similar: messengers from another world. Iset my ideas in motion through excitement. Excite-ment gets me going.

Excitement is movement. Movement, motion, e-motion requires an excitation. For me, this occursmost powerfully in reading. As a preparation forentertaining an entire range of emotions, youngpeople get their training in stories that they hearout loud, in making them up themselves, in beingread to out loud, in reading aloud to themselves, inreading silently, and finally in writing their own sto-ries. Wordsworth’s walking, talking ramble with hissister Dorothy in his poem “The Prelude” has thesame spatial, mobile, emotional charge as Dante’scircular stroll on his way to Paradise. Emersonwalks his talk in his famous essay “Walking.” Onespace — interior — maps on to another — exterior.

Against a backdrop of moving pictures, pulsing pix-els, and streaming videos, the word “reading”sounds terribly old-fashioned and creaky. The bookmoves in the way Rodin wants his sculptures tomove. We, as readers, make the letters dance. Buttry to explain that to a youngster. What to do? Forit’s in reading that I’m convinced young peoplelearn not just to exert some control over theirworld, but to reshape it, as well. I want to conjuresomething better, more hopeful, than “The Termi-nator.” I want to imagine something better thanterror versus anti-terror. The world is not goodguys versus bad guys.

Manufactured, packaged and processed, technolog-ically-driven excitement is corrosive to lived experi-ence. It has helped to eradicate the wonderful pos-sibilities of the everyday and the mundane — theordinary objects and events of daily life. Now morethan ever, we need poets to show us the charge ofthe quotidian, the everyday, as Richard Wilbur doesso magnificently in his poem, “Love Calls Us ToThe Things Of This World.” Wilbur is writingabout the sudden explosion of beauty in, of allthings, a clothesline with the morning wash flap-ping in the wind. It is the excitation of love — thesheer thrill of being alive — that interests Wilburand transforms the most mundane of activities intothe most magical of moments:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,And spirited from sleep, the astounded soulHangs for a moment bodiless and simpleAs false dawn.


Outside the open windowThe morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are inblouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.Now they are rising together in calm swellsOf halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wearWith the deep joy of their impersonal

breathing;

Now they are flying in place,conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence,moving

And staying like white water; and now of asudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quietThat nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks.

From all that it is about toremember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day,And cries,“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but

laundry,Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steamAnd clear dances done in the sight of

heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledgesWith a warm look the world’s hunks and

colors,The soul descends once more in bitter loveTo accept the waking body, saying nowIn a changed voice as the man yawns and

rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddygallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs ofthieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floatingOf dark habits,

Keeping their difficult balance.”

The new velocity of narration, story-telling as atriple-X, extreme event, is not only wiping out theeveryday, it has kidnapped the world of orality.Young people are sleepwalking —deprived of theregularity of breathing and the phenomenology ofseeing which orality so powerfully promotes.Speaking, conversation, storytelling, creep at apetty pace; events repeat themselves, double backon themselves. Events exist and do not exist,they’re true and not true —they troop about in adreamy state. Young people now expect the worldto resemble in sight and sound a game of Doom orSniper; or, perhaps, knowing that it cannot, findthis world a pale facsimile compared with the spe-cial-effects versions that the media offer. The worldand its copy have traded places — the simulationmore powerful than the actual.

Excitement has replaced the richness of interiorspace. Excitement is an internalized thrill ride andworks best when the self has been weakened.Coleridge’s use of the supernatural demanded, hesaid, the willing suspension of disbelief; excitementrequires no act so deliberate —willingness and sus-pension both beside the point.

In the past, I have argued that young people, nei-ther oral nor literate, must be taken out of theirilliterate limbos and brought back to orality to startall over from the beginning. Now, I believe it’simportant to pull young people away from theirworld of virtual movement and bring them backinto that interior space where motion and emotionbegin their journey. I did not ask, near the begin-ning of this morning’s talk, how many Big Macs,Biggie Fries, and Super-Size Cokes youngsters havegobbled and gulped since we last met. The amounthas to be staggering, not just in number, but incalorie counts, as well. How can they not grow fat-ter and fatter, consuming huge amounts of calorieswith the impression, the illusion, that they havegone through great activity and movement bywatching it happen on the screen. While the move-ment may be virtual, the obesity is shockingly real.Is it possible that living in the virtual, electronicworld of heavy-duty excitement, creates the illusionthat one needs more fuel?


Let us substitute one kind of orality — consuming— for another kind, one where youngsters practicetheir sense of timing, their sense of humor, wherethey can learn to love the power of a few words, aquip, a couple of well-turned sentences, an image— where they come face to face with the thrill oflanguage; all this oral activity in anticipation, inpreparation, for reading and writing. (It’s in thatoral state that interior space gets nurtured, beforeyoung people come into a fuller and more maturestate in literacy.)

This is dangerous stuff, this culture of excitement.It may even have eroded some important elementsin adult life. For we seem to have lost the ability tounderstand or comprehend any more the mostaggressive and all-consuming form of action andmovement: war itself. It’s too remote, too highlytechnologized, and, for the most part, too clean.We know war best when something goes wrong,and then only for a flash. And only as an adjunct —something called collateral damage. But more thanthat, I fear, the declaration of war may be justanother one of those things, among scores of oth-ers, like wild movies, super-fast cars, high octanefuel, that keeps the air electric with excitement.

Books cannot compete with B-52 bombers or thebox office. But taking our students, no matter theirage, back to a state of orality, to the free and easy,sheer pleasurable dance of words, as Ezra Poundcalls it — logopoeia — can open the door to one ofthe most exciting realms any person can enter. Forliteracy always begins with orality. What a strangestate of affairs, that the perfect, fortified defenseagainst outright attacks of virtual, exciting violenceshould find its match in the most basic, evanescent,precious, most invisible and, at the same time, mostactual stuff — human breath.


Over the past decade, there has been analarming increase in the incidence andprevalence rates of child psychopathology

across a wide range of diagnostic categories, includ-ing Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Autis-tic Spectrum Disorders (Asperger’s Disorder in par-ticular), and Bipolar Disorder.1 Advances in geneticresearch and brain imaging techniques have led to awealth of insights into the genetic and neurochemi-cal substrates of a number of psychiatric illnesses,facilitating more precise interventions for scores ofchildren who might otherwise have been misunder-stood as lazy, moody, immature, unintelligent, orthe victims of bad parenting.

While medical research has advanced our under-standing of specific mental illnesses, it fails toexplain the increase in the number of childrenbeing labeled as psychiatrically disturbed acrossdiagnostic categories. Some researchers suggest thatthe percentage of children who suffer from psychi-atric illness has not actually changed but, rather,increasingly sophisticated assessment tools enableus to identify more children who might not havebeen correctly diagnosed at an earlier time. Howev-er, given the sheer number of children who are

purported to have gene- and brain-basedpsychiatric illnesses (and are ingesting daily doses ofpowerful psychotropic drugs), and given theexquisite sensitivity of the brain and of gene activa-tion to environmental influence during infancy andearly childhood, we must also consider the role ofthe environment.

Young children in the United States are being chal-lenged by a confluence of factors that include wide-spread poverty,2 the disintegration of the family,3

inadequate access to medical care,4 unregulatedand substandard daycare facilities,5 and trends ineducation that are profoundly insensitive to chil-dren’s developmental needs and to variations intheir learning styles and intelligences.6 These trendsinclude the premature introduction of formal acad-emic subjects with the aid of computer softwarethat privilege cognitive development over socialand emotional development, and increasingly uni-form curricula and outcome measures.7 Vulnerablechildren may well be succumbing to psychiatric ill-nesses which they might have otherwise avoided inhealthier and more supportive environments. Inaddition, as young children are required to func-tion under constraining conditions at school, indaycare and at home, and as caregivers and teachersbecome more stressed themselves, they may be

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A Risk Factor inChild Psychopathology

Sharna Olfman

quicker to label children under their care as dis-turbed whose personalities, profile of talents, ordevelopmental timetables are not an ideal fit withthe environment.

Pathogenic Trends in EarlyChildhood Education

The Need for Play: Early childhood literacy pro-grams that usurp time for play are at odds withwhat and how children are designed to learn. Inthe words of Lev Vygotsky, “children stand a headtaller when they play” as they learn to symbolizeobjects and events, delay gratification, practice self-regulation, assimilate adult roles, exercise imagina-tion, practice motor skills, and develop emotional,social and verbal literacy.8

The Interdependence of Emotional, Social andIntellectual Growth: As Stanley Greenspan andStuart Shanker’s9 compelling research demon-strates, emotion is not merely a form of intelli-gence, but rather the cornerstone of all aspects ofintellectual development. Children who are notemotionally engaged with the material they arelearning and by the teachers who instruct them,cannot grow intellectually. Teachers who facilitatehealthy play provide an ideal means of integratingsocial, emotional and intellectual growth in a stage-appropriate way. Teaching preschoolers to read isan example of a prevailing attitude that cognitivedevelopment is the purview of educators andsocial/emotional development is a personal matter.This attitude is in keeping with the information-processing model of learning which conceptualizesthe brain as a computer and cognition as the pro-cessing of information.10

“High Stakes Testing”: It goes without sayingthat setting standards for preschool education isessential, and that assessing children’s readiness forkindergarten not only exposes programs that aren’tworking but also highlights the urgent need toimprove social policies that support the family, suchas family leave, subsidized daycare and housing,universal health insurance, and raising the mini-mum wage to a living wage.11

Unfortunately, initial efforts to create and assessstandards have been used punitively, so that schoolsthat don’t perform well because they are in need ofresources are denied aid. As a result, many teachersfeel pressured to get results and “teach to the test,”but the tests themselves are insensitive barometers ofwhat and how children should be learning. We arenow seeing the mindset of “high stakes testing” fil-tering down to preschools, as their test scores alsobecome tied to funding. As our understanding of therich and varied ways in which children learn andtheir intelligence increases, we are requiring them toperform in increasingly prescribed ways, and thosewho don’t fit the model may suffer enormously12.

Trends in American Society

Thus far, I have suggested that certain trends in edu-cation are insensitive to children’s psychological well-being and may be contributing to the significantincrease in psychiatric disturbance in children. Thisbegs the question: What underlying currents inAmerican culture are fomenting these changes? Whyhave so many policymakers, parents and educatorsbecome obsessed with teaching three-year-olds toread in increasingly uniform, high-tech settings? Twofeatures of American culture that are influencing howwe educate children are 1) our uncritical embrace oftechnologies, and 2) privileging the rights of individ-uals over responsibility to community.

Screen Nation: Children who are exposed toscreens for several hours each day, often from infan-cy, while their brains are rapidly developing, will beprofoundly affected by both the content (e.g. vio-lence, rapid-fire stimuli) and the process of watch-ing screens (e.g. passively absorbing images andfantasies rather than actively creating their own,stimulating the visual centers of the brain at theexpense of the language centers, and interactingwith machines rather than humans).13 As a conse-quence, children’s ability to play, pay attention, uselanguage, and engage in emotionally and sociallyappropriate ways is undermined. It may be no coin-cidence that educators at the elementary, secondaryand college level are decrying their students’ inabil-ity to read, pay attention and think critically or cre-atively.14 Teaching preschoolers to read can beunderstood as a desperate effort to compensate,

38 • The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A Risk Factor in Child Psychopathology

having created the conditions for academic failurein older children. It is particularly ironic that effortsto teach preschoolers to read often utilize comput-er programs with entertaining graphics that under-mine literacy.

Advances in computer technology were the catalystfor the development of the information processingmodel of learning with the computer as itsmetaphor. This model overlooks the central role ofemotion, intuition, morality, and experiential learn-ing in cognitive development.15 Computer andinternet technologies are also big business, and asbaby laptops and preschool software become derigeur and anxious parents become convinced thattheir children will fall behind unless they furnishthem with state-of-the-art computers, corporateexecutives (who in turn fund political campaigns)have much to gain.16

The Cult of Individualism: Rugged individualismand the right to privacy have served American pio-neers and successive waves of immigrants fleeingoppression very well. Individualism, which shifted theunit of personal membership from the community atlarge to the family, has also had the effect of under-mining the development of humane social policiesthat support family life.17 As television and the inter-net promote shameless consumerism and immediategratification, and successive administrations continueto impoverish aid to struggling families, parents areincreasingly less able or willing to take responsibilityfor their children. And so, without the safety net ofcommunity or family, many children are fending forthemselves: children are becoming miniature adultsand adults are becoming more childlike.18

Conclusion

It is a striking paradox that as adults feel increasing-ly entitled to place their individual needs first, weare creating educational environments that do notrespect children’s individuality or their special sta-tus as children. We introduce concepts long beforechildren are ready to master them, deny their needfor play, subject them to uniform curricula andassessment, and label and drug the children who donot fit in. Our preoccupation with understandingthe genetic and neurological bases of illness, while

ignoring the power of the environment, also speaksto our increasingly mechanized conceptualizationof human nature.

I would recommend the following research efforts:

In recent years, stage theories have fallen out offavor, and yet they retain face validity in teachers’and caregivers’ awareness of when children undertheir care have achieved developmental milestonessuch as kindergarten or grade one readiness. A syn-thesis of the work of Piaget, Erikson, Greenspan,and Vygotsky, with a focus on the role of play inearly childhood, would be timely.

In her book Failure to Connect, Jane Healy articu-lates a number of concerns about how early andexcessive computer time is impacting on children’ssocial, emotional, moral, intellectual, and neurolog-ical development. Research on how children areaffected by both the content and process of com-puter use is urgently needed.

We need to create a better tracking system of inci-dence and prevalence rates of children’s psy-chopathologies, cross-culturally, nationally, andregionally, and correlate these with risk factors suchas poverty, access to health care, stability of familylife, quality of daycare, quality of early childhoodeducation, and opportunities for play. We also needmore systematic information about patterns of drugprescription among children.

References

1 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,Atlanta, GA (www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/dd/ddautism.htm and www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/dadphra.htm), 2002; R.DeGrandpre, Ritalin Nation: Rapid-Fire Cul-ture and the Transformation of Human Con-sciousness (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999); E.Fonbonne, “Is There an Epidemic of Autism?”Pediatrics 107, 2001, 411-413; J. Kluger, S.Song, D. Cray & J. Ressner, “Young and Bipo-lar,” Time, August 19, 2002, 42.

2 J. D. McLeod & M. J. Shanahan, “Trajectoriesof Poverty and Children’s Mental Health,” Jour-

Sharna Olfman • 39

nal of Health and Social Behavior 37, 1996,207-220; Child Poverty in the United States(New York: National Center for Children inPoverty, 2000); E.F. Zigler & N.W. Hall, ChildDevelopment and Social Policy: Theory and Appli-cations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000)

3 E. M. Hetherington, M. Bridges & G.M. Ins-abella, “What Matters? What Does Not? FivePerspectives on the Association between MaritalTransitions and Children’s Adjustment,” Ameri-can Psychologist 53, 1998, 167-184; U.S. Bureauof the Census, Statistical abstract of the UnitedStates, 120th Ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Gov-ernment Printing Office, 2000)

4 The State of America’s Children: Yearbook 2000(Washington, DC: Children’s Defense Fund,2000)

5 D.L. Vandell, K Dadisman & K. Gallagher,“Another Look at the Elephant: Child Care inthe Nineties,” in R.D. Taylor & M.C. Wang(eds.), Resilience Across Contexts: Family, Work,Culture, and Community (Mahwah, New Jersey:Erlbaum, 2000), 91-120.

6 S.I. Greenspan, The Growth of the Mind and theEndangered Origins of Intelligence, (Cambridge:Perseus Books, 1997)

7 C. Cordes & E. Miller (eds.), Fool’s Gold: ACritical Look at Computers in Childhood (Col-lege Park, Maryland: Alliance for Childhood,2000); S.I. Greenspan, op. cit.; J.M. Healy, Fail-ure to Connect: How Computers Affect our Chil-dren’s Mind and What We Can Do About It(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); J.M.Healy, Endangered Minds (New York: Simon &Schuster, 1990)

8 E. Klugman & S. Smilansky (eds.), Children’sPlay and Learning (New York: Teacher’s CollegePress, 1990); K.A. Roskos & J.F. Christie (eds.),Play and Literacy in Early Childhood: Researchfrom Multiple Perspectives (Mahwah, New Jersey:Erlbaum, 2000); O.N. Saracho & B. Spodek(eds.), Multiple Perspectives on Play in EarlyChildhood Education (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1998); L. Vygotsky, “Play and itsRole in the Mental Development of the Child,”in J. Bruner, J. Jolly & K. Sylva (eds.), Play: Its

Role in Development and Evolution, 537-554

9 “Emotional Bases of Intelligence: Implicationsfor the Classroom,” in S. Olfman (chair), A Cri-sis in Early Childhood Education: The Rise ofTechnologies and Demise of Play, Pittsburgh, Sec-ond Annual Childhood and Society Symposium,2002

10 J. Kane (ed.), Education, Information andTransformation: Essays on Learning and Think-ing (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1999)

11 D.G. Singer, J. Singer, S.L. Plaskon & A.E.Schweder, “A Role for Play in the PreschoolCurriculum,” in S. Olfman (ed.), A Crisis inEarly Childhood Education: The Rise of Technolo-gies and Demise of Play (Westport, Connecticut:Greenwood/Praeger, 2003)

12 H. Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory inPractice (New York: Basic Books, 1993); S.I.Greenspan, op. cit.

13 J.M. Healy, 1998, op. cit.

14 J.M. Healy, 1990, op. cit.

15 J. Kane, op. cit.

16 C. Cordes & E. Miller, op. cit.

17 S. Scarr, “Individuality and Community: TheContrasting Role of the State in Family Life inthe United States and Sweden,” in Scandina-vian Journal of Psychology 37, 1996, 93-102.

18 N. Postman, Building a Bridge to the EighteenthCentury (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000)

Sharna Olfman, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologistand an associate professor of Psychology in theDepartment of Humanities and Human Sciences atPoint Park College, Pittsburgh, where she special-izes in Child Development and directs the Child-hood and Society Symposium series. She is the editorof the Childhood in America book series forPraeger Publishers, and her anthology All Workand No Play: How Educational Reforms are Harm-ing our Preschoolers will be available in December,2003 (Praeger publishers).

40 • The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A Risk Factor in Child Psychopathology

Several issues and concerns relating to earlychildhood literacy in the current political cli-mate seem very important and worthy of

discussion.

First, the age-old reading debate over whethercode-first or meaning-first instruction works besthas become more politicized than ever. The 2000Republican national platform endorsed phonics,and the Bush administration promotes the teachingof phonics in America’s classrooms and is tyingfunds to programs that explicitly teach phonics.The National Reading Panel mandated by Con-gress, which promotes systematic phonics instruc-tion, was produced largely by McGraw-Hill authorswho write phonics-based materials and has beencriticized as an extremely flawed research effort.But the report by this panel is having widespreadinfluence over classroom instruction nationwide.This politicization of the longtime reading debateis undermining the progress that has been made inthe literacy field toward better integration of thesetwo opposing views. What serves children best isfor research and theory to point educators towardthe best practices that can support children’s opti-mal literacy development. This path is available toeducators now, but is being undermined by thecurrent administration’s bias.

A related issue of concern is that politicalleaders are not turning to the experts in the fieldsof literacy and early childhood education for guid-ance in developing policy. The report of theNational Research Council, headed by CatherineSnow of Harvard University, entitled PreventingReading Difficulties in Young Children calls for abalanced approach to literacy and spells out in greatdetail what kinds of language and literacy experi-ences children need in preschool and child care set-tings.1 Two committees of scholars in the literacyfield have recently produced large works whichspell out the wide range of specific experiences inoral and written language that young children needin order to become proficient readers and writers.These two books, Speaking and Listening forPreschool through Third Grade and Reading andWriting Grade by Grade, also present practical stan-dards for early literacy achievement beginning inkindergarten and standards in speaking and listen-ing that begin with preschool.2 These standardsput into practice the best of what is known in thefield of literacy today, but they are not the stan-dards on which federal policies and funding arecurrently based.

The federal government has also not relied on theknowledge base which guides practice in the field

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: Critical Issues and Concerns

Nancy Carlsson-Paige

of early childhood education. In its widely usedbook Developmentally Appropriate Practice in EarlyChildhood Programs Serving Children From BirthThrough Age 8, the National Association for theEducation of Young Children (NAEYC) has identi-fied teaching practices in early literacy that bestsupport young children’s literacy development.3

These include the frequent reading of books, activi-ties of drawing, painting and writing, play withopen-ended materials, and unstructured, make-believe play. Emergent reading skills, such as know-ing that a story is the same with each reading andbeginning to know that meaning is conveyed inprint, develop in settings that offer these kinds ofactivities. In such settings, children also begin tolearn basic concepts about writing — print aware-ness, functions of print, and phonological aware-ness — as they experiment making marks and let-ters on paper with encouragement from theirteachers. These emergent skills are developmentaland occur differently in every child. NAEYC isopposed to the imposition of uniform standardsand timetables on young children, and to standard-ized tests in the early years.

Another concern is that children today are havingfewer of the kinds of experiences they need inorder to build a strong foundation for early litera-cy. Even children ages two to four spend almostthree hours a day in front of a screen. The hourslost in play and interactions with materials andpeers puts children at increased risk for difficultyin learning to read and write. The erosion of playis of special concern because it is a main vehicleused by children to make sense of the world. It isthrough the reordering of experience throughplay that children actively make meaning of theirexperience, begin to use symbols that representtheir ideas, and build the foundation for compre-hension of print. Children are getting fewer posi-tive precursor experiences for literacy in school asthe emphasis on phonics and standardized testsbears down on teachers, narrowing even thepreschool curriculum. The negative impact onchildren of hours of screen time spent outside ofschool is far more damaging when key experiencesneeded for learning are disappearing from theschool curriculum.

Young children gradually build their understandingof symbols and begin to use a variety of symbol sys-tems in the early years: language, play with materi-als, socio-dramatic play, movement, drawing andart. At the root of all symbol use is the effort by thechild to make meaning. Very gradually, childrenbegin to notice the symbols used in the worldaround them and begin to experiment with these,integrating them with other symbol systems theyuse. But for young children whose use of symbols isstill highly subjective, conventional letters are tooabstract to be of optimal use for conveying ideasand feelings. Children move in a gradual, develop-mental progression toward the use of conventionalsymbols, but ideally this happens in a way thatmaintains meaning and a sense of ownership oversymbols.

The development of early literacy skills is a gradualand slow process. Children experiment with thecreation of symbols from a young age, learninghow to make marks that represent their meaning.Symbolic play with three-dimensional materialssupports this process, as does drawing and makingmarks on paper. Over a long period of time, themarks children make will come closer to the con-ventional symbols used in reading and writing. Butif this developmental process is rushed, children canbecome confused and can develop problems inmaking sense of the print system. Also, their com-mand of symbols as within their control and as avehicle for expression is undermined.

Another concern is with the false dichotomy of thephonics approach versus whole language that per-vades all of the discussions and works against find-ing the best programs and practices for children.This current emphasis on school preparednessthreatens to undermine the health and well-beingof children by eliminating the very experiences theyneed in order to establish the foundation for earlyliteracy during this critical period.

References

1 Catherine Snow et al., Preventing Reading Dif-ficulties in Young Children (Washington, D.C.:National Academy Press, 1998).

42 • The Push for Ear ly Chi ldhood L i teracy: Cr i t ica l I ssues and Concerns

2 Garin Baker et al., Speaking and Listening forPreschool through Third Grade (Washington,D.C.: National Center on Education and theEconomy, 2001); New Standards, Reading andWriting Grade by Grade (Washington, D.C.:New Standards, 1999).

3 Sue Bredekamp, ed., Developmentally Appropri-ate Practice in Early Childhood Programs ServingChildren from Birth through Age 8 (Washington,D.C.: National Association for the Education ofYoung Children, 1987).

Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Ed.D. is a Professor ofEducation at Lesley University and a co-founder ofLesley’s masters degree program in conflict resolu-tion and peaceable schools. She is also an advisorfor public television on programs having to do withviolence and children. Among her books and manyarticles on media violence and its effects on chil-dren, how children learn the skills of conflict reso-lution, and the creation of peaceable school com-munities is Best Day of the Week, a children’s bookabout conflict resolution.

Nancy Car lsson-Paige • 43

Influential research by Hart and Risley indicatesthat when parents talk a lot to their young chil-dren, the children have higher vocabularies.

The children also have higher IQ scores (which ishardly surprising because vocabulary scores arestrongly associated with overall IQs). High vocabu-lary also is associated with high school performance.Numerous psychologists therefore recommend thatparents talk a lot to children. In September (2002)the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsedBright Beginnings books that show parents how toincrease conversations with their young children andhow to encourage their children to read picturebooks. The Academy of Pediatrics has sent theBright Beginnings promotional material to thou-sands of pediatricians.

My concern is that we are drawing young childreninto a purely verbal world at the expense of theirsensory exploration of the environment. On a walkin a park or along a sidewalk, young children willstop and investigate objects for long stretches oftime—an insect, a leaf, a puddle of water. Buttoday’s parents are so busy moving them along(often in strollers) and talking to them that thechildren have little time to explore.

I recently saw a girl of about two years, walkingwith her mother, who stopped and stared in fasci-nation at two dogs. After a while, the child said,“Two dogs,” and kept staring, totally absorbed.The mother, however, saw this as a teachablemoment and coaxed her daughter into a “Two’ssong” — “Two dogs, two cows, two horses....”The child reluctantly joined in, as the motherpulled her along. The mother may have increasedher child’s vocabulary, but we will never know whatthe child missed in the experience that had fascinat-ed her.

At a store, I recently saw a baby, about a year and ahalf, point enthusiastically and say, “Oooh,” at atoy animal. He then tried to touch it. But thefather said, “Use your words,” and pulled his handback.

Young childhood, from about 1 to 7 years, is prob-ably a sensitive or critical period for the develop-ment of language. But the Chomsky revolution hasmade it pretty clear that vocabulary growth isminor in comparison to the remarkable acquisitionof deep and abstract syntax during these years—andthat children develop syntax spontaneously, withoutadult instruction.

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: The Loss of Nature

William Crain

Along with the language development, childrenalso form bonds with the natural world. Growingevidence suggests that childhood is the periodwhen this most readily occurs. (The evidence isn’tas strong as in the case of language, but it is gradu-ally accumulating). But children cannot form bondswith nature unless they have unhurried opportuni-ties to investigate it. They need opportunities tojust sit and watch insects and birds, explore weedywaysides and vacant lots, touch and smell leaves,poke around in puddles, climb trees, build modelstructures in loose dirt, and build hideouts in tallgrass. Today’s society is not providing these richphysical and sensory experiences. Instead, we areobsessed with increasing children’s vocabularies andpromoting their achievement in a purely humanworld in which language skills are paramount.

References1 B. Hart and T.R. Risley, Meaningful Differences

in the Everyday Experience of Young AmericanChildren (Baltimore: Brooks, 1995).

2 See, for example, Jill Anderson, et al, BrightBeginnings Storybook: Building Self-Esteem Skillswith Pumsy (Timberline Press, 1990).

William Crain is a developmental psychologist,author, and social activist. He is Professor of Psychology at the City College of New York, andauthor of a major textbook in the field, Theories ofDevelopment: Concepts and Applications. He is alsoeditor of the journal Encounter: Education forMeaning and Social Justice. His most recent book,Reclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in Our Achievement Oriented Society isreviewed in this issue of the Research Bulletin.

Wil l iam Cra in • 45

“Can you do Addition?” the White Queenasked. “What’s one and one and one and oneand one and one and one and one and one?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “I lost count.”

“She can’t do Addition,” the Red Queen inter-rupted. “Can you do Subtraction? Take ninefrom eight.”

“Nine from eight I can’t, you know,” Alicereplied readily: “but –“

“She can’t do Subtraction,” said the WhiteQueen. “Can you do Division? Divide a loaf bya knife – what’s the answer to that?” 1

In this passage from Through the Looking Glass,neither queen shows particular pedagogicalaptitude, or an approach of at least patiently

encouraging Alice to find the correct answers.Although it would be unfair to use the above tosatirize policymakers and educators who are sin-cerely concerned with improving children’s learn-ing, the current tendency to promote early formallearning and its concomitant league table mentalityalso presents dangers that are amusingly encapsulat-ed in this imaginary discourse.

In December 2000, Britain’s House of CommonsEducation Select Committee issued a report2 whichconcluded that children under five years of ageshould learn mainly through creative play in classesof no more than 15 for each teacher. It also con-cluded that there was no conclusive evidence thatchildren gained from being taught the “3 R’s”before the age of six. After a thorough investiga-tion of papers and witnesses, the chairman, BarrySherman MP, forthrightly stated, “If you start for-mal learning early on, you can actually damage for-mal learning later on.” He went on, “Some peoplebelieve that the earlier you start children readingand writing and doing formal instruction the bet-ter. All the evidence we took, from every side, goesagainst that argument.” Tricia David of the Profes-sional Association of Nursery Nurses commented,“Over-emphasis on formal education and abstractconcepts of literacy and numeracy before the age offive can result in a sense of failure. Early failure canlead to long-term underachievement, disaffectionand even truancy…. We could learn from some ofour European neighbors, where children startschool later than in the UK but still achieve betteracademic results.”3 The memoranda submitted tothe committee from the British Association forEarly Childhood Education underscored this pointof view:

The Push for Early Childhood Literacy: A View from Europe

Christopher Clouder

Comparison with other countries suggeststhere is no benefit in starting formal instruc-tion before six. The majority of other Euro-pean countries admit children to school at sixor seven following a three-year period ofpreschool education which focuses on socialand physical development. Yet standards inliteracy and numeracy are generally higher inthose countries than in the UK, despite ourearlier starting age.

The committee recommended keeping the schoolentry age at five, but that young children shouldreceive the style of education appropriate to theirstage of development. The report then goes on tohighlight concerns given in evidence in this area:

the current focus on targets for older childrenin reading and writing inevitably tends tolimit the vision and confidence of early child-hood educators. Such downward pressurerisks undermining children’s motivation andtheir disposition to learn, thus lowering ratherthan raising levels of achievement in the longterm. . . . Inappropriate formalised assessmentof children at an early age currently results intoo many children being labelled as failures,when the failure, in fact, lies with the system.4

This is one contemporary phase in a struggle thathas been waged since the beginning of the 19th

century. At its heart is our conception of child-hood. The manner in which we receive our chil-dren into this world influences who they eventuallybecome, and whether or not nature or nurtureproves the short-term victor in any conceptual bat-tles, the fact remains that the early years are vitallyimportant. The basic assumption is that the childshould be welcomed, but how that welcome isexpressed can vary according to the times and thesocial fabric around the child. A report from theSwedish Aid Commission touches elements thatconfront us as citizens of the world’s affluentminority:

Basic to a good society is that children arewelcome, are given a good environment dur-ing childhood and are the concern of thewhole society. Children have a right to secure

living conditions that enhance their develop-ment. Preschool has an important function inchildren’s lives. It offers a comprehensive pro-gramme and is the source of stimulation inthe children’s development. It gives them achance to meet other children and adults andto be part of an experience of fellowship andfriendship. It is a complement to the upbring-ing a child gets at home.5

In other words, children are born into a culturewhich, with all its assumptions, history and aspira-tions, will have a profound effect on how theyexperience childhood and indeed their adult lives aswell. Human cultures vary enormously in theirapproaches to the rearing of children, and one cul-ture cannot claim to be the template of good prac-tice for all.

Yet there is the factor of our common humanityand something that can be recognized as universalchildhood. In the present roller-coaster plethora ofadvice, research and increasing polarization ofviews, we must look for deeper aspects of child-hood so that as parents, carers and educators we donot become restricted to a particular one-sidedapproach or dogma. The interests of young chil-dren are the interests of the whole of society, andtheir importance should be of primary concern ifwe are to find solutions to the many social and eth-ical challenges facing us.

How quality in early childhood education andcare is defined and evaluated will be a con-cern not only for politicians, experts, adminis-trators and professionals, but will also be amatter for a broader citizenry.... it becomesimportant to create forums or arenas for dis-cussion and reflection where people canengage with devotion and vision…. Withinthese arenas a lively dialogue can take place inwhich early childhood education and care areplaced within larger societal context andwhere questions concerning children’s posi-tion are made vivid.6

Being concerned about the early years of humanlife also has the capability to draw out what is bestin us as adults. If we wish to help our children

Chr istopher Clouder • 47

develop devotion and vision we must also strive forthem ourselves, as in our world they are no longerjust a given fact of life. So we should welcome thefact that the role and content of early years educa-tion is a matter of such a wide and intense debate,as evidence that its seriousness is unquestioned.

Of all the countries in Europe, only Northern Ire-land starts compulsory schooling at age four; fivecountries (the Netherlands, Malta, England, Scot-land and Wales) begin at age five; nineteen countriesbegin at age six, and eight at age seven. Interestingly,one of the latter, namely Finland, scored very well inthe latest Programme for International StudentAssessment (2001 PISA) study which assessed aquarter of a million children in 32 countries. In thissurvey by the Organization of Economic Coopera-tion and Development (OECD) on skills in literacy,numeracy and scientific understanding, Finlandscored significantly better than any other Europeancountry. There may be other imponderables at workhere, but what this does show is that starting laterneed not necessarily be a disadvantage. A few yearsago there was a national debate in Finland aboutreducing the school starting age from the traditionalage of seven. However, in light of both common-sense arguments and scientific evidence regardingchildren’s neurological development, it was decidednot to proceed with this.

The countries that scored less well are less likely tofollow this aspect of Finnish educational policy.Germany’s low ranking has been claimed in thatcountry to be analogous to “sputnik shock” in theUSA, and one result of this is growing pressure tostart formal learning earlier. In spite of anecdotalevidence of numerous discreet summer pilgrimagesby officials and policymakers to Finland, it seemsthey are rather inclined to adopt what Lillian Katzcalls the “push-down phenomenon.” In her RoyalSociety of Arts lecture in London she pointed outthat there is evidence of short-term advantage ifthree-, four- and five-year-olds are put in formalinstruction, but that there is also evidence of somenoticeable disadvantages in the long term. “Thereare two important points to note here,” she writes.“First, it’s only in the long term that you can seethe disadvantages of early formal instruction. Sec-ond, early formal instruction is particularly damag-

ing to boys…. My favorite theory is that, on thewhole, early learning damages the disposition tolearn.”7

In fact, a 1992 International Association for theEvaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA)study of reading literacy in 32 countries showedthat the age at which children began reading wasassociated with a gender gap in literacy. The tentop-scoring countries had a later starting age, withan average of 6.3. The study concludes, “It is clear-ly a plausible hypothesis that boys are too imma-ture to begin reading formally at the age of five,and that their difficulties are represented in lowachievement, relative to girls, at both the ages ofnine and fourteen.” The as yet unpublishedreworking of the IEA data for 27 of these countrieshas also showed that in only four countries didchildren start reading before the age of five, andthat in all four countries (and only these) there wasa distinct gender gap at the age of nine.8

Caroline Sharp’s paper “School Starting Age: Euro-pean Policy and Recent Research,” 9 produced forthe National Foundation for Educational Research,gives a very balanced view of the whole issue ofwhether teaching literacy and numeracy can causedamage to young children’s development. Shementions that the early schoolstarting age in theUK was not established for any particular educa-tional criteria; it was enacted into law in 1870 part-ly out of concern for the protection of young chil-dren from exploitation, partly to appease employersin consequently enabling an early school leavingage. In any case, six is the most common startingage worldwide. Sharp’s conclusions regarding acad-emic achievement are that there is no conclusiveevidence concerning starting school at differentages. The best available evidence suggests thatbeginning to teach more formal skills early giveschildren an initial academic advantage, but that thisadvantage is not sustained in the long term. Thereare some suggestions that an early introduction offormal curriculum may increase anxiety and have anegative impact on children’s self-esteem and moti-vation to learn. Top-performing countries in theThird International Maths and Science Study(TIMSS 1996) survey had a school starting age ofsix, although the factors for this need further

48 • The Push for Ear ly Chi ldhood L i teracy: A V iew from Europe

research. “What we can say,” the survey concluded,“is that a later start does not appear to hold backchildren’s progress…. Certainly, there wouldappear to be no compelling educational rationalefor a statutary school age of five or for the practiceof admitting four-year-olds to school receptionclasses.”

In June 2001 the OECD issued its long-anticipatedand highly regarded thematic review of early child-hood education and care policy (ECEC) for twelvecountries. It is significant that for the OECD, earlychildhood extends until the age of eight, and that“education” and “care” are conjoined. It is explicit-ly stated in the report that flexible curricula, builton the inputs of children, teachers and parents, aremore suitable in early childhood than detailed,expert-driven curricula: “Contemporary researchsuggests… that the curricula should be broad andholistic with greater emphasis on developmentaloutcomes rather than subject outcomes… moreprocess-related and co-constructive… defined bythe vital interests and needs of the children, familiesand communities… and more in tune with socio-cultural contexts”10 This was an international callfor flexible frameworks that leave freedom for adap-tation, experimentation and cultural inputs.

The testing regime that accompanies the pressurefor early learning is also under scrutiny. The Lon-don University Institute of Education’s systematicreview of the available evidence made a wide-rang-ing search of studies of assessment for summativepurposes in schools for students between the agesof four and eighteen. After searching through 183studies, nineteen of which they identified as provid-ing sound and valid empirical evidence, theresearchers concluded, “What emerges is strongevidence of negative impact of testing on pupils’motivation, though this varied in degree with thepupils’ characteristics and with the conditions oftheir learning…. Lower achieving pupils are doublydisadvantaged by the tests. Being labeled as failureshas an impact on how they feel about their abilityto learn.”11

The researchers’ suggestion is, therefore, that newforms of testing be developed that make it possibleto assess all valued outcomes of education includ-

ing, for example, creativity and problem-solving,not just literacy and numeracy, and that, further-more, such assessments be only one element in amore broadly based judgment. However, theresearchers also found that “When passing tests inhigh stakes, teachers adopt a teaching style whichemphasizes transmission teaching of knowledge,thereby favoring those students who prefer to learnin this way and disadvantaging and lowering theself-esteem of those who prefer more active andcreative learning experiences.” Although this paperis more concerned with older students’ reactions,we should not overlook the fact that four-year-oldscan feel themselves failures too, and the sense thatthey are letting their parents down can be devastat-ing and lasting. It also begs the question of what isdevelopmentally appropriate for young children’slearning that is in harmony with their natural needfor “active and creative leaning experiences” asexpressed in play.

Play is vital to human learning. It can consolidateand support learning in an infinite variety of situa-tions. It assists the development of cognitive andsocial skills, encourages problem-solving skills, sup-ports language development and the expression ofemotions, and provides opportunities for exerciseand coordination. It also needs space and time,which are the very factors the “hurried curriculum”threatens to efface. “We know that we can teachchildren to read at four if we wanted to, but wewanted them to spend those years playing. Hereyou teach them to give the right answers. We wantthem to solve problems, cooperate with others andcope with life”12 It could be argued that childrenhave a fundamental right to be prepared for schoolin such a way that the impact of their individualitydoes not become a handicap. The Hungarian edu-cational sociologist, József Nagy, found enormousdifferentiation in children’s capabilities. “Childrenwith a calendar age of six,” he writes, “can demon-strate a biological difference of plus or minus oneyear, a difference in mental development of plus orminus two and a half years, and a difference of plusor minus three years in social development.” In the1980s, after researching school-based attempts toovercome this variation, he concluded that schoolswere incapable of doing so: “The result is that theschool career of those entering is predetermined by


their stage of development at entry.”13 As such awide variation of capacities and personal develop-ment is unsuitable for a setting in which formallearning can successfully take place for all children,the view that the purpose of preschool is to preparechildren for formal learning gains greater credence.Whole class teaching requires the children to becapable of receiving and benefiting from it andensuring a certain stage of readiness. This is, infact, the child’s right.

Perhaps at this point we should turn to the evi-dence of the poets, who have an instinctive, ratherthan analytical, approach to childhood that shouldnot be disregarded just on account of its lack ofacademic rigor. Poets are often able to retain theircloseness to the qualities of childhood that the restof us lose. Miroslav Holub, himself a distinguishedbiologist, remembers his own Czech childhood andthe need to inwardly breathe:14

Ten million yearsfrom the Mioceneto the primary school in Jecnà Street.

We know everything from a to z.

But sometimes the finger stopsin the empty space between a and b,empty as the prairie at night,

between g and h,deep as the eyes of the sea,

between m and n, long as man’s birth,

sometimes it stopsin the galactic coldafter the letter z,at the beginning and the end,

trembling a littlelike some strange bird.

Not from despair.Just like that.

If this space is so vital, where is the evidence thatthere is a greater good in losing it? What do wedestroy if we fill up all the space in a child’s imagi-native and emotional life? Lowering the age atwhich children start formal learning is, in fact, asmall revolution with little debate or serious con-sideration of the consequences. “The precise educa-tional rationale for the school environment beingoffered to four-year-old children has either beengiven inadequate attention or overlooked altogeth-er.”15 A change of such significance and conse-quence surely needs careful and deep consideration,especially as its effects impinge on everyone andcould be lifelong.

Beginning in the 19th century, preschool educationin Europe had humanitarian roots in catering tochildren from working-class families. It was said ofMargaret McMillan (1860-1931), a great pioneerin this work, that “Her anger burned at the viola-tion of the lives of little children. She fought as oneinspired to prevent their misuse.”16 A similarromantic notion was shared by Ellen Key, theSwedish educational reformer, whose influentialbook The Century of the Child was published in1900. “The next century will be the century of thechild just as the last century has been the woman’scentury. When the child gets his rights, moralitywill be perfect.” Perhaps we do not have to be soromantically inclined or so passionately engaged tonotice that children and the quality of childhoodface new threats in the 21st century. We shouldtake to heart such warnings as this:

What has become clear from this short analy-sis of international educational research is thatthe drive of successive English governmentsto introduce formal scholastic teaching at everearlier ages serves merely to create the failureit seeks to avoid. Until our first phase of edu-cation – for our three-, four- and five-year-olds – has goals, curriculum content andappropriate teaching strategies to preparechildren for formal schooling… our educa-tional “beginnings” will not be as “sound” aswe might hope.17

We should also applaud when a brave politician,such as Jane Davidson, the new Minister of Educa-


tion for Wales, stands up to the prevailing trendand ends the formal educational testing of seven-year-olds so that Wales can be a place “where ourchildren get the best start in life”18 in favor of acurriculum that is less formal and more child-cen-tered, or when the Swedish government takes pridein its Early Years curriculum because it is the short-est and least prescriptive in Europe.

We live in our world,A world that is too smallFor you to enterEven on hands and knees,The adult subterfuge.And though you probe and pryWith analytic eye,And eavesdrop all our talkWith an amused look,You cannot find our centreWhere we dance, where we play,Where life is still asleepUnder the closed flower,Under the smooth shellOf eggs in the cupped nestThat mock the faded blueOf your remoter heaven.19

Our analytical approach has its limitations. Becausewe are working and caring for children, we shouldallow our feelings to participate in this debate.Children have the gift of “becoming” in the senseused by Walt Whitman:

There was a child went forth every day,And the first object he looked upon, that

object he became And that object became part of him for the

day or a certain part of the day,Or for many years or stretching cycles of

years.20

In this gift of “becoming” we can find the roots ofour humanity, our compassion, empathy and toler-ance. Do we really need to squander these becauseof short-term goals and a lack of foresight and dueattention? Listening to the children themselveswould be a good start.

References

1 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass.

2 House of Commons Education Select Commit-tee Report (December 2000).

3 BBC News Online (Jan. 11, 2001).

4 House of Commons Education Select Commit-tee Report, December 2000. First Report: EarlyYears, para. 62

5 Family Aid Commission, Sweden, 1981. op. cit.Transforming Nursery Education. eds. Moss andPenn (Chapman: 1996).

6 Dahlberg and Åsen, Evaluation and Regulation:A Question of Empowerment. Valuing Quality inEarly Childhood Services, eds. Moss and Pence(Chapman: 1994).

7 Katz, “Starting Them Young,” RSA lecture,Nov. 22, 1999. Educating Futures, RSA, (London: 2000).

8 C. and D. Mills, “The Early Years,” Dispatches,Channel 4 Television Publications (London:1998).

9 Caroline Sharp, School Starting Age: EuropeanPolicy and Recent Research, NFER (2002).

10 Starting Strong: Early Childhood Education andCare, OECD (2001).

11 Harlen, W & Deakin Crick, R., Testing, Motiva-tion and Learning. (2002). EPPI CentreReview. To be published in Assessment in Educa-tion (July 2003).

12 Sylvie Hopland, Head teacher of the NorwegianSchool in London. The Guardian (6/12/2001).

13 op.cit. Mills

14 Miroslav Holub, Alphabet. Faber Book of ModernPoetry (London: 1992).

15 Martin Woodhead, lecturer in child develop-ment, “Open University UK” in The Indepen-dent (16/10/97).

16 Recalled by a student in G.Lowndes, MargaretMcMillan — the Children’s Champion. (MuseumPress: 1960).


17 C. Aubrey, T. David, G. Ray, and L. Thompson,Early Childhood Educational Research (Rout-ledge/Farmer:London, 2000).

18 Jane Davidson in The Times Educational Supple-ment (30/8/2002).

19 R. S. Thomas, Children’s Song (1955).

20 Walt Whitman, There was a Child went Forth(1871).

___________________________

Christopher Clouder is currently head of theSteiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship for the UK andIreland, the Director of the European Council forSteiner Waldorf Education, and a co-founder andfacilitator of the Alliance for Childhood. Previousto this he taught adolescents for 20 years, both inthe state system in the Netherlands and in Waldorfschools in England. He lectures widely on educa-tional matters and on cultural evolution, and is avisiting lecturer at Plymouth University and Emer-son College, UK.


In his new book, Reclaiming Childhood, devel-opmental psychologist William Crain tells thestory of a four-year-old girl in New York City

whose parents are determined to make sure she isaccepted at a certain highly selective preschool. Fora year leading up to the critical admissions inter-view, the parents make her practice answering ques-tions from the Stanford Binet intelligence test —which the school uses to sort out truly exceptionalpreschool applicants from their less promisingpeers.

On the day of the interview, the little girl is led intoa room where the psychologist who will administerthe test is waiting for her. The psychologist asks thegirl’s name. “Amanda,” she replies. But her name isnot Amanda. Amanda is the name of the family cat.For the rest of the session, the girl answers everyquestion by saying simply, “Meow.”

This anecdote neatly illustrates the combination ofgentle wisdom and stark social commentary thatstrikingly sets Reclaiming Childhood apart frommuch of what is written in the field of child develop-ment. Crain’s argument in this book is both radicaland stunningly simple: that the nearly universalassumption that the purpose of education is to“prepare children for the future” is fundamentally

flawed, and that, for young children especially, itleads to practices and policies that are harmful.“Maybe it’s time to question our emphasis on thefuture,” he writes. “Maybe we need to start payingattention to children’s present feelings and interests.”

The absurd competitiveness that leads somemodern parents to believe that acceptance at aprestigious preschool is the only way to ensure theirchild’s eventual admission to Harvard is only onemanifestation of the enormous pressure thatchildren increasingly feel in our culture.Standardized testing as the sole measure of schoolachievement and the enforcement of “standards”has transformed the educational landscape in recentyears, and with the passage of President Bush’s “NoChild Left Behind” Act mandatory testing hasproliferated at every level, including the earlygrades. The kindergarten and now the preschoolcurriculum has changed dramatically, emphasizingearly academics in response to parental and govern-ment concern that children are not learning fastenough and will fall behind. As a result, open-ended play and artistic exploration, once themainstays of the early childhood curriculum, aredisappearing from the classroom and from chil-dren’s lives. In a very real sense, childhood itself isendangered.

Book ReviewReclaiming Childhood: Letting Children Be Children in Our Achievement-Oriented Society, by William Crain (New York: Times Books, 2003).

Edward Miller

Crain notes that one side effect of this change isthat many children have lost much of their enthusi-asm for learning by the second or third grade. Hereports the worried comment of one parent: “Mychildren are signed up for so many lessons that Isometimes wonder, What’s wrong with just playing?But I have to think of the future. With everyoneelse starting their kids in this competition for thebest colleges, I have to do it, too.”

In Reclaiming Childhood Crain makes a compellingargument that this view of children is exactly whatthey don’t need. “I believe,” he writes, “that we areso obsessed with preparing children for the futurethat we are depriving them of the chance to developtheir artistic orientation, ties to nature, and otherdistinctive traits of the childhood years. I amsuggesting that we are, in effect, stunting theirgrowth, and future research may show that theeffects show up in increased depression, suicidalideation, restlessness, and other symptoms ofunfulfilled lives.”

His method is to combine clear, nonacademicsummaries of the most important threads inresearch on child development with direct observa-tions of the nature of real children — as in the storyof “Amanda,” the preschooler. In successivechapters Crain illuminates the natural creativity,intelligence, and sheer delight in experiencing theworld that characterize all healthy children. Youngchildren, he argues, are natural dramatists, natural-ists, artists, poets, and linguists. (His explanation ofNoam Chomsky’s theories of linguistic develop-ment is the most accessible I have ever read.)

His chapter titled “The Child as an Artist” isparticularly fascinating in its analysis of the develop-ment of children’s drawing, from the “primordialcircle” to sunbursts, mandalas, tadpoles (humanfigures with no trunks, where the legs extenddirectly from the head), and finally the “goldenperiod” between the ages of five and eight. It isimpossible to come away from this chapter and itsstriking illustrations without a profound apprecia-tion for the beauty and mystery of children’s art.

Throughout, Crain adds his own uncommonly wiseadvice on how to maintain a child-centered

approach to caring for the young, as in this simplebut moving observation:

The psychologist Louise Ames once notedthat often it isn’t parents, but grandparents,who best exemplify the child-centered atti-tude. Grandparents derive endless pleasurefrom just watching their grandchildren goabout the business of being children. Whethera child is trying out her first steps, trying tobalance one block on another, making up asong while playing with a truck, or watchingan insect, a grandparent may sit and watch,smiling, as if something quite wonderful isoccurring. Grandparents do not rush in toteach and correct the child — they just enjoyobserving. And children often feel goodabout being in the presence of grandparents.Many parents think children like grandparentsbecause the grandparents spoil their grand-children. Some parents say, “Of course myson likes his grandparents; they let him getaway with murder.” But I suspect the realreason is that grandparents have a broadersense of the life cycle. They recognize thespecial qualities of the childhood years andthe child’s own efforts to discover what isimportant to her.

Reclaiming Childhood deserves the widest possibleaudience of educators, policymakers, and parents.Among its greatest strengths is Crain’s direct andunaffected style, which perfectly reflects themessage he hopes to convey: that the simple realityof childhood — children’s inborn talents andtheir timeless innate rhythms of growth anddevelopment — is nothing less than miraculous andawe-inspiring, if only adults can have the wisdom,patience, and humility to see it.

Edward Miller ([email protected]) writes abouteducation policy and practice and is a foundingpartner of the U.S. Alliance for Childhood. Hisbooks include Fool’s Gold: A Critical Look atComputers in Childhood.

54 • Book Review: Recla iming Chi ldhood

To the Editor:

In response to S. Sagarin’s essay about WaldorfEducation (“No Such Thing: Recovering theQuality of Rudolf Steiner’s Educational Work,”Research Bulletin, January 2003):

With intellectual finesse, and an abundance ofexamples and references, Sagarin tried hard toconvince the reader in the course of nine pages thatWaldorf education is a phantom, that there is nosuch thing. Perhaps this is why he wrote: “I cannotdescribe Waldorf education well, but I can investi-gate how others have defined or described it,” andthereafter spends almost the entire article on ajourney that depicts different facets of how peoplehave dealt with this question before. After readingthrough excerpts by Barnes, Oberman, Schwartz,Sloan and others, I found myself curiously waitingfor a final statement. Then he ends with a“Conclusion” that said: Slice the word Waldorffrom your “Waldorf Education” bumper sticker,and you will understand that education is left asthe all-demanding essence.

Sagarin’s point is well taken that Waldorf is not athing, a commodity that can be traded, sold,packaged or implemented by recipes. I also believe

that the core of Waldorf is neither found in its namederived from a German cigarette factory, norhidden in a box of beeswax crayons.

Where I do differ, is that Sagarin “eats the fruit”(education) and tosses away the “pip” (Waldorf) asuseless prey. Isn’t it the pip that bears the potentialfor reproduction and not the flesh? Does not theseed called Anthroposophy, if nourished well, growinto a strong enough tree to bear the fruit we callWaldorf education?

Sagarin further states: “There is no characteristicnor quality that is unique to what we call Waldorfeducation that cannot potentially be found some-where else…,” and then parallels certain writings ofEmerson with Steiner. What is obviously missing iswhat I just called the “tree”: Anthroposophy itselfand how it relates to Waldorf education. The truthof the matter is, Waldorf education would benothing without it. It is the inner understanding ofa teacher working out of Anthroposophy that giveshim or her the unique opportunity and perspectiveto see a child as having descended from the spiritualworld, a child that perhaps has gone through manyprevious incarnations, a child that perhaps in itsspiritual being even carries more wisdom than theteacher himself. Now that is a humbling thought!

Correspondence: No Such Thing?

There could be much more said as to howteacher/child relationships in Waldorf schools areunique compared to other schooling concepts orhumanistic philosophies; it includes the wholeunderstanding of human development based onSpiritual Science.

If Sagarin’s purpose was to conduct a mentalexercise in reduction, it might be suited for adoctorate paper at a university, but it seems lesssuitable in a Waldorf research publication. There Icould expect him to show consequences for otherAnthroposophical endeavors to make his point:Reduce Bio-Dynamic farming to farming,Eurythmy to dance — and so on. That at leastwould have given each reader ample opportunityfor thought.

I am not concerned about name preferences(Waldorf Schools or Rudolf Steiner Schools) as longas one is willing to give them a name. Without aname we let the “Wesen” (being) go, that is willingto be part of each individual school. It would be atragedy if we can no longer permit this to happen.

Lukas Zay

Lukas Zay coaches woodwork teachers in variousU.S. Waldorf schools and teaches clay modelingand woodwork at Sunbridge College. For sevenyears he was the woodwork teacher at the RudolfSteiner School in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

56 • Correspondence: No Such Thing?

The Online Waldorf Library (OWL) hasbeen a live web site for nearly 18 months.To date we have had over 34,000 visitors

looking for resources, in English, about Waldorfeducation. Each month, information about newbooks and articles is added to the site. The searchdata base feature allows visitors to find all the avail-able books currently in print dealing with aspects ofthe Waldorf curriculum. The site now includes thecomplete text of articles appearing in the ResearchBulletin and Gateways, as well as selected articlesfrom the archives of Education as an Art and otherjournals.

The Online Library is attracting attention far andwide. We have had visitors to the site from all statesin the U.S. as well as Canada, Australia, NewZealand, the U.K. and every country in WesternEurope. Of note are the many hits from the Balticcountries and Russia as well as countries in the FarEast and Africa.

One goal of this web site is to provide free access toarticles that may be of help to Waldorf class andspecialty teachers in countries where Waldorfeducational resources are scarce or expensive toobtain. Another goal of the OWL is to create openaccess to Waldorf educational materials, in a sense

demystifying an education that is sometimescriticized for being mysterious.

There are now many parents in the United Statesand in the United Kingdom who opt to teach theirchildren at home using “Waldorf methods.” TheOWL does not intend to create or offer lessons, butdoes want to make available the pedagogicalinformation for parents to plan their own lessons.

Future plans include posting newly translatedarticles (from German), and adding curriculumresource pages and dissertations. The OWL willcontinue to add newly published books aboutWaldorf education and articles from the majorWaldorf educational journals, and expand onarchival articles from out-of-print journals.

If you have suggestions or comments, or know ofsomething that should be included on the site,please contact Marianne Alsop, [email protected].

The Online Waldorf Library – An Update

www.waldorflibrary.orgMarianne Aslop

This year, Douglas Sloan and I, originalfounders in 1994 of what was then calledthe Waldorf Education Research Institute

(WERI), have once again taken on active roles inthe Research Institute. Douglas is the editor of theResearch Bulletin and I have taken on the positionof Director of the Research Institute. RobertoTrostli, who was Director from 2000 to August,2002, continues to oversee the development of theOnline Waldorf Library and is working on a cur-riculum resource project called Themes in WaldorfEducation. Douglas and I are pleased to be work-ing in active partnership once more and look for-ward to the future development of the Institute.We are also pleased to be working with MarianneAlsop, who has taken on responsibility for theOnline Waldorf Library. Her report on the OWLproject is included in this issue of the Bulletin.

Board Development

We are pleased to announce the appointment oftwo new members to the Board of Directors.

Douglas Gerwin, Director of the High SchoolTeacher Training at the Center for Anthroposophyin New Hampshire, has joined the board as anappointee from the Association of Waldorf Schools

of North America (AWSNA), replacing DavidAlsop, who moved on to new work in developmentafter launching the Online Waldorf Library site forthe Research Institute last year.

Ann Stahl, recently retired from the Rudolf SteinerFoundation office in Spring Valley, New York, hasalso accepted an invitation to join the board. Shebrings decades of experience in the Waldorf move-ment and in banking and foundation work.Douglas and Ann join other board membersDouglas Sloan (president), Susan Howard (secre-tary), Roberto Trostli (treasurer) and DavidMitchell. Our current board membership includesindividuals active in AWSNA, the PedagogicalSection, and Waldorf early childhood, lower school,and high school education, as well teacher training,higher education and publications.

Research Priorities for the Future

We are currently in conversation with AWSNAleadership, the Pedagogical Section Council, RudolfSteiner Foundation, and colleagues in the EuropeanCouncil for Waldorf Education about researchpriorities for the future. You can read aboutcurrent and past activities of the Research Instituteat the end of this Research Bulletin. Our vision for

The Research Institute for Waldorf Education — Looking Toward the Future

Susan Howard, Director

the future also includes the following projects, forwhich we are currently seeking funding:

1. Research Fellowships and CollaborativeResearch Groups

These are research studies undertaken by indi-vidual Waldorf educators and by collaborativeresearch groups, modeled on the High SchoolResearch Project and groups such as the Peda-gogical Advisors Colloquium. Research groupsmeet in small retreats on specific themes in earlychildhood, lower school, middle school andhigh school education, and teacher education.The work of these groups would lead to collo-quia, larger conferences and publications. Wesee such individual and collaborative researchprojects as making a significant to the deepeningand renewal of Waldorf education.

Areas of study and exploration include thefollowing:

Curriculum Studies and Resources:

• The middle school curriculum

• Waldorf science teaching and the developmentof perception and thinking

• Waldorf arts and crafts and the developmentof feeling and will

• Rhythms of learning: daily, weekly and blockschedules

• Birth to Seven: the renewal of Waldorf earlychildhood education

Child Development and Learning:

• The role of movement in learning

• Developing social and emotional health

• Multiple intelligences and anthroposophicaltypologies

• The insights of Rudolf Steiner and contempo-rary research findings

• The role of play in child and humandevelopment

• The physiological basis of education

Social, Philosophical and Spiritual Foundationsof Waldorf Education

• What makes Waldorf education “Waldorf”?

• The self-administration of the Waldorf school

• Developing the individuality of the teacherand the child

• The Christ Being, Christianity and Waldorfeducation

2. Waldorf Graduate Survey

The Research Institute is currently developing aproposal and seeking researchers for a project onthe outcomes of Waldorf education. This wouldinvolve documentation on Waldorf graduates aswell as anecdotal perspectives by college facultymembers who have taught Waldorf graduates.This study could serve as the basis for a largerlongitudinal study.

3. Consultations and Colloquia: Dialoguewith the wider world

Consultations in partnership with the Alliancefor Childhood and others such topics as early lit-eracy, assessment, the role of movement in thedevelopment of thinking, the standardizing ofeducation, the role of play and imagination,technology and education, etc. These continuethe consultancy work developed by DouglasSloan through the Center for the Study of theSpiritual Foundations of Education at TeachersCollege, NY. Such consultations would alsoresult in proceedings and other publications.

4. Publications and Resources:

• Continued development of the Research Bul-letin, broadened for an international reader-ship with addition of a European editor,Christopher Clouder, and links to English-lan-guage Education Section newsletters.

• Further development of the Online WaldorfLibrary to include research studies, theses anddissertations on Waldorf education, transla-tions of journal articles, and other resourcesfrom the international Waldorf movement.

60 • The Research Institute for Waldorf Education — Looking Toward the Future

• Collections from past issues of the ResearchBulletin around themes such as Technologyand Education, Perspectives on Child Devel-opment, etc. to be published in collaborationwith AWSNA Publications

• Monographs and brochures on specificresearch questions or findings, such as RainerPatzlaff on the loss of speech and language, orWolfgang Schad/Gottfried Straube on com-puters in the Waldorf school, etc.

• Support for a book on Waldorf education by aprominent author

• Proceedings from research consultancies andconferences

As we seek funding for these and other projects, ouraim is to stimulate collaboration among individualsand groups within the Waldorf movement anddialogue with the wider educational community. Inthis way, research activity can contribute to arenewal of education within both Waldorf and non-Waldorf schools.

We welcome your suggestions regarding theresearch priorities for Waldorf education in thecoming years. Please contact

Susan Howard, DirectorThe Research Institute for Waldorf Education193 Bay Road, Hadley, MA 01035tel: 413-256-8772email: [email protected]

Susan Howard is the Director of the ResearchInstitute for Waldorf Education. She also directs thePart-time Early Childhood Teacher EducationProgram at Sunbridge College and is theChair/Coordinator of the Waldorf Early ChildhoodAssociation of North America (WECAN). She isalso a member of the Pedagogical Section Councilof North America.

Susan Howard, Director • 61

The Research Institute for WaldorfEducation (formerly WERI) is an initiativeon behalf of the Waldorf movement. It

has received support and guidance from thePedagogical Section of the School of SpiritualScience and financial support through theAssociation of Waldorf Schools of North America,the Midwest Shared Gifting Group, and theWaldorf Schools Fund.

The Research Institute was founded in 1996 inorder to deepen and enhance the quality of Wal-dorf education, to engage in serious and sustaineddialogue with the wider educational-cultural com-munity, and to support research that would serveeducators in all types of schools in their work withchildren and adolescents.

The Research Institute has responded to the call forresearch as a top priority of the Waldorf movementby becoming a supporting organization of the Asso-ciation of Waldorf Schools of North America and byco-sponsoring research projects with AWSNA.

During the past six years, we have supportedresearch projects that deal with essential contempo-rary educational issues such as attention-relateddisorders, trends in adolescent development andinnovations in the high school curriculum, learningexpectations and assessment, computers in educa-tion, the role of art in education, and new ways toidentify and address different learning styles.

The Research Institute has sponsored colloquiaand conferences that have brought together educa-tors, psychologists, doctors, and social scientists.We have published a Research Bulletin twice a yearfor the last six years, and we are developing anddistributing educational resources to help teachersin all aspects of their work.

Recently incorporated as a supporting organizationto AWSNA, The Research Institute is now a501(c) (3) tax-exempt organization.

Summary of Activities supportedby the Research Institute:

Research ProjectsArt in Human Development Attention Related Disorders Research Project Exploring the Four Polarities in Child

Development Evaluation of the Urban Waldorf School in

Milwaukee Waldorf High School Research Project Waldorf Learning Expectations and Assessment

Project

Colloquia and ConferencesTowards Wholeness in Learning, 1996Pathways of Healthy Child Development, 1998Waldorf High School Research Colloquia,

2000-2001

About the Research Institute for Waldorf Education

Resource Development Computers in Education–a handbook for teachersBeing on Earth–a book for scientists and teachersOnline Waldorf Library–a website of resources

for Waldorf education Themes in Waldorf Education–compilation of

Rudolf Steiner’s indications on teaching lan-guage arts and mathematics

Board of Directors:Douglas Sloan, PresidentSusan Howard, SecretaryRoberto Trostli, TreausurerDavid MitchellDouglas GerwinAnn Stahl

Supporting Members:AWSNAEast Bay Waldorf SchoolEmerson Waldorf SchoolGreen Meadow Waldorf SchoolHalton Waldorf SchoolHawthorne Valley SchoolHighland Hall Waldorf SchoolMerriconeag SchoolPine Hill Waldorf SchoolRudolf Steiner CollegeRudolf Steiner School, NYSan Francisco Waldorf SchoolSanta Cruz Waldorf SchoolSanta Fe Waldorf SchoolShining Mountain Waldorf SchoolSound Circle Teacher TrainingSummerfield Waldorf SchoolSunbridge CollegeToronto Waldorf SchoolWaldorf School of BaltimoreWaldorf School of Garden CityWaldorf School of Orange County

Research Bulletin Editor: Douglas SloanEuropean Editor: Christopher ClouderArt: Van JamesProduction: Common Wealth Printing Co., Inc.

Subscriptions: $15.00 for one year, including postage for the

U.S.A.$17.00 for one year, including postage for Canada $20.00 for one year, including postage for

Europe and South America$22.00 for one year, including postage for

Africa and Asia

Subscriptions for groups of five or more are avail-able at a discount of $5 per subscription for eachperson in the group.

Groups, schools, or institutes that wish tobecome Supporting Members of the ResearchInstitute are entitled to 20 copies of each issue ofthe Research Bulletin. Supporting membershipsare $200 per year.

The Research Institute for Waldorf EducationSusan Howard, Director193 Bay RoadHadley, MA 01035 Phone: (413) 256-8772 Fax: (413) 256-8772email: [email protected]

64 • About the Research Inst i tute for Waldorf Educat ion

Waldorf Library

Documents