The Cry for Myth, page 1

During a recent visit to a New York City public school I was met by my host teacher outside of her combined 4^th/5^th grade classroom. She wanted me to know that she had to set aside her lesson plan for a while in order to deal with a recurrent problem. Once again, she said, an argument had arisen between a particularly polarized pair of girls. The factors were manifold and complex: jealousy plus cliqueishness times envy divided by spite – a potent and acrimonious equation, to be sure!

Utilizing a method that is widely accepted and now and then even effective, the teacher set up a flip chart and asked two students to moderate. The two parties in the conflict were asked to give their versions of what had happened — which led to more acrimony — and other children were asked what they thought was best to do in such a situation. Ideas and suggestions were duly noted ad recorded on the flip chart: “Ignore people who insult you,” “Be nice to your friends,” “Don’t use bad language,” etc. Once the exhortations were exhausted, the flip chart sheets were tacked to the bulletin board and the wall, where they joined an ever wider array of aggressively positive slogans. I was reminded of photographs of Soviet classrooms in the nineteen fifties, their walls aglow with the words of Lenin and Stalin. Back then, our teachers told us that we should be grateful not to have to sit in rooms decorated with propaganda…

It was clear that by this time of year (late December) the discussion I had witnessed was nothing for this class, nor did it seem to have been very helpful. The overall effect was that children were being trained to intellectualize their emotions in order to “control” them, while their real feelings continued to lurk behind the scenes, ready to erupt as soon as the discussion ended and the flip chart was put away. Symptoms were being “managed,” but the underlying archetypes that motivated the children were hardly being touched.

During a break time, the teacher, her principal and I discussed what I had seen, and she acknowledged that little or no progress had been made in healing the rift between the two antagonists. I stated that Waldorf teachers perceived such argumentative tendencies, or even vindictiveness, as a natural part of fourth grade behavior.

“So what do you do about it?” she asked. “What do you do in a Waldorf school when this stuff breaks out?”