Emergence and Practice of Waldorf School in Nepal

Abstract

In the world today, education is brain-oriented; goals are cognitive, intellectual and academic. We focus on head not on hands and heart. At Waldorf or Steiner schools, however, an integrative approach prevails. In this school, learning happens within the child’s entire body or being: beyond addressing the task of thinking (head forces), the child’s feelings (rhythmic forces) and will forces are educated. Accordingly, pre-K and kindergarten curricula focus on helping a child to feel at home in or to fully incarnate his or her body, generally through movement – based activities. Gross motor work is complimented by fine motor work as grade school approaches; handwork promotes dexterity that later supports the mechanical mastery of writing. But the whole body still is utilized: for instance in grade school students clap, jump, and stamp in patterns relating to the times tables they are reciting. Chest forces or feelings, too, are addressed, for example through pedagogical storytelling and wet-on-wet painting activities. Only later will purely cognitive tasks be undertaken. In sequentially addressing the whole child – hands, heart and head – Waldorf education progresses in tandem with what its founder called “a genuine anthropology”. Waldorf education helps to produce balanced, freethinking human beings who feel and behave as if connected to the world in which they live.