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CHAPEL HILL -- While commemorating personal growth in its 25-year anniversary, Emerson Waldorf School broadens its celebrations to applaud 90 years of Waldorf education worldwide.
Waldorf education, which was started in 1919 in Germany by the Austrian educator Dr. Rudolf Steiner, has spread to include more than 1,000 schools worldwide.
"It actually has really fulfilled Rudolf Steiner's dreams," said Whitney MacDonald, the physical education teacher at Emerson Waldorf, a formal class teacher and a parent of two Emerson Waldorf students. "People from all these vastly different cultures are looking at this and saying, "Yes, this is what we're looking for."
This worldwide movement has 200 fully accredited schools across the nation, although Emerson Waldorf is the only one in North Carolina. Each school follows a common mission, principle and curriculum centered on the objective to teach the whole child.
Part of that full-person formation comes from an emphasis on the arts, such as music, poetry, painting, drama and dancing. Arts not only bring beauty to learning, but hone in on a child's tendency to learn with a picture, said Eve Olive, one of the school's founders.
"You keep this imaginative picture-making quality alive in the child," she said. "It's no good being able to read if you can't visualize what's happening in a story."
A major artistic part of learning for the students involves creating their own textbooks, MacDonald said. Depending on the subject of study, the kids write down the stories they've heard and draw pictures of the images they've seen.
"They're taking in, in a much deeper way, what they're learning," MacDonald said. "They're also training again an aesthetic sense, a sense of what is beautiful, what is balanced."
This hands-on approach to books is only one aspect of the pro-active lessons students experience at Emerson Waldorf, including a hand-work progression that starts with knitting and advances through crocheting, cross-stitching, needle-point and eventually the sewing machine.
"There's this incredible integration of thinking, feeling and doing," MacDonald said. "Most of what education is today is just going right at the head, just thinking, thinking, thinking. We think that makes kids out of balance. If you can take the thinking and warm it with a sense of beauty and put it in a practical skill, they've actually integrated all three of those things."
Part of the hands-on approach utilizes a philosophy on kinesthetic learning, especially in the younger classes.
"It's natural for students to want to move when they're younger," MacDonald said. "This movement component -- using that natural tendency kids have towards movement to help them learn -- we find that very, very effective."
Besides just being outside and using their hands, students also use movement when learning math, such as marching and clapping out the times tables. In the lower grades, kids sometimes spend up to 45 minutes of a two-hour morning lesson moving around the classroom.
But catering lessons to the age of the child forms a cornerstone of Waldorf education. Formal academics don't begin until first grade, and even then only in small doses.
"The thing I love about Waldorf schools is the kids, especially at an early age, are really allowed to be kids," MacDonald said. "They're just given time and opportunity to go through things at the speed they need to go through them. We're not trying to push adulthood down into the early years."
Another unique thing about Waldorf education is teachers accompany the same class throughout grade school, following them from first until eighth grade.
"That teacher moves up with his or her class," said Joanne Andruscavage, director of administration at Emerson Waldorf. "And they get to know those students so well that they can meet the needs of those children and inspire them to the best of their abilities."
On the students' side, they form a bond with their teacher, essentially growing up with that one individual through the grades, Olive said.
"They have this image of a human being who's taught them everything from fairy tales to physics," she said.
These types of human relationships become important in a curriculum that values social interaction as a part of everyday lessons, so much so that classrooms don't even have computers until high school.
"We want kids to learn how to think first and when they do go to use a tool like a computer they bring something to the computer," MacDonald said. "The computer is an extension of your mind."
Instead, students hand-write compositions, and while they still do research on computers at home, they also must get information from the library as well as through interviews of family and friends.
"Kids who come out of the school tend to be much more socially aware and much more broad-based in their learning than kids in other school systems," MacDonald said.
And that is the advantage of Waldorf education, he said.
"Are they sheltered? No, because they're out in the world. They're going to the mall," MacDonald said. "Are they asked to be more thoughtful and able to engage human beings? I think they are. I think that's an advantage to them."
The success in Waldorf education lies in that initial focus on teaching the whole child, Olive said, with a focus less on rote memorization but on actual learning.
"We're not trying to teach children to keep with the status quo," said Olive. "We're trying to help them develop and be creative and think outside the box so that they will come up with answers to problems that we haven't been able to solve."
