“I am not a thing, a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process, an integral function of the universe, and so are you.” – Buckminster Fuller

“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein

At the beginning of the twentieth century, most people lived their lives in a close relationship to the earth – a father was usually either a farmer or a labourer. From their rural settings, they performed chores, experienced their parents working, cultivated their will life (learned how to be effective using their hands), and came to school for the purpose of learning how to think.

Today the situation has reversed. Most students live in urban settings, and their parents leave home to go to “work.” The activity of the parents’ work is invisible to the child, and the direct results are not always experienced or directly appreciated by the family. Life and work have become abstractly separated.

At the same time, children are flooded with information, and their thought-life is constantly, even excessively, stimulated, putting stress on their nervous systems. It is an error to consider this information to be education! Rather it produces a type of pseudo-thinking that neither exercises nor satisfies the soul. In addition, many students lack rhythm in their lives and have no meaningful tasks to occupy them. The task of learning to “work” and to direct the will has been passed over to the schools.

The Waldorf handwork and practical arts curriculum strives to address this problem. Today’s students need to be taught to activate their full capacities to apply their thinking and to see the results. They are desperately in need of developing practical skills to build their self-confidence, self-reliance, and independence.

Accomplishing tasks with the hands serves to build confidence in each child. This is also a key to academic success. The children engage in a process of practical application where they “learn how to learn.” Woodworking, for example, comes into the curriculum at a time when the children are developmentally ready to develop new interests and new skills. The more interests and skills we can develop in the children, the more we can help them to live on the earth and cease to be victims of a technology-based culture. The Waldorf practical arts curriculum plays an important part in the transition from play to work. The children need to experience that work is wonderful. Also, these classes are a time when the teacher can lead them to feel the joy of being altruistic, as they make projects for friends and loved ones.

Woodworking is taught from grades 4 (or 5) in a Waldorf school. The grade to begin varies, however, my preference has always been to begin in the fifth grade.

Safety

A first priority is to ensure safety in the work area. Every space should be clean, free from clutter, and have adequate full-spectrum lighting (natural, if possible). At least one appropriately coded fire extinguisher must be present along with a first-aid kit, the inventory of which should be restocked on a monthly basis, or sooner, if necessary. Every practical arts teacher should have training in basic first aid. All flammable substances and supplies must be stored in suitable locked metal containers, and all rags must be properly disposed of on a daily basis. Tools and machines should be clean, and adequately stored, with manuals accessible.

The conscious teacher carries the safety of the workplace as a priority at all times but most especially at the beginning and conclusion of every work day.

Guiding Conversations

In the younger grades one can sing with the children as they work.

The singing brings about a regularity in the breathing. The rhythm in the song creates bodily harmony and allows for efficient movement. This is the reason for sailors singing sea shanties, as they hauled up the heavy anchor, or farm workers singing as they monotonously picked cotton or fruit. Rhythm helps keep the body from becoming tired.

Try to establish a connection between instruction in music and singing and handicrafts… This connection should exist. It would greatly benefit the children. Every kind of work started out with music. Today this is not heard any more, but if you went into the country and heard the peasants threshing, you would hear the rhythm in their handling of the flail. This kind of rhythm is needed by us. Then we would get the spirit back into working. – Rudolf Steiner

In the younger grades, I liked to tell humorous stories that continued over to the next lesson. This created a feeling of expectation when the children came to class. It also relaxed those youngsters who were tense.

However, one of the more important accomplishments can be in guiding and developing the conversations. There are certain conversations one might want to avoid, such as those involving violence on the television or from the movies. If it does come powerfully into the classroom through the experience of the children, the teacher has to recognize that the children need to process and digest the images. Thoughtful questions and discussion can settle the students if the teacher has patience and wisdom.

A wonderful aspect of Waldorf education is that the atmosphere in the schools is constructive and happy. No matter what the children are exposed to in the rest of the world, in the school setting they receive something positive that they may carry with them through life. In the woodwork class, many of their life experiences can be openly talked about and digested. The observant teacher can be a quiet counsellor and guide.

I tried to establish, and maintain, a high level of conversation in my classes. This involved observations and stories about nature, questions about what they were doing in main lesson or where they had travelled on the holidays. It is an art to be able to sustain a decent conversation and involve everyone. Being able to listen to each other is something that is learned. Both the handwork and the practical arts teacher help to develop these important social skills of conversation and listening.

If the conversations became too loud, I would just say, “Okay, we will all become quiet for seven minutes and nineteen seconds,” or some such ridiculous number. I would then accurately clock the quiet time, while they enjoyed being able to focus on their projects with deepened concentration. Almost always, when the time was up, they would be more peaceful and more fully engaged in their work.

If one of the children used bad language, I would just say tactfully,

“Those words aren’t welcome in this class. They float up to the corners of the ceiling and make the room dirty.” Every word one utters can have an effect on the entire group. Group awareness is a developed social skill that must be learned. We would learn new phrases to vent frustration like, “Oh diddles!” or “Ten thousand curses!” It was fun!

You can’t make rules about how to guide conversations. Rather, you must emulate a conductor trying to direct an orchestra. You have to deal with what happens in the moment. It depends on the class, it depends on who’s absent that day, and so on.

If we teach our classes in a rhythmic, breathing, emotionally relaxed atmosphere, it will be a strength to the students and will give them tools for life.

Ecology

Care and respect for materials leads to moral and social responsibility. The manual arts studio or classroom should be a model of ecological awareness and wakefulness. Every scrap of everything can be resurrected and have a purpose. Sticks can be transformed into buttons, scraps of leather can become flexible hinges, sawdust can stuff puppets or make putty when mixed with white glue, and pieces of hardwood can become inlays.

One of the unwritten rules for a handwork or woodwork teacher is that they must have some tendencies toward being a packrat. While this can drive spouses to distraction, the children inwardly delight when they see a novel use for what might ordinarily be thrown away.

I created bins, bottles, and boxes to recycle all our scraps. When I could foresee no use for something, or when my “Pippy Longstocking” tendencies of finding a “treasure” around every corner started to clutter things up too much, the scraps could always go into the wood stove to keep us warm. All of this was carefully and consciously explained to the children.

One of my delights was when the children came running to the shop to fetch some odd thing they needed for a play or a class project because they knew there was a good chance of finding it, or making it, from our collection of recyclables.

Cultivating Altruism

One of the tasks of people living in North America is to develop the capacity of altruism. – Rudolf Steiner

Working in crafts allows the anticipation of pleasing someone to whom we would like to give our project. The projects provide “real” gifts for the children for birthdays or other holidays. Because they are made with such devotion, the recipient usually treasures them.

In the upper elementary grades, we can build into our curriculum a community activity which allows the students to use their considerable skills for the common good. Several of these projects are outlined in the chapters which follow.

Thinking

Thought activity is cultivated through an approach to the subject where the phenomena are studied and evaluated before conclusions and theories are drawn. This process leaves the student free to develop and exercise the capacity for judgment and discrimination.

Dynamic thinking requires movement. Wordsworth and Goethe both created their most beautiful poems while walking. In the crafts classes the children are constantly in motion. The children inwardly imitate the techniques taught by the teacher, and this flows as a formative force into their hands. An adult can notice that the power with which children observe and then create is not born out of the intellect, but is the result of an interaction between sense observation and will activity.

All active limb work requires blood movement. When the children are fully engaged, you can see that their cheeks are red, flushed with blood, and from this movement bodily warmth and lactic acid are produced.

Thinking produces the opposite it stirs our body chemistry toward the alkaline pole. Thinking requires coolness. Too much heat (fever), and one hallucinates and doesn’t think properly. The children become pale when they are engaged in thinking for extended periods of time. Thinking originates from our nerves, the only non-re-creating cells in our body our nerves are the part of our cellular life which is closest to death. We need to balance these two polarities of thinking and will activity. The practical arts, and all active working of the will, produce constructive body chemistry.

When we are working with our hands, our thinking becomes vitalized. When children understand that there are many ways of completing a given task and that mistakes can be corrected, then they develop more flexible thinking. As children observe their skills improving, they become flooded with self-confidence.

Awakening Moral Judgment

There is an intimate connection between crafts and morality.

Craftspeople, in order to be true to their material, have to be centred and focused on their intuitive processes in relation to the stone or wool or wood. Craftwork cannot be done in a hurry. Care and patience must be integrated. Craftwork is basically a differentiated, organized way of incarnating spirit into matter.

In many ways, morality is the opposite of thinking. Rudolf Steiner commented that “morality is actually a problem of will and not of thinking.” The will is hidden to our consciousness; it is asleep deeply within us. Our thinking is universal- our will is that part of us which is most truly individual. Moral codes were created for mankind by religious leaders, but morality remains an individual experience. We own our own morality. In our bodies our will creates instinct. It is our will in our physical body which creates our digestion, respiration, and heartbeat. It is our will in our feeling life that creates passion, desires, and cravings. That will which works in our higher nature, our ego, creates motivation. It is motivation which leads us to morality. As we are motivated to strive in our craftwork, we are touching upon the kernel of morality the wish to do better, to approach perfection. Morality is being true in oneself toward something. The crafts awaken the capacity to form moral judgements. One must constantly make determinations on how to proceed with the work at hand. Mistakes must be corrected and worked with because we don’t throw things away or start over, except in dire circumstances. The spoon with the hole carved through the bottom is transformed into a salad fork, and so on. Thus, the authority should flow out of the work itself and not necessarily always from the teacher. This will allow the student to develop more respect and love for the subject and will allow the teacher to spend more time on the pedagogical tasks at hand. The attitude in the classroom or studio develops integrity in the children when the expectations are clear and well-defined.

The teacher strives to guide the students in such a way that a feeling for “what is right” is established. Then this is repeated until it becomes habitual. This process is the foundation for moral development.

The practical arts transform the “play” of the child first by awakening aesthetic formation, then by developing the capacity for practical formation, and finally to experience the joy of work itself.

Educating the Senses

Living is learning. When we are most alive, using most fully our energies, senses and capacities, we are learning the most. – John Holt

The texture of the smooth wood, the smell of a freshly sawn log, the smell of the aromatic oils from a crushed leaf of sweet fern or eucalyptus, the odour of a burning pine cone, are all part of the education of the senses. We need to provide as many nourishing sense experiences for the children as we can.

The children can be taught how to put on a blindfold and identify trees by the feel of the bark. They can smell a fresh sassafras root dug from the soil and then boil it into a tea that they can taste. They can experience the smooth surface of a piece of wood cut by a sharp knife, or plane, by stroking it against their cheeks. They can eat a winterberry or chew a peppermint leaf. They can balance themselves and walk on a fallen tree; they can dig a handful of fresh leaf mould and smell its earthy richness. A full sense-experience of their environment will give them confidence in their surroundings.

This abridged extract is taken from: Mitchell, D. & Livingston, P., 1999. Will-Developed Intelligence: Handwork & Practical Arts in the Waldorf School, Elementary through High School. California: The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.