Motueka Rudolf Steiner School
Our curriculum follows indications given by Rudolf Steiner, a prominent scientist and philosopher who was active in a number of social fields early in the twentieth century. The first Waldorf School was founded in 1919 and there are now more than 1000 Rudolf Steiner schools world wide.
Waldorf schools work with an understanding of the evolving human being and seek to educate the hands and the heart, as well as the head. Steiner recognised that the growing child passes through three major developmental stages on the journey to adulthood. Specific forces are at work in each phase and different capacities develop as the child grows into his body.
During the first 6 or 7 years the child is primarily a being of will; he learns through doing. Children at this age have an amazing capacity for imitation and need to learn through hands on experiences and through watching others. At this age, the emotions are still wide open and the child is very sensitive to his physical environment. As such, the kindergarten years (age 3 - 6) are filled with opportunities for meaningful play and feature beautiful, natural surroundings worthy of reverence and imitation.
A major transition occurs at around the age of 7, when children begin to lose their milk teeth. According to Steiner, this physical milestone also indicates that the child is ready to begin formal schooling. It is from this age that the child is ready to use his forces of memory in order to learn in a more structured environment. Between the ages of 7 – 14 children need to learn through stories and artistic activities, and teachers in Rudolf Steiner schools are constantly striving to imbue their lessons with an imaginative quality and a feeling for all that is wondrous and beautiful in the world.
The third stage begins with adolescence, when a capacity for critical judgement begins to develop. Students at this age have a thirst for truth; they seek living knowledge and need to feel that their teachers are worthy of respect as experts in their fields, that they are the ambassadors of an objective truth. This is the time to foster a regard for different perspectives and to develop the young person’s need for moral action.
Rather than pushing primary school children into intellectual modes of thinking from a young age, the Steiner curriculum seeks to celebrate number and language through imaginative stories, living pictures and artistic impressions. On their journey from Class 1 to Class 7 the children are guided through an imaginative recapitulation of how literacy and numeracy have developed over the course of human history. For example, 6 year olds learn about letters through pictures. They might have a story in which the hero has to cross some misty mountains; the letter M can then be found in the picture. He might shelter in a deep den – the letter D. This mirrors the way in which the earliest writing developed; writing was originally pictorial (hieroglyphs are the best known example) and only developed into abstract symbolism much later in human development. The magic of the Steiner Curriculum is that it delivers the right stimulus at the developmentally appropriate time for the child, engaging their natural enthusiasm and fostering a genuine love of learning.
