Schooling the Imagination

By Anne Greer

"Children come to school as integrated people with thoughts and feelings, words and pictures, ideas and fantasies. They are intensely curious about the world. They are scientists, artists, musicians, historians, dancers and runners, tellers of stories, and mathematicians. The challenge we face as teachers is to use the wealth they bring us. They come with a two-sided mind. We must encourage them to use it, to develop both types of thinking so that they have access to the fullest possible range of mental abilities."

Linda Williams, Teaching for the Two-Sided Mind

Imagine a school day filled with music, poetry, drama, storytelling, drawing, painting, and sculpting as ways to learn math, history, and science. Imagine a day filled with movement, handwork, and social interaction. This is a Waldorf classroom.

Over the last thirty years in most schools, the arts have become marginalized, seen as irrelevant in the race to make students competitive in the global marketplace. Focus on math, science and an increasingly narrow view of literacy at younger and younger ages leaves little room for the play and delight of question, exploration, and artistic expression.

And yet, throughout history, new knowledge has been born through interdisciplinary creative practice. Leonardo di Vinci uncovered principles of tree growth through sketching and observation; Abbott Thayer discovered animal camouflage through painting; Wallace Walker

discovered the iso axis through paper folding. The list could go on and on.

As Albert Einstein reminded us, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”.

How, then, do we educate the imagination? In Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking

Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, scientist Robert Root-Bernstein finds embodied in the arts, “tools of thought” that give meaning to facts and facilitate creative and transformational thinking.

These tools include the use of analogy and metaphor, pattern forming and recognition,

visual and kinesthetic thinking, modeling, playacting, manual manipulation, and aesthetics. He believes that the mind and senses alike must be trained equally and in tandem to perceive and to imagine. Without these tools of thought, kids have difficulty in connecting with or constructing meaning from an assembly of facts or bits of information.

Integrating all this in daily learning may seem impossible, but Waldorf Education has been doing just that for almost a hundred years. In 1919, philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner introduced a radically different path of schooling that has become the fastest growing alternative educational movement in the world with over 1000 schools in 60 countries. Waldorf education believes in allowing children to enjoy childhood, while, as they grow, preserving the joy of curious exploration and experiencing the deep satisfaction of skilful doing. All this in a learning community devoted to peacefully educating within a non-competitive, arts enriched, academic curriculum that promotes respect for self, others, and the Earth.

From preschool to high school, teachers build upon innate creative reasoning with imaginative play and artistic expression, cultivating a sense of mastery, self-control, and

focus. And, yes, studies have proven the correlation between art, music, and movement and high academic achievement. Woven throughout Waldorf’s curriculum, the arts support academic success allowing learning to happen in multiple ways: verbal/linguistic, mathematical/logical, visual/spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, musical/ rhythmic, the full range of Howard Gardiner’s multiple intelligences.

Schooling the imagination in a Waldorf School allows children to experience, throughout each school day, possibility transformed to reality and a sense of reverence for the beauty around and

within them. All this with curiousity, joy, and a love of learning that will last a lifetime.