Sunday, June 4, 1989
THE MERCURY NEWS

Childhood in a Cocoon (continued)

“Goood mooorning, fourrth graders,” intones teacher Susan Goldstein. “Goood mooooorning, Mrs. Gooooldstein,” 27 children chant back. And without another word, the teacher begins jumping up and down in front of the blackboard. The children join in—including Daniel King, hopping on his right foot and flinging his right arm over his head. The disorder that has twisted the left side of his body hasn’t stopped Daniel from doing virtually anything his classmates do. Small for his age, he has incredible balance—hopping around the room to the long Norse poems recited by heart every morning, stomping his foot to the bark of hard consonants. (“Barque, bravest in battle of billows and breeze.”)

The children remove their flutes from the red-and-blue cases they knitted back in second grade. Standing in a circle, they all face in the same direction, as if preparing to march around the room. “Now,” says Goldstein, “I’ll give a note to Damon and he’ll give the note to Daniel. . . .” She plays middle C on her flute and the note goes around the circle, as each child repeats it, turns his back and “gives” it to the person now facing him. Though some children temporarily lose the pitch, the note eventually winds its way back to Goldstein, who gently admonishes, “Now let’s try again and see if we can keep it moving. I don’t know if you heard it, children, but I heard it. And it was so beautiful when it just moved and moved and moved.”

When it is finally time to sit down, Daniel takes his seat all the way on the right-hand side in the middle of the room. Though the casual visitor would never guess it, the seating arrangement is anything but random. It is based on the teacher’s careful study of the children’s temperaments and how they fall within the four classic types (melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric) outlined centuries ago in ancient Greece and adopted by Steiner. Daniel sits with the melancholics.

In her four years as a Waldorf teacher, Susan Goldstein has found the assignment of temperament to be one of the greatest challenges of her work. Much has been written about the four temperaments, including a detailed guide for teachers by Rene Querido, director of Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, the largest Waldorf teacher-training program in the English- speaking world and the place where Goldstein received her training. In a 1980 lecture given at the San Francisco Waldorf School and reprinted in a slim volume entitled Creativity in Education, Querido devotes many pages to a recognition of the different temperaments. A sampling:

“The phlegmatic child may be inclined toward laziness; he does a lot of sitting and loves to eat potatoes and pasta so that it is difficult for him to move and remain alert.” In arithmetic, he “enjoys the constant activity of adding numbers” and in music, he prefers “instruments that don’t have to be tuned or fussed with, such as the piano.”

The choleric is fiery and “likes to barrel through things.” He or she usually has a somewhat stocky build. In arithmetic, “division is a choleric activity,” and in music, the drum is his instrument of choice. The choleric child is always looking for a fight; he can be “a thorn in the teacher’s side,” so the teacher is advised to befriend the cholerics or the class will suffer tyrants instead of selfless leaders.

The four phlegmatics in Goldstein’s class sit in the back of the classroom because, she says, “If you put two phlegmatics next to each other they get so bored that they come out of themselves. It’s hard for a phlegmatic child to sit next to a choleric, because the phlegmatic needs a lot of quiet.”

Meanwhile, imported colored pencils in hand, the students are copying their teacher’s blackboard drawing of one-eyed King Odin into their lesson books. The names of some of the children —Bodhi, Priya, Hopi—are not that far removed from those of the ancient Norse gods they are studying. “Children,” says Mrs. Goldstein, in a teacherly tone of voice, “when you’re done please write the letters O-D-I-N next to the picture. You may use any colors you choose. They may be fancy or plain. But they must be very beautifully done.”

“At its root, Waldorf education is based on an aesthetic approach,” says David Swanger, an educational philosopher at UC-Santa Cruz. “By aesthetic, I mean a heightened feeling through beauty and the life of the emotions, particularly as the children are educated through the arts. In American public education, art is typically given short shrift. The dominant ethos of the public schools is to learn facts. Feeling is regarded as a disruptive influence, a nuisance and a threat to orderly proceedings. Everything—from the architecture to the codes of conduct and the colors on the walls—is organized so people will not be excited and passionate and exuberant, so things can move along at a somewhat uniform and orderly pace.”

Of the Waldorf alumni he has known, Swanger says he has been impressed by their “calmer and deeper sense of themselves as learners.” This impression is not far afield from Jessica King’s assessment of her three boys as “self-motivated and self-contained. As they go out in the world, I can see how self-contained they are, how much they are operating out of their own sense of who they are.” Or Susan Goldstein’s appraisal of the Waldorf graduates she has known: “In very subtle ways, the children are different. They look like all the other kids at Santa Cruz High School, but they’re very deep in a different way. It seems as if they still love learning. They’re still inspired by things.”

The closest Waldorf high school is 200 miles away from Santa Cruz in Fair Oaks, so graduates have no choice but to enter the pragmatic, materialistic and competitive environment of public education. Often, it is a welcome change; by most accounts, the average Waldorf adolescent is desperate to explore the world of plastic, fast food and bad music. And many of them do well in that world. At Santa Cruz High School, the anticipated valedictorian of the Class of 1989 is Ezekiel Menis, a Waldorf graduate. Another, Romlah Frediani, is a National Merit finalist. Waldorf graduates are present on the honor rolls of all the local high schools and several of them play on the football teams.

But for others, the transition hasn’t been nearly so easy. Clea Haug, now 17 and a straight-A student, spent the first two years after Waldorf reeling from a series of academic failures due to her near-inability to read or perform simple math skills. Clearly a bright child, Clea’s lack of skills had never been addressed at Waldorf, according to her mother, Cindy, who finally removed her the summer before she was to have graduated with the school’s first matriculating class in 1985.

“At Waldorf, they believed reading was a natural thing and you caught on when you were ready to,” says Cindy Haug. “But by the fourth or fifth grade several of these children weren’t reading, and you could tell they were so different from the kids in the outside world. Finally, at the end of seventh grade, I took her to an elementary school psychologist for IQ and reading comprehension. Of course, she’d never taken a test before in her life. It was an assessment test, to see where the child was. Her reading and math skills were at about a third grade level—and here she was at the end of seventh!

“She went to public school in eighth grade and was very excited about going out into the big world. And she fell right on her face. We spent the whole summer tutoring her. She felt so inadequate that she spent the next two years rebelling. It was very hard for the whole family. Now she’s in her senior year and getting straight A’s. But as a freshman, she got a D- plus. She wrote a paper recently for English about that experience, and said that she felt like a failure, that there was no way for her to succeed academically. Now I think it wasn’t fair to her to be so far away from what was culturally expected.”

In an unpublished survey compiled by nine Waldorf high schools throughout the United States and Canada, alumni praised their education for the lifelong love of learning it gave them. They credited Waldorf for a spirit of independence and self- reliance. “I have no fear of being different,” wrote one graduate. “Waldorf is such an optimistic sort of education,” wrote another. “It instills hope and love in the children, rather than fear and competitiveness.” But 21 percent of the 710 alumni who responded complained that they had been inadequately pre pared in science and math. “Facts were often lacking,” wrote one respondent. “The science facilities were out of date.” “I tried to major in chemistry. My ‘A’s’ in Waldorf chemistry were woefully inadequate in the real world.” “It ill-prepared me for the competition of premed in college. Scholastically I was well-prepared but not in how to manage severe pressure. I suffered greatly for it.” Several criticized the experience as over-protective, and more than one lashed out at the “rigidity in adhering excessively to ‘Steinerian’ dictates.”

But while some Waldorf graduates recall the experience as sheltering and even stifling at times, the alternative has been equally disconcerting. That, at least, was the lesson of Cecilia Murray, of Scotts Valley. After six years of attending America’s second-oldest Waldorf school, in Kimberton, Pa., Cecilia was “dying to get out into the world and watch Starsky and Hutch.” In 1977, she got her wish when her family moved to St. Louis, and Cecilia was transferred into the 10th grade at the 2,000-student Southwest High School in urban St. Louis. “It was a shock,” she remembers. “Drinking, drugs, violence. It was like all the world had come down and I was completely raw and unprotected. I really missed Waldorf—my teachers who cared about me, being challenged. School was a breeze. I graduated valedictorian of my class without even trying. It was stupid.”

Her husband, Paul, a graphics artist, attended the Sacramento Waldorf School and graduated from the Kimberton Waldorf School. He went to Swarthmore in suburban Philadelphia, but his college experience never quite measured up to his Waldorf education. In fact, he encountered some problems in focusing his interests in college. “It was a problem for me,” he concedes. “I wanted to take both botany and studio arts. I felt they were all linked together, and I still see all kinds of links between music and embryology.”

Even now, the Murrays feel themselves repeatedly drawn to the company of other Waldorf enthusiasts. In the Waldorf community, they find a place of balance in an unbalanced world. Here, they say, children are raised as creative, free individuals, not the mini-intellectuals who are taught to read by 4 and spit out facts by 6. And, of course, they also find in that community people who know what they’re talking about when they mention eurythmy, the body movement developed by Steiner that is neither dance nor personal expression, but the art of speech made physical and performed to poetry or music. Or why the four corners of a piece of paper are rounded off for a young child’s painting. (Rounded edges soften the lines and thus the child’s entrance into life.) For the Murrays, as for most devotees, Waldorf is not only a good education. It is their way of life.

How can it be otherwise when a Waldorf teacher is called upon to make a nightly connection with every student’s guardian angel? So picture Dan Martinez, for one, lying in bed before he turns off the light and envisioning, one by one, the children of Grade 2. “I just put their face in front of me,” explains Martinez, “the color and length of their hair, the color of their eyes, the shape of their nose, whether they have full or thin lips, what their eyebrows look like. Let me see, what was Galen wearing today?” He pauses, briefly. “A blue turtleneck, a blue wool sweater. That down vest that has four or five pockets that go down the front, and the blue cords that got trashed on our hike. When I shook his hand this morning, it was very cold. His hands looked purplish; they have ever since he had that bout with poison oak. I think he’s been using up his forces to get rid of it.”

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Copyright 1989 San Jose Mercury News
Knight Ridder