Children and the Art of Education 

The mood in which students approach their work is key to the healthy development of all their faculties. Habits for life are being cultivated. Seeds are being planted which will determine whether their future life will be filled with joy of accomplishment and satisfaction in a job well done, or rather tend towards despondency and lack of trust in ones own abilities. Over-emphasis of the academic at a tender age, forced early reading and appeal to the logical faculties before they are operative - all these tend to dry up the colorful inner life of children and rob them of vitality and love of the world. The question must be asked repeatedly, whenever one intends to direct children’s attention: Am I giving nourishment to the person who wishes to grow and develop throughout life, or am I perhaps burdening him with dead concepts which have no potential for growth?

Measuring at the loom

Learning occurs in rhythms of vital activity balanced by periods of rest and contemplation. Rose Harmony Education strives to integrate the elements of the arts with the content of subject material. This may be a project of students creating a skit after the study of a particular epoch of history; it may also consist in painting exercises during a botany period. One observation can always be made: the completion of particularly intense artistic projects results in heightened abilities and interest in academic studies. This assumes that the practice of the arts be as serious and as thorough as any other discipline.  

                                              Three fundamental gestures characterize the work with children in the RoseHarmony Children's Program, as we integrate the practice of the arts - music, theater, movement, eurythmy, painting and crafts - with the fundamental studies of arithmetic, writing, literature, foreign language and the sciences.The three gestures are: 
1) The love of artistic process which charms the faculties of learning, wakening them to life; 
2) Devotion to the natural world - animal, plant, garden, woods and field - which gives us the materials we need to fashion beautiful things from clay, wool and wood, and offers us the opportunity to develop the will; 
3) The cultivation of language through which we become moral beings, balancing one sphere with another, developing intelligence and the power of discrimination.

The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde

Self-Presentation 

Especially in the early years, it is important that the children feel their individualities being spoken to. They must feel included in the creative process of beginning another lesson or opening another day. Called upon daily to present themselves, the students awaken to their own role in the process of learning. This is not a passive operation. It is something one willingly enters into out of love for the thing itself. The condition: that the student feel that the medium is native soil, a territory as well-known as home. Presentation of a poem may be called for, or working the hand-made puppets. At a more mature age, the practiced student will be articulate in presenting an original essay or reporting on, say, an aspect of astronomy. 

What have We Learned?

Dialogue with the Child 

It is a characteristic of our times to create discrepancies in young people: feelings of abandonment and alienation, even in the best of situations; anxieties and actual fear despite well-intended upbringing by loving parents. And yet our young people bring new abilities into the world and demonstrate the courage to face the challenges of a new world order, including the problems which we elders have not been able to solve. They wish to develop capacities which we do not have. They often strive to express the need to be heard, for they have deep intentions other than our own. Within the context of Rose Harmony Education, we strive to give ear to these quiet murmurings of the young. Over the last few years we have conducted a quiet dialogue between young and old.

We asked the children (but silently, in our hearts), Where is the starting point? How shall we begin?

And the children answered (not so silently, but from their hearts), Let us move! We want to move more! We can’t stand sitting around, being lectured to all the time!

So we took away the furniture and started each day afresh in an empty room, moving rhythms and forms, practicing poems in movement and moving with song. And after moving we found that we could come to rest and develop powers of concentration. The children developed. Their capacities grew and they became graceful and balanced.

They had become confident. Numbers are easy, they said, Math is great! Now, what? we asked.

Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw.  Performance February 2000

And the children answered (in their hearts), We want to learn about the world in a way in which we can understand it. Why are so many people afraid? Even our parents seem to be so troubled sometimes.

So we began to relate stories of courage and endeavor, exceptional biographies and legends, until the children began to feel, We have faced opposition and overcome. We have gone on quests, faced danger and yet returned home safely. We have experienced history being made.
And the older students took stories from current events, some of them full of wonder, some full of horror, and made them their own. We can meet the future, they decided, We could make a difference in the world. But what about our future? they asked. How am I to prepare for my own future role in life?

And we adults could once again appreciate the full dynamic of the arts. How else to sustain the educational process, but by continual appreciation and application of the arts in our daily practice?

Contact Information

Rose Harmony Association, Inc. is an incorporated, not-for-profit organization, exempt from federal income taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

 

Phoenxville, PA office

337 High St., Phoenixville, PA 19460

Phone:    610-415-0871
E-mail:    Admin@RoseHarmony.org

Hudson, NY office

411 Roxbury Rd., Hudson, NY 12534

Phone:   518-672-4910

 

Copyright © 2008 Rose Harmony Association, Inc.
Last modified: January 24, 2008