Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

36
Poetry is the path because it provides the potentized kernel of imagery. Pictorial imagination is a
form of freedom. Story leaves you in freedom to exercise the images in meaning and truth. Students can be
led to value this freedom to participate in and develop images of the story. This requires an act of will on the
part of the students.
How do we bring the will into thinking? We begin through a transition of the word “imagination”
from a noun to a verb. Imagination is what gets the will moving. Imagination uses the will to awaken
knowledge
This understanding of the freedom inherent in reading literature may be a key to teaching the New
Testament. It is difficult to bring any reference to Christ to most students, yet they need to know the New
Testament to enter into the 11 th grade curriculum. There is such an aversion to the name “Christ” in our
students, in part because what immediately comes to mind is the Christian right with its materialistic
assumptions. Soloviev says the Antichrist will come with the name of Christ. Do the students bring a prebirth
understanding of this? The Christian right embodies a materialistic assumption. When students understand
the law of love, they feel sorrow at what was lost. The images of the Christ as Western is a true
perception of the students. It is the world of the deed at the close of a materialistic age. One 12 th grader was
upset at the idea of Columbus as a hero in Transcendentalism. Another was also upset with the failure of
Brook Farm. But what is a life without initiative? The students want to know why they are part of the
culture of deed and will. We need to make it real again. We must find ways to overcome student scepticism
and cynicism. There must be something good we can put into the world, even while taking the risk that it
might not work.
Meg Gorman spoke of an experience with a Mexican Shaman who said that his youth are lost to
their own religion and want to go to the west to find religion; the abandoning of one’s religion is not only
our question. The young people know in their bones that there is not just “one way.” This can be a problem
with Anthroposophy as well; our students can experience it as dogma. Many students are reading The Life
of Pi by Jan Martel. Pi is a boy who grows up in a village in India. He begins to attend three religious
services and forms a connection with the holy men of Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist faiths. All is well
until his parents and the three “priests” tell him he can’t possibly combine all three, but must rather embrace
only one. He wants the combining of all, as many of our students do.
One participant recommends the books of Mary Doria Russell to students the summer before
12the grade. The Sparrow and The Children of God treat the issue of colonization from a metaphorical point
of view. In 2019, when radio waves are received from space, a Jesuit priest sells off church relics to fund
intergalactic travel with a team including the Jesuit priest, non-Jesuit Catholics, a Jew, and a number of
atheists. On the new planet Rakhat, the questions begin, “How do we colonize? What is the role of the
church? What is the role of the anthropologist?”
Philip Thatcher’s novels Raven’s Eye and Mirror of the Moon deal directly with the issue of finding
identity in a multi-cultural world. The central character, Nathan Solomon Jacob, is born in an aboriginal
village on the west coast of British Columbia and grows up full of riddles. In his quest, he attends a Waldorf
high school where he is deeply influenced by Parzival. He later travels to Wales and Ireland where he finds
resonance between Celtic mythology and the stories told by the elders in his own village.
Many of us are experiencing that students don’t want the curriculum to be so Euro-centric. The
world is more globally aware than when Steiner was around. Students now want to know what was happening
in South America in the 9 th century. On the other hand, if we’re talking about the evolution of consciousness,
where was it happening? How was it and is it different in other parts of the world? What
happens when new consciousness is brought to an old world as when England colonized India, Australia, or
North America, for example, or currently when America is colonizing Iraq? What happens when Intellectual
Soul violently intrudes into Sentient Soul?