Waldorf News

Are We Ready to Be Discovered? by Dorit Winter

Imagine a Budweiser commercial on TV that actually shows scenes of stumbling drunkards; or a British Petroleum ad that brings us graphic scenes of polluted coastline. This is exactly what Microsoft did with its smart phone commercials during the recent World Series. Even a baseball ignoramus like myself had to be affected by Giants Fever, and so, along with millions of others, I got to see not only the “triumph of the beards,” but the Windows Phone 7 commercial which gave us scene after scene of people falling over objects, ignoring their loved ones, tumbling down steps, literally spellbound by their smart phones.

The commercial depicted well-dressed, civilized people ignoring family and friends, utterly focused on the devices in their hands. “Really?” yells the little leaguer whose father is mesmerized by the screen in his hand until his exasperated son chucks a ball at his head. Clunk! “Really?” asks the bridegroom as his distracted bride proceeds down the aisle. “Really?” “Really?” “Really?” exclaim humiliated, ignored, and frustrated people as their talking partners disappear into palm-sized screens.

Ten years ago such public self-parody by any manufacturer, let alone Microsoft, would have been unthinkable. But the extent to which our technological appendages have us in their thrall has intensified to such a pitch that they can be mocked by their own creators. Even an online trade magazine, Advertising Age, can make the point:

The campaign aims a barbed jab at today’s leading smart phones — BlackBerry, iPhone and Android — that render us heads-down slaves to our devices. Repeatedly asking ‘Really?’ the Windows Phone video finds people stuck to their devices in scenes where they should actually be, well, living.

“Living!” Instead of “slaves to our devices.” Really! For those of us laboring in the largely undiscovered world of Waldorf education on this continent, these examples of self-deprecation represent a significant turn of events. On all sides people are waking up to the toxic effects of our civilization, especially on the young. A constant flow of articles, blogs, and publications tells us that contemporary values need rethinking. Some core values of Waldorf education are now being “discovered” by experts in various fields of research: nutrition, medicine, psychiatry, sociology….So popular has this line of thought become that it can even be commercially exploited by the “Greenwashers.”

Waldorf education needs no greenwashing; neither does it need any whitewashing. It stands on its own merit. Waldorf education was “green” before there was such a term. For over nine decades it has set a pace so far in advance of conventional thinking about education that it has been misunderstood, mislabeled, even abjured. But, if Microsoft recognizes itself as being a threat in need of a remedy, we in the Waldorf world better take heed. For it could happen any minute that we are discovered by a broad spectrum of people who yearn for a lifestyle — including, therefore, a form of education — built upon human values. The big question, then, for the next decade is: are we ready to be discovered?

During these past ten years, the endeavor of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training has been to strengthen our students so that they can swim up stream against the current of the times. The challenge for the coming decade may well be different. We are no longer swimming up stream. The stream is changing direction because more and more people already unwittingly espouse our values.

One such unknowing discoverer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matt Richtel. During an interview on “Fresh Air” on August 24,2010 (the entire interview is highly recommended and available on www.npr.org), Richtel spoke movingly about his research into the effect on our own brains of “smart” technology. Richtel tries to describe the problem by way of analogy:

Just as food nourishes us and we need it for life, so too in the 21st century, you cannot survive without the communications tools. And yet, food has pros and cons to it. We know that some food is Twinkies and some is Brussels sprouts. And we know that if we overeat, it causes problems.

Similarly, after, say, 20 years of glorifying all technology as if all computers were good and all use of it was good, I think science is beginning to embrace the idea that some technology is Twinkies, and some technology is Brussels sprouts.

And if we consume too much technology, just like if we consume too much food, it can have ill effects. And that is the moment in time we find ourselves in with this series and with the way we are digesting, if you will, technology all over the place, everywhere today.

The question is: What is the line right now when we go from a kind of technology nourishment to a kind of obesity , to a kind of stepping backwards, to a kind of distraction that rather than informing us or making us more productive, distracts us, impedes our relationships, impedes our productivity?

And there’s ample evidence, or rather, let’s say, growing evidence that that line is closer than we’ve imagined or that we’ve acknowledged.

The remainder of the interview provides what Richtel calls “clear evidence” that constant interruptions such as emails and text messages and phone calls stimulate in us a steady stream of stress hormones — specifically cortisol — that can have lingering effects on our powers of long-term memory and the effectiveness of higher cortical functions:

As of say, 20 years ago, scientists began to realize that the brain is what they call plastic. It bends and it evolves and it changes throughout a lifetime, whereas opposed to years ago, they used to think, well, your brain basically formed when you were a kid and then it was static, it was done.

The recognition, the revelation that the brain changes over time means that what happens in our environment effectively acts as a molding experience for our brains. And so when we get into a place like this, where there is such a fundamental change to our environment through the use of handheld devices, ubiquitous information, media everywhere, we can now expect that that changes our brains. Whereas, two decades ago, we might not have thought it had any effect internally .We might have thought it was just some external thing we experience.

At this point, the interviewer asks about the effect of all this on children’s brains. And Richtel explains:

The frontal lobe of the brain tends to develop last. It is the thing scientists say makes us most human. It is the part of the brain that sets priorities. It helps us balance between and make choices. It essentially says, here’s where I’m going to direct my attention at any given time. And it’s kind of long-term thinking, long-term goal-setting.

But it is constantly, if you will, in a simplistic sense, under bombardment from other parts of the brain. The sensory parts that like, you know, we see something and we send a message to the frontal lobe that says, should I pay attention and how much? When we have an onslaught of data coming in, the sensory cortices of the brain are now constantly bombarding the frontal lobe, saying, what should I pay attention to?

Richtel is not an anthroposophist and presumably knows nothing about Waldorf education. Instead common sense and logic have led him to insights which constitute one of the essential elements of Waldorf education: the uninterrupted two-hour main lesson which every Waldorf child world-wide experiences every day from grades one through the end of high school. It is not a monolithic experience for the child. The main lesson breathes, it modulates, it arcs from major to minor and back. Its composition is not prescribed. Each teacher each morning must create its form anew. But it provides for an uninterrupted flow of attentiveness. It strengthens the memory. It strengthens the thinking. It provides an antidote to the technologically-induced brain stress our era has unleashed.

In his book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind, studied by First Year students in our teacher training, Rudolf Steiner describes the brain from a spiritual scientific perspective:

When [man] is born, his physical brain, for instance, is but a very imperfect instrument. The soul has to work a finer organization into that instrument, in order to make it the agent of everything that the soul is capable of performing.

The elaboration of the brain is undertaken because the brain is the instrument of thought. At the beginning of life, this organ is still malleable, because the individual has to form it for himself as an instrument of thought….The brain immediately after birth is, as it was bound to be, in consonance with the forces inherited from parents and other ancestors. But the individual has to express in his thought what he is as an individual being….Therefore he must re-model the inherited peculiarities of his brain, after birth, when he has become physically independent of his parents and other ancestors.

All the more reason to avoid brain stress, most especially in young children.

The uninterrupted main lesson has been part of Waldorf education since its inception in 1919. And like so many other details of our approach to the growing child, its value is being validated by neurologists, artists, and educators beyond our own circles.

Rudolf Steiner ends his lecture cycle Man As Symphony of the Creative Word, studied by Second Year students in our teacher training, with the following clarion call:

It is very evident that mankind today [1923] again needs something from civilization which stands close to the human heart and the human soul, which springs directly from the human heart and the human soul. If a child,on entering primary school, is introduced to a highly sophisticated system of letter-forms which he has to learn as a …b …c,etc., this has nothing whatever to do with his heart and soul. It has no relation to them at all.[…]

We must, therefore, develop an art of education which works creatively from the child’s soul. We must let the child bring color into form; and the color-forms, which have arisen out of joy, out of enthusiasm, out of sadness, out of every possible feeling, these he can paint on to the paper. When a child puts on to the paper what arises out of his soul, this develops his humanity.… This is something which grows out of man like his fingers or his nose! — whereas, when the child has forced on him the conventional forms of the letters, which are the result of a high degree of civilization, this does engender what is parasitic.

Immediately the art of education lies close to the human heart, to the human soul, the spiritual approaches man without becoming poison. First you have the diagnosis, which finds that our age is infested with carcinomas, and then you have the therapy — yes, it is Waldorf School education.

Waldorf School education is founded upon nothing other than this, my dear friends. Its way of thinking in the cultural sphere is the same as that in the field of therapy.[…] One must regard education as medicine transposed into the spiritual. This strikes us with particular clarity when we wish to find a therapy for civilization, for we can only conceive this therapy as being Waldorf School education.

Many in the culture at large are already seeking us. When they find us, will we be ready?

Will our own brains have become calcified by constant interruptions and the “onslaught of information,” or will our anthroposophical studies and meditative life strengthen our thinking so that — whether on YouTube or in the New York Times — we can articulate in contemporary language how Waldorf education serves as a potent antidote to the illnesses of our times?

“Are We Ready to Be Discovered?” originally appeared in the tenth anniversary edition of Golden Gate: Newsletter of the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training. Dorit Winter is the director of the Center and it is with her kind permission that this article is reprinted here.