Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

considered necessary in relation to the environment. The curriculum of aWaldorf school in Japan, for example, must reflect the cultural environmentin which it stands and not be an imported “little Stuttgart.”Concerning how elementary school lessons are taught, one noticesa widespread tendency to start the day with a lengthy series of circle gameactivities. This obliterates one purpose of the main lesson—to carry oversomething inward in the students from the previous day. The carrying overof questions and feelings from the sleep life renders the first part of the mainlesson time the “golden time” of the school day. The students can, after anintroductory activity such as the saying of a verse, make the subject trulytheir own by calling up the content of the previous lesson and discussingit while they are still inwardly fresh. This carrying over, discussion, anddevelopment of the subject matter is a vital part of Steiner’s method ofteaching according to a two-day rhythm. The structure of the main lessoncan, in fact, be a picture of the incarnating process itself.Another important curricular question concerns the computer. Whenand how something is taught is as important as what is taught. The latesttechnology must be taught in the Waldorf school. Certainly computer technologyshould be familiar to the high school student. There could be a mainlesson block or course on the history of technology out of which such a studycould arise. This could be followed by a course on the development andtechnical workings of the computer since the seventeenth century, and theinvention and the principle of the binary system. If these things are taughtwith insight and imagination, then the student will be equipped inwardlyto face the encounter with the keyboard and with the spider behind theinvisible threads of the electronic World Wide Web.The North American instinctively abhors the negative side of Europeanculture—that is, the intellectual side. But this intellectual element hassailed across the Atlantic along with the various other aspects of Europeanculture. It is today clearly manifest in school programs that kill an aliveeducation stone dead. This should be resisted openly and courageously byparents and teachers who have a feeling for their children’s welfare andfuture. The child knows what is meant when you tell the story about howthe Native Americans of long ago said that if you try to count the stars anddon’t finish counting, then you will die. Counting is intellectual, not pictorial.Culture dies when you try to count the stars. No one can count them,but to do so, metaphorically, is the basis of our modern culture.Let us not count the stars in the Waldorf curriculum and fix themrigidly, but rather see them as pictures of the human constellation, andrender these pictures rightly within each culture. We must do research as277