It does not take much practice at entering the consciousness of a young child to discover several things. The world, to a child’s consciousness, is wonderfully fresh and new, and wonderfully exciting. What is more, young children, before they enter school, have an incredible lust to learn. It is this desire that draws them upright and teaches them to walk and talk, and urges them to ask the incessant questions that normally drive adults to distraction.
But how long do these aspects of the child’s consciousness survive the normal educational environment? Maybe a year or two ― at most.
Extract from
Education for Freedom by Garry Richardson
(back cover 1985 edition)
During the last century there has been an intensifying interest in the ways in which we teach children to learn. In that time a transformation has taken place: from treating children as an empty slate which parents and educators can inscribe to a central concern with the natural learning processes of children. There are many people and movements who have contributed to this change: Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy and ideas; Piaget’s ‘genetic epistemology’ emphasizing how humans acquire knowledge; Montessori’s emphasis on creativity and independence as the learning experience for children; and Ivan Illich’s notion of ‘de-schooling’, learning webs and life-long learning. These are just a few examples. This paper is based on my belief that human-centred education provides the best focus on the intrinsic learning needs of young children – needs which are inseparable from the children’s desire to express their growing understanding of the world in a creative way.
My interest in education began with the search for a suitable school for my daughter. We eventually chose the Steiner school system because its gentle imaginative approach to teaching and a strong emphasis on the school community and parental involvement coincided with our family ethos. However, I felt unsure about some aspects of the Steiner system.
We moved some distance to attend one of the many Steiner schools in Australia but fortuitously on arrival we came across a brochure detailing a local school called Korowal and went to look at the school. Within seconds of entering the Kindergarten classroom I realized that this school was right for us and our daughter and so we enrolled her. I immediately read Garry Richardson’s Education for Freedom on which the school was based, and his philosophy of human-centred education has engaged me and informed my life since. I shall say something about this philosophy later in the paper, after a brief account of some of the activities at Korowal.
When I met my daughter’s future Kindergarten and Class teacher I offered to teach craft as I had a background in clothing and textile design and subsequently taught craft in that class for a full day a week. After a term I became even more involved by becoming the teacher’s assistant a further two days per week in order to learn the school’s teaching methods. After training, I also worked as a relief teacher in the junior primary school.
As a design student and later as a practicing designer I had had strong views about the nature of creativity and the teaching of creative arts generally and I had developed my own methods of doing this. I also believed that creative talent was not found in everybody but that some people could be taught ‘creativity’, and others could not.
I experienced a radical turnaround in my previous understanding when I began to teach at Korowal. About two thirds of the way through my first year, I was pinning up the children’s art work and was suddenly struck by the realisation that every picture was a work of art. All the children were able to project their inner world onto paper using colour and form they had each learned to communicate creatively. I was overwhelmed by this insight and spent weeks reviewing intensely my views on education – as well as my feelings about who I was in the world. I began to observe more carefully the teachers who had developed their methods under Garry Richardson’s guidance. I could see that within the general framework of human-centred education each teacher had honed his or her own way of teaching that was aligned with their personality, and I set about finding my own way.
Although Garry had retired from the school before I arrived there, he visited from time to time and during one of those visits I sought him out to discuss his writings and the principles underlying human-centred education. This meeting started a long working relationship which continued until Garry’s death early this year.
Human-centred education flows from conscious action philosophy which holds that everything in the universe is fundamentally spiritual in nature. We use conscious awareness to inform our understanding of whatever activity engages us; we are guided by our archetypal or spiritual love to inform and transform. We aim to make conscious the universal wisdom and goodness that all human beings possess and are capable of expressing. We believe that if this natural ability is understood we can have a most valuable resource to change society for the better. It is a realistic but optimistic philosophy.
In the process of educating young children in a human-centred school each child is helped to realise his or her potential in a way that continues to develop beyond their school years and broadens abilities of mind, soul and body as a dynamic unity. While the unfolding abilities of each human being constitute a unique configuration, there must be a balance between this individuality and the child’s place in the class and the community that envelop and support the child.
Therefore teachers work with the natural interests and abilities of the children in their class but also attempt to harmonise these in an approach that balances ease with challenge. The children are encouraged to play, explore, discover and light their way
towards their own sense of the sacred nature of life which grows from their intuition and does not rest on religion or ideology.
In a human-centred school, children benefit from play, time to day dream and a slower start to formal teaching. One of our basic principles is the involvement of creativity in all activities and at all levels of learning. Different subjects are interwoven and artistic expression is part of the learning process throughout, thus retaining the sense of wonderment that is in every child and is a most precious human gift.
Now I would like to illustrate how these broad principles translate into activities in the classroom. For example: towards the end of the Kindergarten year, the children work slowly through the numbers one to nine, focusing on one number per week. Much of this is done through story- telling that really captures the children’s imagination. Thus Number One stands straight wearing a saucepan on his head, and with his heavy boots jumps everywhere. Most captivating was Number Eight: if you walked over its shape as drawn on the floor and recited “hurley, burley, cracker dunk” then your heart’s desires would be granted. From these stories which children often re-told at home many parents became inspired enough to come in after school to try their luck!
At the end of Kindergarten there is much anticipation of moving to Class One in the following school year. In this atmosphere, one afternoon the class teacher developed a game that involved coloured blocks on the floor which the children were asked to count. The teacher then placed a piece of hand-dyed cloth over the blocks, took one out and then asked the children how many were now under the cloth. The children came up with their answers and then took a vote on which was the correct answer. Then the teacher lifted the cloth and the children all counted the blocks together. The teacher then went on with increasingly more challenging versions of the same exercise, involving all the children every time. At the conclusion of the activity, the teacher told the children that what they had been doing was called mathematics. Silence fell over the children as they had not imagined mathematics to be such an engaging game.
Mathematics is indeed of special interest. It is often taken to be the polar opposite to art but in fact the two are closely related. The placement of simple forms on the page and the appreciation of their size represent a basic concept with which very young children work from the time they make their first mark and which they develop in more complex ways as time goes on. In a parallel manner the early cave drawings gradually evolved towards perspective based on calculation during the Renaissance; later still, more complicated calculations brought into perspective the appreciation of the curvature of the Earth.
We hold that there is a natural historical course of development of consciousness, and this applies to children also. This becomes evident when they create shapes with form and colour. The concepts of size and proportion – mathematics – gradually emerge through the children’s own perception and understanding. In human-centred education we do not criticise something that will change and develop of its own accord in due course. It is our joy as teachers to experience the child’s individual
development and it is our responsibility to know when to step in to aid and enhance the process or to simply allow its course. Guidance must be given with the greatest of care and continuous effort should be made to see the world through the child’s eyes, because what may seem inappropriate to an adult has often been well thought out and has real significance for the child.
Children need to develop loving and sensate relationships to the community and the world through creative activity that marshals resources of mind, soul and body in equal measure. Therefore we display the children’s own artwork in their classroom and encourage their participation in making the teaching aids like alphabet cards and counters. We teach the children to design and make their own pencil cases, craft bags, cushions and toys so that they experience the useful nature of their art and craft activity. The making of class books is another wonderful communal activity through which favourite stories are retold and re-enacted, and significant events commemorated through both individual and collective activity.
Nature is another basic concept which we develop in various ways. We use the tree as a symbol and teach the children to look below the ground line which they invariably make in their drawing of a tree. They are encouraged to look into the earth around the tree, to feel its roots and see the creatures that live in and around and on the tree, and to appreciate the myriad of colours on the bark and in the leaves. Thus we connect the tree to the living world and its marvellous variety in an ongoing exercise of increasing complexity which continues over a number of years and coincides with the children’s development. The children are learning about the interconnected nature of everything and the mysterious hidden aspects of life; a concept we all marvel at, developed and enhanced through observation and creative activity.
During Kindergarten we teach the children to draw the sun as a ball of fire. We start with our deepest red crayon and build up a strong red circle until all children can get a sense of the heat on the page. Then we add a lighter red and do the same outside the smaller more intense circle. Next come dark orange, lighter orange, deep and lighter yellow. Thus we have six hot colours which lessen in intensity as we move out from the centre and the children can feel their sun’s radiant heat and ask us to feel it also.
Each child has a very true representation of the ball of fire which lights and warms our cosmos and is essential for life. Though we never spoke of this to the children they understood the basic idea. After this lesson they drew various versions of the sun using combinations of their own way of drawing as well as the way we had taught them. What the children had gained from all this was an understanding of the nature of the sun which honours its significance, majesty and beauty – as well as a sense of belongingness to the universe of which they and the sun are a part.
At this stage I would like to clarify the relationship between human-centred education and the Steiner education system. We share many aims with the latter:
•An acknowledgment of the spiritual nature of everything and the need to work in harmony and with reverence for whatever engages us:
• Our relationship to the natural and built world and the natural rhythms of life, both internal and external:
• An awareness of truth, beauty and goodness:
•Our regard for the evolution of consciousness and its importance for our teaching methods which include an unhurried introduction to formal learning through play:
•An emphasis on human relationships which necessitates children and teachers staying together over some years, as well as parental involvement:
•The main lesson structure fostering concentration and activities which integrate formal and artistic work:
•All children are taught music, poetry, art and craft, and other subjects are elevated to an art and interwoven:
•A balanced approach addressing all modes of learning which honours the whole child and:
•Children are encouraged to reach their potential with a view of contributing to a changed and better social order.
Our major difference from the Steiner philosophy is that, although we both have a spiritual core, our structure does not have an explicit religious basis. We accept and encourage personal religious beliefs but maintain openness which is necessary to create an atmosphere of acceptance for everyone. It is important to maintain firm guidelines that are not in themselves dogmatic, calling for a balance of discipline and freedom for all involved. It is a fine but very definite difference and, I would like to emphasise, an essential element in our contemporary diverse world.
Another difference is our understanding of the importance of our physical existence. Whereas Steiner philosophy favours the spiritual order as higher than the lower physical realms, we bring them together as a whole – in other words, we are philosophically monist.
In Steiner’s Anthroposophy there is an emphasis on knowledge through spiritual clairvoyance. By contrast, we feel that insight is better achieved through the harmony of body, mind and soul.
Artistic creativity in human-centred education is particularly inspiring and differs from the Steiner approach as practiced in the schools I have visited in Australia. We place a greater emphasis on individual interpretation and expression utilising techniques which are taught but are not prescriptive, so that the finished work becomes an authentic expression of the child’s inner world.
We also acknowledge the balance of light and dark within each individual – and the world as a whole - in a realistic way as human beings are complex, even as children. Although we have gained a vast understanding of our world there are many areas we know very little about, including human consciousness and the soul. We are all grasping in the dark to some degree and it is honest to acknowledge this instead of masking our ignorance or hiding behind status and qualifications. There is an almost
brutal honesty to our endeavour but that it is balanced with empathy and conscious effort to work with archetypal or spiritual love.
We encourage the development of all the senses as rational argument is never completely sufficient. Through utilizing the rich and rounded feeling senses we can develop a deeper understanding and acceptance of other people and other cultures. Tolerance and joy in our diversity is an integral aspect of human-centred education. It is the over-arching aim of human-centred education to develop children who are both knowledgeable and free to explore the richness of life through creative interaction for the betterment of human society. And our first question as teachers should always be - what is a child? We still do not have all the answers, and so that question has to keep running like a thread through our activities as teachers; it is the basis for our conscious actions towards the children and the wellspring of our love and regard for them.
Works by Garry Richardson:
But how long do these aspects of the child’s consciousness survive the normal educational environment? Maybe a year or two ― at most.
Extract from
Education for Freedom by Garry Richardson
(back cover 1985 edition)
During the last century there has been an intensifying interest in the ways in which we teach children to learn. In that time a transformation has taken place: from treating children as an empty slate which parents and educators can inscribe to a central concern with the natural learning processes of children. There are many people and movements who have contributed to this change: Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy and ideas; Piaget’s ‘genetic epistemology’ emphasizing how humans acquire knowledge; Montessori’s emphasis on creativity and independence as the learning experience for children; and Ivan Illich’s notion of ‘de-schooling’, learning webs and life-long learning. These are just a few examples. This paper is based on my belief that human-centred education provides the best focus on the intrinsic learning needs of young children – needs which are inseparable from the children’s desire to express their growing understanding of the world in a creative way.
My interest in education began with the search for a suitable school for my daughter. We eventually chose the Steiner school system because its gentle imaginative approach to teaching and a strong emphasis on the school community and parental involvement coincided with our family ethos. However, I felt unsure about some aspects of the Steiner system.
We moved some distance to attend one of the many Steiner schools in Australia but fortuitously on arrival we came across a brochure detailing a local school called Korowal and went to look at the school. Within seconds of entering the Kindergarten classroom I realized that this school was right for us and our daughter and so we enrolled her. I immediately read Garry Richardson’s Education for Freedom on which the school was based, and his philosophy of human-centred education has engaged me and informed my life since. I shall say something about this philosophy later in the paper, after a brief account of some of the activities at Korowal.
When I met my daughter’s future Kindergarten and Class teacher I offered to teach craft as I had a background in clothing and textile design and subsequently taught craft in that class for a full day a week. After a term I became even more involved by becoming the teacher’s assistant a further two days per week in order to learn the school’s teaching methods. After training, I also worked as a relief teacher in the junior primary school.
As a design student and later as a practicing designer I had had strong views about the nature of creativity and the teaching of creative arts generally and I had developed my own methods of doing this. I also believed that creative talent was not found in everybody but that some people could be taught ‘creativity’, and others could not.
I experienced a radical turnaround in my previous understanding when I began to teach at Korowal. About two thirds of the way through my first year, I was pinning up the children’s art work and was suddenly struck by the realisation that every picture was a work of art. All the children were able to project their inner world onto paper using colour and form they had each learned to communicate creatively. I was overwhelmed by this insight and spent weeks reviewing intensely my views on education – as well as my feelings about who I was in the world. I began to observe more carefully the teachers who had developed their methods under Garry Richardson’s guidance. I could see that within the general framework of human-centred education each teacher had honed his or her own way of teaching that was aligned with their personality, and I set about finding my own way.
Although Garry had retired from the school before I arrived there, he visited from time to time and during one of those visits I sought him out to discuss his writings and the principles underlying human-centred education. This meeting started a long working relationship which continued until Garry’s death early this year.
Human-centred education flows from conscious action philosophy which holds that everything in the universe is fundamentally spiritual in nature. We use conscious awareness to inform our understanding of whatever activity engages us; we are guided by our archetypal or spiritual love to inform and transform. We aim to make conscious the universal wisdom and goodness that all human beings possess and are capable of expressing. We believe that if this natural ability is understood we can have a most valuable resource to change society for the better. It is a realistic but optimistic philosophy.
In the process of educating young children in a human-centred school each child is helped to realise his or her potential in a way that continues to develop beyond their school years and broadens abilities of mind, soul and body as a dynamic unity. While the unfolding abilities of each human being constitute a unique configuration, there must be a balance between this individuality and the child’s place in the class and the community that envelop and support the child.
Therefore teachers work with the natural interests and abilities of the children in their class but also attempt to harmonise these in an approach that balances ease with challenge. The children are encouraged to play, explore, discover and light their way
towards their own sense of the sacred nature of life which grows from their intuition and does not rest on religion or ideology.
In a human-centred school, children benefit from play, time to day dream and a slower start to formal teaching. One of our basic principles is the involvement of creativity in all activities and at all levels of learning. Different subjects are interwoven and artistic expression is part of the learning process throughout, thus retaining the sense of wonderment that is in every child and is a most precious human gift.
Now I would like to illustrate how these broad principles translate into activities in the classroom. For example: towards the end of the Kindergarten year, the children work slowly through the numbers one to nine, focusing on one number per week. Much of this is done through story- telling that really captures the children’s imagination. Thus Number One stands straight wearing a saucepan on his head, and with his heavy boots jumps everywhere. Most captivating was Number Eight: if you walked over its shape as drawn on the floor and recited “hurley, burley, cracker dunk” then your heart’s desires would be granted. From these stories which children often re-told at home many parents became inspired enough to come in after school to try their luck!
At the end of Kindergarten there is much anticipation of moving to Class One in the following school year. In this atmosphere, one afternoon the class teacher developed a game that involved coloured blocks on the floor which the children were asked to count. The teacher then placed a piece of hand-dyed cloth over the blocks, took one out and then asked the children how many were now under the cloth. The children came up with their answers and then took a vote on which was the correct answer. Then the teacher lifted the cloth and the children all counted the blocks together. The teacher then went on with increasingly more challenging versions of the same exercise, involving all the children every time. At the conclusion of the activity, the teacher told the children that what they had been doing was called mathematics. Silence fell over the children as they had not imagined mathematics to be such an engaging game.
Mathematics is indeed of special interest. It is often taken to be the polar opposite to art but in fact the two are closely related. The placement of simple forms on the page and the appreciation of their size represent a basic concept with which very young children work from the time they make their first mark and which they develop in more complex ways as time goes on. In a parallel manner the early cave drawings gradually evolved towards perspective based on calculation during the Renaissance; later still, more complicated calculations brought into perspective the appreciation of the curvature of the Earth.
We hold that there is a natural historical course of development of consciousness, and this applies to children also. This becomes evident when they create shapes with form and colour. The concepts of size and proportion – mathematics – gradually emerge through the children’s own perception and understanding. In human-centred education we do not criticise something that will change and develop of its own accord in due course. It is our joy as teachers to experience the child’s individual
development and it is our responsibility to know when to step in to aid and enhance the process or to simply allow its course. Guidance must be given with the greatest of care and continuous effort should be made to see the world through the child’s eyes, because what may seem inappropriate to an adult has often been well thought out and has real significance for the child.
Children need to develop loving and sensate relationships to the community and the world through creative activity that marshals resources of mind, soul and body in equal measure. Therefore we display the children’s own artwork in their classroom and encourage their participation in making the teaching aids like alphabet cards and counters. We teach the children to design and make their own pencil cases, craft bags, cushions and toys so that they experience the useful nature of their art and craft activity. The making of class books is another wonderful communal activity through which favourite stories are retold and re-enacted, and significant events commemorated through both individual and collective activity.
Nature is another basic concept which we develop in various ways. We use the tree as a symbol and teach the children to look below the ground line which they invariably make in their drawing of a tree. They are encouraged to look into the earth around the tree, to feel its roots and see the creatures that live in and around and on the tree, and to appreciate the myriad of colours on the bark and in the leaves. Thus we connect the tree to the living world and its marvellous variety in an ongoing exercise of increasing complexity which continues over a number of years and coincides with the children’s development. The children are learning about the interconnected nature of everything and the mysterious hidden aspects of life; a concept we all marvel at, developed and enhanced through observation and creative activity.
During Kindergarten we teach the children to draw the sun as a ball of fire. We start with our deepest red crayon and build up a strong red circle until all children can get a sense of the heat on the page. Then we add a lighter red and do the same outside the smaller more intense circle. Next come dark orange, lighter orange, deep and lighter yellow. Thus we have six hot colours which lessen in intensity as we move out from the centre and the children can feel their sun’s radiant heat and ask us to feel it also.
Each child has a very true representation of the ball of fire which lights and warms our cosmos and is essential for life. Though we never spoke of this to the children they understood the basic idea. After this lesson they drew various versions of the sun using combinations of their own way of drawing as well as the way we had taught them. What the children had gained from all this was an understanding of the nature of the sun which honours its significance, majesty and beauty – as well as a sense of belongingness to the universe of which they and the sun are a part.
At this stage I would like to clarify the relationship between human-centred education and the Steiner education system. We share many aims with the latter:
•An acknowledgment of the spiritual nature of everything and the need to work in harmony and with reverence for whatever engages us:
• Our relationship to the natural and built world and the natural rhythms of life, both internal and external:
• An awareness of truth, beauty and goodness:
•Our regard for the evolution of consciousness and its importance for our teaching methods which include an unhurried introduction to formal learning through play:
•An emphasis on human relationships which necessitates children and teachers staying together over some years, as well as parental involvement:
•The main lesson structure fostering concentration and activities which integrate formal and artistic work:
•All children are taught music, poetry, art and craft, and other subjects are elevated to an art and interwoven:
•A balanced approach addressing all modes of learning which honours the whole child and:
•Children are encouraged to reach their potential with a view of contributing to a changed and better social order.
Our major difference from the Steiner philosophy is that, although we both have a spiritual core, our structure does not have an explicit religious basis. We accept and encourage personal religious beliefs but maintain openness which is necessary to create an atmosphere of acceptance for everyone. It is important to maintain firm guidelines that are not in themselves dogmatic, calling for a balance of discipline and freedom for all involved. It is a fine but very definite difference and, I would like to emphasise, an essential element in our contemporary diverse world.
Another difference is our understanding of the importance of our physical existence. Whereas Steiner philosophy favours the spiritual order as higher than the lower physical realms, we bring them together as a whole – in other words, we are philosophically monist.
In Steiner’s Anthroposophy there is an emphasis on knowledge through spiritual clairvoyance. By contrast, we feel that insight is better achieved through the harmony of body, mind and soul.
Artistic creativity in human-centred education is particularly inspiring and differs from the Steiner approach as practiced in the schools I have visited in Australia. We place a greater emphasis on individual interpretation and expression utilising techniques which are taught but are not prescriptive, so that the finished work becomes an authentic expression of the child’s inner world.
We also acknowledge the balance of light and dark within each individual – and the world as a whole - in a realistic way as human beings are complex, even as children. Although we have gained a vast understanding of our world there are many areas we know very little about, including human consciousness and the soul. We are all grasping in the dark to some degree and it is honest to acknowledge this instead of masking our ignorance or hiding behind status and qualifications. There is an almost
brutal honesty to our endeavour but that it is balanced with empathy and conscious effort to work with archetypal or spiritual love.
We encourage the development of all the senses as rational argument is never completely sufficient. Through utilizing the rich and rounded feeling senses we can develop a deeper understanding and acceptance of other people and other cultures. Tolerance and joy in our diversity is an integral aspect of human-centred education. It is the over-arching aim of human-centred education to develop children who are both knowledgeable and free to explore the richness of life through creative interaction for the betterment of human society. And our first question as teachers should always be - what is a child? We still do not have all the answers, and so that question has to keep running like a thread through our activities as teachers; it is the basis for our conscious actions towards the children and the wellspring of our love and regard for them.
Works by Garry Richardson:
- Education for Freedom: Schooling for the Third Millennium, 2nd edition (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 2004).
- Conscious Action Philosophy: a Way for Self and Social Transformation, (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 2004).
- System of the Daystar: The Spiritual Home of Humankind (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 2004).
- The Nature of Reality: An Outline of Human-Centred Philosophy (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 2000).
- Realizing the Vision: the New Society (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 1998).
- Understanding Reality: Human-Centred Philosophy in Overview (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 1999).
- Structures for Human-Centred Schools (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 2001).
- Writings on Education and Korowal (Crows Nest, Sydney: Gavemer Publishing, 1994).
- Other works consulted:
- Bettelheim, Bruno, The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairytales (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
- Strauss, Michaela, Understanding Children’s Drawing (London: Rudolph Steiner Press, 1978).
- Findlay, Victoria, Colour : Travels through the Paintbox (London, UK, Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).
- Rogers, James T., The Story of Mathematics (Norwick, UK: Brockhampton Press, 1974).
- Edmunds, Francis L., Rudolf Steiner Education: The Waldorf School (Sussex: Rudolph Steiner Press, 1992).
- Honoré, Carl, In Praise of Slow (London: Orion, 2004).
- Mighton, John, The Myth of Ability (Melbourne, Australia: Text Publishing, 2003).
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