A Steiner School pupil's memories

My memories from my education in the Rudolf Steiner School of Verrières-le-Buisson (France) are in equally stark contrast to what is generally criticised in schools, and to what is generally considered as "the way forward", the latest trend in addressing these failures.

My teachers never used "teaching aids". A blackboard, white and coloured chalk, that's all. When there was a need for direct observation or experience, we went on a visit (to farms, flour mills, factories, museums, other schools, etc.) or we practised handicrafts (clay, wood, stone, iron, cupper, wool knitting, stitching, gardening, cooking, etc.) In classes 10, 11 and 12 we worked for 2 weeks as trainees, successively in a farm, in a factory, and in an old-age home or home for mentally handicapped, etc. Even the science classes were based on the most simple ingredients, found in kitchens or hardware shops. In class 10 we all had to built our own electric engine, with a piece of wood, 2 nails and 2 pins, and some wire salvaged from a discarded transformer. In fact, almost everything that we had in our hands was made by us and everything that we learnt was through our own activity. But nothing was left to chance or unprepared: If you really want all your pupils in a class to have a rotating electric engine on their desk within one-and-a-half hour, you have to prepare at home for much more than that!

In our school surroundings, we could see only things made by us and sometimes by our teachers, or taken from nature. Even the school buildings were partly built with the hands of the parents and teachers. There was no photographs and no printed material anywhere on the walls, except the mandatory "exit" lights prescribed by the fire department. But the walls were very colourful, painted afresh in a new colour, every year, by ourselves under the direction of our class teacher, as we shifted into a new classroom. Our latest paintings and drawings were carefully affixed on the walls by our teacher, never a selection of "the best ones", but all the paintings of the entire class on a given theme or exercise, covering the entire surface of a wall. This was not a beautification exercise, not even remotely a competition or even a comparison: The names, generally written behind, were not easily visible. It never collected dust, since the wall surfaces were limited, it had to be removed to give place for the next painting/drawing exercise. It was not intended to impress our parents or outsiders: In fact, the entrance hall, the refectory, the school offices, the teacher’s room and all public spaces were never "decorated" with our paintings or any pupil’s school work. This periodically renewed class-room exhibition was just a part of our work, to look at the result of our labour, for a while. And this made our class rooms much more than colourful and beautiful: It was alive and permeated with meaning.

There was no T.V., no video, no sound system. When computers were introduced, it was not as a teaching aid for injecting mathematics or geography in the primary classes, in a more "funny" and dreamy manner. On the contrary, the course was rather stern and designed to help the elder pupils to experience the mechanisms and the concepts that make computers run, and to enable them, based on their own experience and rational thinking, to dissipate the cloud of magic surrounding these machines. The pupils were very eager for this course.

Children's reverence for their teachers

I never saw a teacher reading something in class, except, sometimes, for reading aloud a historical quotation, or when we were studying a piece of literature in the language classes. For all the other subjects, history, geography, mathematics, geometry, geology, biology, zoology, physics, etc. etc. our teachers never, never brought a book with them in the class room. They really had to prepare seriously! And we had an instinctive feeling of great respect for what was going to happen in the class, for we knew that our teacher, our dear teacher, had prepared something specially for us, for that very hour indeed, and we had a great respect for that particular time, this encounter with knowledge, that our teacher had prepared for us. We knew it was unique, and as I remember it was always an experience. It was unique in one more sense: Although our teacher knew each one of us very well, it was not possible for him or her to foresee exactly our reaction to a particular subject, to a particular idea or experience, and he/she had to improvise all the time, as only well-prepared people can do.

Of course, with the passing of time, and specially since I have myself been a teacher for some time, I understand that sometimes, when the course was disappointing, maybe because the teacher was tired, or was too busy the day before, it was often because he or she didn’t prepare seriously his/her class for the day. And sometimes it was also us, the pupils, who were tired and didn’t do justice to the hard homework of our teacher. But in a sense things were clear: There was no short cut, no escape to one’s responsibility, and not much scope for confusion about how to address the problem, on the teacher’s side and on our side.

Homework

In a sense, the moral justification for our home work came from the ample evidence that our teacher was doing a lot of home work. And sometimes, our laziness had its origin in our teacher’s laziness! We were followers. Our encounter with knowledge was carefully organised by our teachers.

Competition?

It was not before the age of about 30 years old that I discovered that in most schools, in fact almost all schools except Steiner schools and very few others, competitions are organised. This is particularly strong in India, where there are competitions on just about everything: exams, drawing, poetry, sports, songs, etc. No child activity is spared. One just can’t imagine a school cultural programme in India which doesn’t conclude with a distribution of first, second and third prizes. And it is astonishing how seriously people take it: They exhibit the school prizes of their children in their drawing room for visitors to admire, and instead of mitigating this social pressure they often add their weight to it, by gifting and celebrating their child, or scolding him, depending on his ranking in the competition.

Values?

Of course society has always a tendency to infuse its values in schools, and competition is one of these values. Gandhi doesn’t have many genuine followers. I understand now what a blessing it was to be born in an environment where competition is a part of life (it took the centre stage in professional sports, elections, and in many love movies), but had definitely no place in school.

A non-competitive school would not be difficult to make, if the only goal was educating children. In fact, it is much more easy and efficient to teach in a non-competitive manner, and much more is achieved without the distraction caused by the burden of competition. But schools are not answerable to children only, but also to society: Parents must justify to their friends and neighbours, how well their child is doing in school, and how good their school is. Schools must justify to the government how well they perform, and so on. In fact, it was this administrative necessity (government’s rules) that was at the origin of the first marks I ever saw, at the age of 18 years old. I was leaving the school, and my teachers had to translate their rather insightful, pointed and accurate observations into marks, to facilitate my admission for the 12th class into a mainstream school, because I had decided to prepare for the most competitive higher secondary examination (mathematics), to please my parents and my vanity, and because my Steiner school was not preparing for that particular maths examination.

So, at an age when some people discover that there is a world beyond marks and competition, I decidedly embraced the world of competition from which I had been so carefully protected. But there was never any doubt in my mind that this competitive world is just an insignificant and conventional set of arbitrary rules, sometimes useful in some very few and specific areas of life (like professional sports, politics, selecting an industrial process or machine, or getting admission in prestigious engineering schools), and that the only important thing in life is, what you are actually doing. This certitude was built in my early childhood.

Values!

A truly non-competitive school has deep implications; In fact everything can be drawn from that premise, and this is also the most outstanding idea shared by Steiner, Tagore and Gandhi about education. A non-competitive school is not only a proper environment for children, it is also a the proper answer to important problems of society. Therefore a good school has deep political implications. Which doesn't mean pupils should be "taught" politically correct ideas. On the contrary, children are never involved in political debates and arguments, which always get some air of ridicule when we try to bring these ideas to children. But the attitude of their teachers is consciously determined by many ideas, including political. Which doesn't even mean that it has to be perfectly uniform in the school, because what children need is to live in the company of adults who make a conscious effort to work responsibly. They have an instinctive respect for this.

A school is a very special institution indeed, because it is a creation of society that must be protected from the values of society. Society believes in competition and violence, it is even officially, openly based on capitalist competition and on government violence (This is not an advocacy for any sudden abolition of capitalist competition or government violence) but children have absolutely nothing to do with this. They are not concerned, and they don’t have to, before some maturity, enough interior strength, self confidence, and ability to trust others, is acquired.

What are children?

Children can't learn directly from nature or from experience. Their path to knowledge is mediatised by the adults around them. That's why everybody, everywhere, feels that, in front of a child, one has to "behave". It is not a cultural code, it is a perception of what children really need. And that is why children, even when grown-up, always remember with reverence their teachers.

A child is like a question mark, whose adult life is an attempt at an answer. In any society, education has always been based on the assumption that every child has a specific purpose in life, and therefore the only possible education is to feed the child with whatever is needed for gathering the strength for the child to achieve that purpose as an adult.

Steiner even said that "the child is a question that the spiritual world asks to the material world". He then went on elaborating that the cause of materialism in education comes from selfishness, because people are generally much more concerned about "the life after death" (meaning in fact, a confused desire for a kind of continuation of our material life and all our habits, possessions etc.) than about what comes in this world through birth, or so to say, "life before birth", which obviously has absolutely nothing to do with any of our small personnal habits, possessions, etc. And then he argued that a genuine concern for what manifests itself by birth, coming from the "spiritual world", or in other words, the children, is the basis of education.

This observation of Steiner seems to be more relevant today than it was 80 years ago, because unfortunately, our mainstream education system really looks like a tragic attempt at sterilising the fresh air that our dear children bring with them.