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Feature Story – August 2007
Educating and Raising
Our Youngest Citizens:
The 1st Annual Whole Child
Conference Rises to the Call
by Joni DeGroot M.S. Ed., MFT
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Family life has changed significantly since the 1950s. There are new challenges facing families, children, and their futures everyday. Electronic media (TV, ipods, computers, cell phones) and consumerism are linchpins of our global economy and have become recreational staples for our youth. Two-parent incomes, safety concerns, and more frequent family moves are noteworthy factors affecting the daily life of children. Misinterpretation of 1990s brain development research has also altered well-intentioned parents' perceptions on how to raise their children. Instead of promoting spontaneous neighborhood-based play, many parents seek out opportunities to enhance their children's abilities through highly scheduled, pre-structured classes and camps. The daily pace of the adult world has accelerated as well. We multi-task, sleep less, and work more. We spend hours each week on our computers and worry about increasingly unstable environmental and political circumstances. These concerns trickle down to our children. It is no surprise that parents and schools face kids stressed out from “Hurried Child Syndrome.”
In the early 1980s, the U.S. government issued a report called “A Nation at Risk.” From that point forward, education morphed into the bone-crunching behemoth of today and childhood all but disappeared from the official landscape of our public school system. In addition, political and corporate leaders have become anxious about America's ability to compete globally. They have promoted programs within the schools that emphasize standardization and “high-stakes-testing.” This trend gained momentum in the 1990s as concerns over “failing schools” intensified and reached a crisis point with the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Many school administrators, teachers, and parents have been troubled by NCLB. It has compelled many classroom teachers to teach primarily for test preparation and has narrowed national curricula and teaching methods.
The changing times we are living in demand an urgent call to all adults to remember childhood. It is also important to look at the big picture when it comes to educating our youngest citizens. We must ask the questions: “For what are we preparing our children?” and “How do we best prepare them?”
RESEARCH REVEALS PROBLEMS
In Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, Sir Ken Robinson posits that the origins of the American school system was to prepare for rote and manual jobs arising from the Industrial Revolution. Modern business leaders and employers, however, need employees to go beyond rote data and to reason with information at more innovative levels in today's fast-evolving markets. Educational practices up to and including No Child Left Behind emphasize right/wrong answers for tests that smother children's innate risk-taking and creative capacities. Robinson calls for restructuring education to engage the whole body/brain through the arts. Individual creativity can emerge, and the result can be passionate contributions by uniquely talented citizens. This is the supreme path toward global sustainability and the quintessential challenge of the 21st Century.
Analyses of neuropsychological research by Drs. Bruce Perry, Jane Healy, Susan Johnson, and Joseph Chilton Pearce align with Robinson's recommendations. These researchers also explain that today's test-focused academic environments require young children to use regions of the brain prematurely. Brain imaging techniques indicate that premature pressure causes severe stress on the developing brain of the child. The rising incidence of ADHD, anxiety disorders, disruptive behaviors and learning difficulties coincide with the earlier introduction of abstract academics at a time when the brain is still at its concrete stage of development. According to the German Psychological Institute, such difficulties are also linked with a pervasive pastime for many children: electronic media. These researchers conducted a yearly study over a twenty-year period, in total, working with over 4000 children.
The children watched the average 5,000-6,000 hours of television normally viewed by the time a child reaches six years of age. Increasingly, the results showed that, increasingly, children's sensory systems were acting as isolated components in the brain and many children were less able to process environmental sensory information— e.g., sound, touch, lighting, movement, and spatial awareness. Children often felt bored, irritable, or overwhelmed when the high-density stimulation of electronic media was not present.
COMING TOGETHER FOR CHILDREN:
THE WHOLE CHILD CONFERENCE
The dissatisfaction and alarm parents and educators feel offer a powerful opportunity for new choices in truly educating the children of today. We need to encourage and model for them the balance between work and play. We also need to honor the developmental course through which children grow. We need to nurture childhood by slowing down the pace of daily life, and allowing a much smaller and age-appropriate amount of recreational electronic media. We need to connect with our children through chores and family mealtimes. Let us give children opportunities to experience nature in real life, not just on the Nature Channel. Let us require schools to consider alternatives to test-driven education, and to incorporate the arts (handwork, dance, painting and drawing, drama and music), and physical and imaginative play as essential prerequisites for literacy, confident self-expression and creative reasoning.
The conversation about the education and raising of children must broaden to protect the spirit of childhood. Conscious parenting and education reform are priorities for many concerned citizens. With the critical and timely nature of the issues clearly in view, four dedicated professionals have come together to create a groundbreaking conference on behalf of our budding citizens. These individuals are Joan Jaeckel, former Development Director of the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA) and a visual media specialist; Dr. Philip Kovacs, former high school English teacher, assistant professor of education at the University of Alabama and teacher advocate; David Marshak, Ed.D, Professor emeritus of education at the University of Seattle, veteran school administrator, and published author; and myself, Joni De Groot, school psychologist with the Del Mar Union School District and licensed marriage-family therapist.
Dr. Philip Kovacs helped found the Educator Roundtable, an internet-based national coalition.
“If we want participatory democracy, we must educate for it.” Dr. Kovacs explains. “Democracies require a diverse group of citizens who are caring, reflective and resilient. Education in a democracy must help children explore and develop these capacities.”
“Our public schools do quite the opposite,” he continues. “Words such as accountability, standardization, and performance have replaced the language of responsibility, innovation, diversity, ingenuity, development and growth. The result of (the Educator Roundtable's) growth over the last eight months is (cumulating in) a trans-partisan, national coalition of individuals and organizations working in public policy arenas to stop the standards movement,” Dr. Kovacs explains. “Our partners include libertarian think tanks, psychologists, activist organizations, school board members, national educational leaders, independent schools, local unions disillusioned with their national leaders, and private school start-up organizations. Many institutes and individuals are committed to educational experiences beyond rote memorization and regurgitation.”
Conference co-coordinator Joan Jaeckel explains that her involvement is part of an awakening process based on her own experience. “I am so grateful I could give my children (now 36, 34 and 24) an education intentionally designed to respect the spirit of the growing child,” says Jaeckel. “I unequivocally can say my Waldorf school experience, although humanly imperfect, protected the exuberant, creative and open-minded traits of childhood we most want for our children as adults…Their brains were challenged in a sequentially coherent way, and they have never stopped being enthusiastic, curious and voracious learners.”
Jaeckel is the consulting producer on Eric Stacey's CINE Golden Eagle Award–winning documentary The Waldorf Promise, about the experiences of eight Waldorf teachers in their public schools. She also recently co-produced a series of audio interviews with David Marshak called Reimagine Growing Up!
Marshak is the author of The Common Vision: Parenting and Educating for Wholeness, which describes the common insights on human development presented by three spiritual teachers: Rudolf Steiner, Sri Aurobindo, and Hazrat Inayat Khan. Marshak is also author of the forthcoming book, No More “Goodbye Every June,” a book that explains critical benefits of teachers working with every child and family for at least two years.
“Most schools are stuck in an industrial paradigm from the early 20th century,” Marshak explains. “Children are seen as raw materials. Test scores are the product. No Child Left Behind took an already antiquated model for schooling and magnified its worst features. The good news is that we are nearing the end of the era of industrial schools. History suggests that this is the stage right before the model crumbles from its own absurdity.”
“We need educational contexts based on the vision that children grow and unfold,” says Marshak. “Each child comes with her/his own unique capacities (and challenges), and we need learning communities that support the growth of each child's gifts.”
As a school psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist, I, as well as my husband, a special education teacher, have witnessed our 6th grade daughter's incredible blossoming at the Waldorf School of San Diego during the last three years. WSSD is a deeply arts-integrated, private, non-denominational school based on Rudolf Steiner's principles of child development. Children remain with the same teacher from first through eighth grade. They create Lesson Books in which teacher narrative assessments on the child's academic and other developments are formed. This system contrasts sharply with my own mainstream school employment experience. Each year in public schools with high test scores, there are more and more “average” children marked as “possibly disabled.” Restlessness and anxiety are noticeable as the pace and density of classroom curricula escalates, especially as teachers' and parents' worries become apparent to their children. To encourage schools to remember childhood, I am helping coordinate 2007-2008 workshops for parents and teachers on optimal childhood development and learning—and the essential relatedness of these factors in raising fully participatory world citizens.
With the foundation for these workshops in place, I considered offering them to a regional or national audience. From this idea came the preparations for the first annual 3-day conference entitled The Whole Child: Educating and Raising Our Youngest Citizens. The conference is tentatively scheduled to take place in October, 2008 and the intent is to share the best practices and research on parenting and education with lawmakers, pediatric mental and physical health care professionals, and green/sustainability organizations. Action-oriented groups and individuals will have opportunities to network and strengthen their effectiveness as well.
My conference co-coordinators and I agree that environmental imbalance and escalating global conflicts call on adults to remember childhood. This is the primary means by which a diversely talented democratic citizenry can emerge to meet the critical challenges of the 21st Century. This citizenry must be one capable of the creativity and innovation required for a sustainable and more harmonious future. With this conference, we are rising to the call.
Donations, volunteers and speaker workshop proposals are currently being accepted for The Whole Child October 2008 conference. Please contact Joni De Groot, conference coordinator, at hjhdgroot@cox.net for more information. To learn more about the Educator Roundtable, please visit www.educatorroundtable.org. Reimagine Growing Up individual interviews can be downloaded from New Dimensions Media at www.newdimensions.org. Joan Jaeckel's The Waldorf Promise is available as a DVD from Amazon.com.