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MillennialChild.com
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Essential Conferences for Summer, 2007 Articles: -Handwork and Intellectual Development -----ADHD: A Challenge of Our Time -The Cry for Myth -Freedom of Choice or Freedom From Choice? -Computers in Education -Helping Your Child's Teacher Communicate
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Freedom, Authority & Discipline, Page 3
Sativa, why are you sitting down? You're terribly fatigued? But, it's the beginning of the day! Couldn't you just try standing up along with the others? You think that you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Now, Sativa, I never heard of anyone your age suffering from such an...Clay, how do you know that I'm wrong? Second graders, please be quiet while Clay and Sativa and I are talking! Now, listen, Clay, just because you saw that on PBS doesn't make it absolutely true! Has anyone else here ever heard of a second grader with CFS?-- Ezekiel, will you please leave the room? Yes, I mean it! I won't have you pulling Natasha's hair while I-- Second graders, please be quiet! All right, all right, could everybody please sit down; we'll say the verse from our desks. Yes, that's it, could you all return to your seats? Good. Now for our verse-- Prescott, why are you still standing?... And so it goes, on and on, day after day, in classrooms from coast to coast! What is the nature of the problem here? First of all, this "composite teacher's" misguided approach is to be a friend to his second graders, rather than an authority. I think that I can speak for my whole generation--those of us who were born in the post World War II years--when I say that, as the children of adults who rejected the authoritarian ways of their elders, we grew up experiencing little of parental authority, and therefore are ill-equipped to act as authorities to anyone else. Notice that I am distinguishing between being authoritarian and acting out of authority; very often, in America, the two are confused, and so we have that phrase held over from the 1960’s: "Question Authority!" Whether or not we, as individualized adults, enjoy questioning or challenging authority, it is incumbent upon us as Waldorf teachers to serve as authorities for our children. Between seven and fourteen the child craves authority for the sake of his soul development and needs authority so that he may have an outer form in which to incarnate. Our harried second grade teacher throws another obstacle in his own path when he makes threats but does not act upon them. How much better not to make the threat at all, but to simply perform the action! Think of how much aggravation teachers would be spared in the course of a day if they made their motto, "Deeds, not words!" If we take seriously the thought that young children live most intensely in their feeling and will organizations, the "language of gesture" can eloquently communicate our intentions and concerns. A threat is pedagogically problematic because it implies a cause-and-effect relationship which will transpire over the course of time. Yet as Waldorf teachers we should recognize that the child's relationship to the course of time is still quite dreamlike, and his
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