Posted: May 1st, 2025

Educational Model Research Project

Educational Model Research Project: For this project, you will investigate one of four different educational models (please note that in the syllabus I did not specify that you only need to do one of the models. You can pick.) other than the traditional system. Then, you will share what you have learned with your peers.

The four models are as follows:

Regio Emilia

Montessori

Waldorf Steiner Schools

Roeper Schools

You will need to research one of these educational models, and reach out to someone at one of the schools to ask questions, observe, get additional information from, or talk to someone (interview) who has attended one of the schools.

KH
EDPS325 (12685)
11/17/2020
The Waldorf Steiner Education Model
Today, there are over 1200 Waldorf Steiner schools in 67 countries and nearly 1900
Waldorf kindergartens in more than 54 countries (Kreis, 2020). This all happened in just over a
century, with the first Waldorf school opening in 1919 in Stuttgart, Germany. Rudolf Steiner, an
Austrian educator, philosopher, scientist, author and mystic, opened the first Waldorf school for
the children of the Waldorf-Astoria Company’s employees. By 1938, he had opened schools in
the U.S., Norway, the Netherlands, Hungary, Great Britain, Germany and Austria (Jewett, 2019).
All these schools were based on his philosophy, which was designed in response and opposition
to German educational practices at the time. These practices were “teacher-centered and
fo?cused on basic literacy, mathematics, German history, and religion” (Jewett, 2019, p.?). The
German system at the time also only allowed a small number of students to continue past the 8year elementary school. Steiner’s schools would be 12-year schools that would remove the focus
from being solely on the intellect of the child, and instead focus on the child as a whole. Steiner
wanted a curriculum that engaged the child’s head, heart and hands (Jewett, 2019). To
understand this better, specifically the aspect of “heart” within education, I called and spoke with
an Administrator named Peggy Wilson at Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor Lower School. I
asked her simply, “In what ways is the heart engaged?” To this, she replied,
“There is a close connection between the adults and the children. So much emphasis is
put on relationships and knowing the student and working with the parents, being aware
of the child. The students spend 5 years with the same teacher or 8 years with the same
teacher, depending. There is a lot of social inclusion, approaches to bullying and teasing,
seeing the other person as a human being and accepting each other” (Wilson, personal
communication, November 17, 2020).
To me, this absolutely seems like an approach that engages the child’s heart. It feels like
something that should be implemented into every model of education, and not just peripherally,
but so much so that it’s a part of the unofficial motto, as it is here.
Steiner’s Approach
Meeting Students Halfway
Engaging the head, heart and hands also means, in part, aiming education at the child’s
internal motivation, socially, morally and academically. Steiner used art, nature and physical
activity in his learning approach. Something that was very important to him was meeting the
students where they were at, rather than expecting them to adapt to the curriculum. He believed
that:
the educator’s basic sense must be … of great respect towards the child’s individuality.
We must be completely aware that in every child dwells a soul-spiritual individual, and
that the child’s physicality does not tangibly manifest this individuality … such that in
fact each child, from the bodily perspective, faces us, more or less, as an incomplete
individuality. That hides behind the mask of physicality (Goldshmidt, 2017, p. 349).
Practically, this meant addressing the many differences in children and their approach to
learning, giving them more chances to find a path that works for them, rather than adapting to
one that works for others. For example, “when learning about Rome, sixth graders will read
books, paint, engage in oration, write reports, draw, sculpt, sing, memorize verse, and perform a
play about Roman life and history” (SGWS, 2017, p.10). Steiner, being a contemporary of Freud
and Piaget, was interested in children’s brain development; however, he was also focused on
social, physical and spiritual development. His model was rich in the arts, delved deep into
experimental learning, and was free of standardized testing (Sobo, 2014).
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Teacher’s Role and Three Stages
These are just some of the ways in which Steiner’s model differed from that of the
German model, but also from most models today. Additionally, Steiner wanted his school’s
teachers to have primary governance of the schools (Jewett, 2019). This is something that still
exists today in Waldorf education, as opposed to the typical teacher/administration model.
Regarding educators, Steiner also encouraged them to study the “Study of Man,” the spiritual
and psychological philosophy on which the Waldorf education model is founded. To Steiner, this
was necessary for learning the “art of education” (Goldschmidt, 2017, p. 351), which was meant
to bring out growth inspired by spirituality, but also the essential encounters between humans.
One example of this would be that there are no textbooks in Waldorf schools. Textbooks are
meant to be formed through the process of joint work through the encounter of teachers and
students (Goldshmidt, 2017, p. 352).
Steiner was interested in designing activities to match student’s learning at different
points in their development, stating that children moved through three stages. The first was from
birth to around age 6 or 7. During this time, children learn by “imitation, empathy, and
experience” (Jewett, 2019). For this reason, the lessons should center around traditional activities
pertaining to life, such as baking, cleaning and gardening. In addition to this, he wanted to bring
about feelings and emotions via the arts while stimulating fantasy and creativity through
imaginative play. The next stage, according to Steiner, is between ages 7 and 12 or 13. This stage
is when the child needs to learn through images and rhythm, meaning that students at this stage
study visual arts, drama, dance, music and languages. Steiner’s literacy model, which has been
criticized by some as starting too late, begins around the age of 7. His definition of literacy is
larger than what we are used to, in that it includes visual art, music and dance. In the third stage
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of development, from puberty to young adulthood, the students engage with abstract thought,
ethical dilemmas and social responsibility. This stage also puts more focus on academics,
narrowing in on subject areas (Jewett, 2019).
Lifelong Learning
Something else important to Steiner’s approach is the goal of lifelong learning for
children, which means he wanted to spark their interest, joy and motivation for learning so that it
would extend beyond the classroom. This is in part achieved through encouraging the
questioning of material. When a child understands the “why” within or behind a lesson being
taught, they will be more inspired to learn. Another way to do this is using creativity, joy and
imagination in the classroom. This is seen not a trivial or silly, but as motivating (sgws, 2017).
Regarding students’ study after a Waldorf education, the research shows they do quite well. One
survey of 556 respondents found that:
93.7% percent of the graduates taking this survey reported having attended college and
88.3% reported having completed or being in the process of completing a
college/university level degree at the time of the survey. Of the remaining 11.7%, roughly
half (5.4%) began but did not complete college, while the other half (6.3%) did not
pursue college or went into professional or artistic training unconnected with an academic
degree program.
These respondents were found to attend a wide variety of colleges and universities, with many of
them saying they took one year off to travel and working before attending college.
Anthroposophy Then and Now
One cannot discuss Waldorf schools without discussing anthroposophy, a theory
formulated by Steiner which he defined as “a manner of acknowledgment which wishes to lead
the spiritual in the human entity to the spiritual in the universe. It appears in mankind as a need
of heart and emotion. It must find justification for its existence in that it provides gratification for
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this need (Goldshmidt, 2017, pg. 347-348). To simplify this a bit, Steiner described it as
“consciousness of our human situation” and “a path from the mind and spirit in the human being
to the mind and spirit in the cosmos.” In the end, he said it “arises as a need of the heart”
(Anthroposophical Society in America, n.d.), and that the purpose of education is to bring the
Soul-Spirit into harmony with the Life-Body” (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 392). Steiner believed there
is a spiritual world intertwined with the physical world. Steiner embraced psychophysical double
aspectism, i.e., that the mind and body are inseparable. He believed that human beings have the
ability to enter this spiritual world, and that inside us are organs of perception that can enter the
spiritual world; however, these organs need to be developed through meditation, improving one’s
relationship with beauty, sympathizing with other humans, thinking, and cultivating one’s
observational skills (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 386-387).
Although many of the teaching and beliefs of anthroposophy have been left behind, we
can still find its application today in practical life. Aside from being found within Waldorf
education, (which in the states has now found its way into the public school system), it is also
used in complementary medicine, biodynamic farming, community centers around special needs,
art therapies, and social innovations (Anthroposophical Society in America, n.d.). It is believed
that the anthroposophical movement is still relevant today because:
like other heretical movements, [it] engages in a discussion where somatic experiences
are taken seriously. Offering a somatic bridge between Self and Other, Anthroposophy in
essence will not go away. That is, even if the movement were to die out, the general ideas
or underlying spirit would be subsumed under some other group or organization
(Uhrmacher, 1995, pg. 400).
This, again, has to do with Steiner’s refusal to continue educating under the German model of the
time, of which it was believed that “somatic repression was part of…the problem” (Uhrmacher,
1995, p. 400).
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The Role of Play
Steiner was a major advocate of play within his schools. “The American Academy of
Pediatrics states unequivocally that ‘Play is essential to the social, emotional, cognitive, and
physical well-being of children’” (Sobo, 2014 , p. 9). This seems to be something that Steiner
understood at the time. Play in a Waldorf school can be defined in the way one might assume,
but also can look like sweeping, gardening, prepping food, etc. Teachers are meant to “meet
what they see as children’s natural tendency toward play by allowing them to play – a lot” (Sobo,
2014 , p. 13). Children’s play within a Waldorf school also take an environmentally friendly
approach, with the absence of industrial furnishings, plastics, technological devices such as
computers. These things, according to Waldorf teachers, distances children from immediate
experience and the natural world. Many Waldorf rooms are decorated to achieve a sense of
organic flow, similar to what would be found in nature. Even shelves, tables and other furniture
will have rounded corners and sides, rather than sharp edges. This is not simply a protective
measure, but an aesthetic one as well. Some teachers even cut the corners of paper into curves
(Sobo, 2014 , p. 14). Toys within the schools are typically simple and natural. They might
include smoothed tree branches or pinecones. Also “there are hand-made, blank-faced cloth and
wood dolls; boxes and baskets; blankets and cloths; carved boats and baby cradles; stuffed, sewn
felt vegetables and fruits; and brooms, buckets, brushes, and other common household tools”
(Sobo, 2014 , p. 14). Outside play is also a major part of Waldorf education. The playgrounds are
in constant use. The classes each spend half the morning outside playing. I asked Peggy Wilson
about play by saying “what types of games do the kids play, either in the classroom or at
recess?” Her reply was that a major part of the curriculum is “movement and exercises and
singing, transition songs, but not games, at least not in the classroom. Outside, games like Red
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Rover and a lot of tag. Inside, not so much set games as much as a lot of movement” (Wilson,
personal communication, November 17, 2020). It seems to me that play is not too much
different, at least in this Steiner school, as it would be in most other schools. Perhaps more
emphasis on movement within the classroom, and perhaps more time spent outside, but that’s the
only major differences, as far as I can tell, although I assume it differs from school to school.
Conclusion
Waldorf Steiner schools have changed in many ways over the years. In my mind, they
haven’t developed into exactly what Rudolph Steiner would have hoped, but I believe they have
taken his teachings/beliefs and made them work at a larger scale. I mainly say this because of the
ways in which Anthroposophy is not front and center in the teachings today. At the same time,
Steiner himself stressed that he did “not seek to educate its pupils to anthroposophy. In this way
he differentiated between the spiritual background on which the teachers based themselves, and
what was transmitted in actuality to the school’s pupils” (Goldshmidt, 2017, p. 360). When I
spoke with Peggy Wilson over the phone, I asked her what role spirituality plays in the school, if
at all. Her response was that “it plays a very large role for the faculty and staff, but nor for
students from kindergarten to middle school; maybe in high school, depending on what they’re
studying” (Wilson, personal communication, November 17, 2020). Steiner was more interested
in schools and teachers educating students on humanist values, and this seems to be alive and
well in his schools. Waldorf Steiner educators want their students to ask questions, examine
answers in a complex way, and open up spiritual worlds, rather than direct them to one spiritual
way of thinking. As I mentioned before, their approach is to engage students’ head, heart and
hands, and that seems to be exactly what they are doing.
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References
Anthroposophical Society in America. (n.d.). https://anthroposophy.org
Gilad Goldshmidt (2017) Waldorf Education as Spiritual Education, Religion &Education, 44:3, 346-363,
DOI: 10.1080/15507394.2017.1294400
Jewett, Pamela Carol. (2019, Sep. 19) Waldorf School. Encyclopædia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Waldorf-school
Kreis, Haager. (2020, May) Waldorf World List: Directory of Waldorf and Rudolf Steiner Schools,
Kindergartens and Teacher Training Centers worldwide. Freunde-waldorf. https://www.freundewaldorf.de/fileadmin/user_upload/images/Waldorf_World_List/Waldorf_World_List.pdf
Mitchell, David & Gerwin, Douglas. (2007) Survey of Waldorf Graduates, Phase II. Research Institute
For Waldorf Education. Journeyschool.net. http://www.journeyschool.net/wpcontent/uploads/Waldorf_Graduates_Gerwin_Mitchell.pdf
SGWS. (2017, Jan. 8th) Spring Garden Waldorf School: Educating the Whole Child in Waldorf Schools.
SGWS. http://blog.sgws.org/educating-whole-child-waldorf-schools/
Elisa J. Sobo (2014) Play’s relation to health and well-being in preschool and kindergarten: a Waldorf
(Steiner) education perspective, International Journal of Play, 3:1, 9-23,DOI:
10.1080/21594937.2014.88610
Uhrmacher, P. (1995). Uncommon Schooling: A Historical Look at Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy, and
Waldorf Education. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(4), 381-406. doi:10.2307/1180016
Wilson, Peggy. (2020, Nov. 17). Personal communication [telephone].
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Nontraditional Schooling:
The Waldorf-Steiner Education Model
EDPS 222: Human Development and Learning
Dr. Margaret Cooley
October 29, 2023
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Nontraditional Schooling:
The Waldorf-Steiner Education Model
The traditional Western school model was popularized during the Industrial Revolution
and is based upon a Prussian model of schooling created by Frederick the Great (Davis, 2019).
This is the most commonly used system of schooling in America, however, some modern parents
are choosing more nontraditional models, such as the Waldorf-Steiner Education Model.
Although the traditional model works in some regard, its “primary goal [when created] was to
build a productive and obedient working class by creating an educational system that would
produce competent factory workers, but not free thinkers and innovators” (Davis, 2019, para. 7).
This does not serve students, nor does it serve the society we have today where corporations and
employers most value leadership, creativity, curiosity, thinking critically, and being able to work
collaboratively (Campbell, n.d). This is why nontraditional models, such as the Waldorf-Steiner
Education Model, are being sought after by parents who want to consider alternatives.
Waldorf’s Beginning
In 1919, Emil Mort, the director of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart,
Germany, invited Rudolf Steiner to speak to his employees. At this time, Germany was
struggling financially post World War One and many people were wishing for better, especially
for their children. Steiner spoke to them about many political and economic issues that resonated
with the workers. For example, Steiner was a strong believer that “education could play an
important role in shaping society” (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 383). He also believed that people
should pursue their interests and talents, rather than be formed into industrial workers by the
school system to prepare them for the workplace already chosen for them (Uhrmacher, 1995).
Mr. Mort and the employees of the factory were inspired by Steiner’s ideas and they suggested
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that he create a school for the workers’ children, which he did after laying down the conditions
that all local children should be able to attend, the school would cover a 12-year curriculum, and
it was to be secular (Uhrmacher, 1995).
Rudolf Steiner
To understand the ideas and goals of Waldorfian education, it helps to be familiar with
Rudolf Steiner’s life, work, and contributions to the model’s philosophy. Steiner, born in 1861 in
Austria, was the son of a low-ranking railroad official (Davy, 2022). He spent his childhood in
small villages in Eastern Austria and was a bright boy, encouraged by his father to become an
engineer (Davy, 2022). Steiner went on to earn degrees in mathematics, chemistry, and physics,
although he was drawn most to philosophy, earning a doctorate for a thesis he wrote within that
area of study (Davy, 2022). After schooling, Steiner took an interest in Goethe’s works and ideas,
which were a large inspiration for his later work and creation of the Waldorf model (Davy, 2022).
Despite this profound academic knowledge, Steiner was also a mystic and was deeply interested
in spirituality, the nature of humanity, and humans as being spiritual beings (Davy, 2022). This
interest led to him developing his own set of spiritual beliefs that he named anthroposophy.
Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy is the idea that human beings have developed a wisdom of spirituality
and that each person develops their spirituality throughout their lifetime (Anthroposophical
Society in America, n.d.). This philosophy can be broadly summarized to mean that “through
meditation and study individuals [can] achieve a higher consciousness and be brought into
contact with spiritual worlds” (Jewett, 2019, para. 4). Steiner believed that we were no longer
evolving physically, but consciously, in an attempt to reach the “spirit self”, which has been
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compared to Maslow’s later idea of “self-transcendence” that could be reached after
self-actualization (Anthroposophical Society in America, 2020).
One major principle of Waldorfian education is that human beings are spiritual beings
and anthroposophy is necessary to understand child development. Through this principle,
anthroposophy’s ideas and teachings are integrated, and the body, spirit, and soul are all
considered in teaching and learning (Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, n.d.).
This is best explained by the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America:
The educational program is developed out of this understanding [of anthroposophy]. Core
components of the educational program include the student-teacher relationship; the
artistic approach; working from experience to concept; working from whole to parts; use
of rhythm and repetition; and observation as the foundation for assessment. Each
approach is tailored to meet the students in each phase of child development. (n.d, para.
5)
Each form of teaching and each activity given to students is aligned with the phases of child
development that Steiner believed in and extensively wrote about (Association of Waldorf
Schools of North America, n.d.).
Phases of Development
Waldorf’s understanding of child development is quite different from what may be read
in a textbook. Steiner’s anthroposophical ideas suggest that children have three different stages
of development as it pertains to the soul (Uhrmacher, 1995). Interestingly, each stage is seven
years long and they all together span from birth to 21. The first stage is from birth to around age
seven and is primarily made of children learning and developing through empathizing and being
hands-on with their learning (Uhrmacher, 1995). Steiner believed that during this stage of
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development, adults and parents ought to consciously act morally and demonstrate goodness to
the child if they were to learn positive behaviors (Uhrmacher, 1995). Children in this stage of
development are best taught through the arts, make-believe play, and hands-on activities such as
baking, creating with clay, and cleaning, according to Steiner (Jewett, 2019). In Waldorf schools,
elementary-level classrooms are adorned with simple wooden toys for children to build with and
create worlds of their own. There are also many arts and crafts activities, such as watercolor,
stamps, and molding clay.
In the second phase of development, the child is approximately eight through fourteen.
This stage starts as the child loses their first baby tooth, which Steiner saw as the unsheathing of
the etheric body from under its protective layer (Uhrmacher, 1995). In other words, the etheric
body is no longer within the physical body but is around the person and is “the vehicle for
character, temperament, habits, and memory” (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 389). Before this stage,
Waldorf educators do not teach students to read or write as their intellects are not developed
enough according to Steiner’s ideas (Uhrmacher, 1995, Jewett, 2019). In this stage, students are
taught with imagery, rhythm, movement, and music, including eurythmy, as this stage of life is
“the time of feeling” (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 390). Eurythmy is a form of art, expression, and
movement coined by Rudolf Steiner. It is a form of dance that uses movement and emotion
intentionally as a way to communicate; Steiner himself said that eurythmy is “visible speech,
visible music” (Hindes, 2019).
The final stage of development in Steiner’s view lasts from around 14 (or the beginning
of puberty) to 21, and “is marked by the release of the astral body, the body of consciousness”
and the beginning of more complex thought (Uhrmacher, 1995, p. 390). During this stage,
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educators should teach students the more abstract parts of life, as well as more specialized
subjects of school (Jewett, 2019).
Waldorf Education in the Present Day
As of September 2022, there are 1,270 Waldorf grade schools across 80 countries and
1,928 Waldorf kindergarten schools in over 70 countries, only 103 years after the first Waldorf
school opened in Stuttgart, Germany (Directory of Steiner-Waldorf Schools, Kindergartens and
Teacher Education Centers Worldwide, 2022). Of these schools, around 130 of them are located
in the United States of America, three of which are in Michigan. Waldorf schools in the U.S.
have incredible outcomes for their students after graduation:
According to the survey tabulations, an impressive majority of Waldorf graduates pursue
and complete degrees in higher education. 93.7% percent of the graduates taking this
survey reported having attended college and 88.3% reported having completed or being
in the process of completing a college/university level degree at the time of the survey. Of
the remaining 11.7%, roughly half (5.4%) began but did not complete college, while the
other half (6.3%) did not pursue college or went into professional or artistic training
unconnected with an academic degree program. (Mitchell & Gerwin, 2007, p. 21)
The percentage of students attending college after graduating from a Waldorf school (93.7%) is
significantly higher than the national percentage of high school graduates enrolled in college,
which was only 62.0% in October 2022 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023).
Student Experiences
I spoke with my cousin, Tessa Pritchard, about her experiences with the Waldorf model to
learn more about how students experience this form of schooling. She went to a Waldorf school
in California from 4th grade through 8th grade but left the school to go to a public high school
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when her parents got divorced. I asked her, “What were the best and worst parts of your
experience at the school, looking back?” to which she said:
The school community was really cool compared to my high school. The class sizes were
much smaller so I got to know the other students more than I could at other schools. I
love drama and theatre as well, so the movement and rhythm that was incorporated were
fun and engaging – a lot better than sitting down all day! Everyone was so creative and
had a passion for what we were learning, especially because we like sometimes got to
choose what we wanted to study. The worst part of the Waldorf school was honestly how
hard it was to transition to a public school afterward. I was used to knowing everyone, so
moving to a high school with over 5,000 people was very overwhelming. I was also
behind in some subjects because like there were things that the teachers at my high
school expected me to know that my time at Waldorf didn’t go over” (Pritchard, personal
communication, October 23, 2023).
Although Tessa Pritchard was not at a Waldorf school to experience phases one and three of
Steiner’s idea of development, she gave her an interesting perspective on the differences between
Waldorf and traditional schools through her time at both.
Conclusion
Waldorf schooling is not a ‘new’ or ‘trendy’ form of teaching, nor is it going away any
time soon. As the amount of Waldorf schools continues to grow across Michigan, across the
country, and around the world, Rudolf Steiner’s name and message grow as well. While some
criticize Steiner’s anthroposophical philosophy and the ideas that it brings with it in education,
others value the creativity and passion that it brings to Waldorf schools. As someone who
suffered in the traditional system of education, I welcome the eccentricity of Steiner’s
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educational approach for the arts integration it brings and the outcomes that it has statistically for
its graduates. The Waldorf model not only has promise, it has proven its success in that promise.
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References
Anthroposophical Society in America. (2020). Insights. Rudolf Steiner on the internet.
https://www.rudolfsteiner.org/insights/
Anthroposophical Society in America. (n.d.). Anthroposophy: On Being Human.
Anthroposophical Society in America. https://anthroposophy.org/learn-more/
Association of Waldorf Schools of North America. (n.d.). AWSNA principles for Waldorf
schools. Association of Waldorf Schools of North America.
https://www.waldorfeducation.org/waldorf-education/in-our-schools/awsna-principles-for
-waldorf-schools#:~:text=Waldorf%20schools%20foster%20social%20renewal,ability%2
0to%20work%20with%20others.
Campbell, M. (n.d.). Top 5 skills employers look for. Work Ethics in the Work Place.
https://newmanu.edu/top-5-skills-employers-look-for
Davis, S. (2023, July 13). Eye on Education: Prussia model influences American Public School
System. DailyRepublic.com.
https://www.dailyrepublic.com/lifestyle/local-lifestyle-columnists/eye-on-education-pruss
ia-model-influences-american-public-school-system/article_f74ee0c2-3a04-5e8f-91f1-58
d25d105eac.html#:~:text=Eye%20on%20Education%3A%20Prussia%20model%20influ
ences%20American%20public%20school%20system,-By%20Stephen%20Davis&text=L
et’s%20hear%20it%20for%20the,education%20in%2018th%20century%20Prussia.
Davy, J. (2022, July 5). Rudolf Steiner. Center for Anthroposophy – Waldorf Teacher Education
and Renewal. https://centerforanthroposophy.org/about/rudolf-steiner/
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Directory of Steiner-Waldorf Schools, Kindergartens and Teacher Education Centers Worldwide.
(2022, September). Waldorf World List – Freunde Waldorf. Waldorf World List.
https://www.freunde-waldorf.de/fileadmin/user_upload/images/Waldorf_World_List/Wal
dorf_World_List.pdf
Hindes, D. (2019). Rudolf Steiner and Eurythmy. Rudolf Steiner Web.
https://www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/Rudolf_Steiner_and_Eurythmy.php
Mitchell, D., & Gerwin, D. (2007). Survey of Waldorf Graduates, Phase II. Rudolf Steiner
School – Ann Arbor, MI.
https://www.steinerschool.org/editoruploads/files/Parent%20Resources/Waldorf_Graduat
e_Study_II.pdf
Pritchard, Tessa. (2023, October 23). Personal communication [telephone]
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2023, April 26). College enrollment and work activity of recent
high school and college graduates summary – 2022 A01 results. U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm#:~:text=The%20college%20enrollment
%20rate%20of,(See%20table%201.)
Uhrmacher, P. B. (1995). Uncommon schooling: A historical look at Rudolf Steiner,
Anthroposophy, and Waldorf Education. Curriculum Inquiry, 25(4), 381–406.
https://doi.org/10.2307/1180016
Roeper Review
ISSN: 0278-3193 (Print) 1940-865X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uror20
Human Relations: The Cornerstone of a Roeper
Education
Lori A. Lutz & Susannah Nichols
To cite this article: Lori A. Lutz & Susannah Nichols (2016) Human Relations: The Cornerstone of
a Roeper Education, Roeper Review, 38:4, 261-266, DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2016.1221012
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02783193.2016.1221012
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ISSN: 0278-3193 print / 1940-865X online
DOI: 10.1080/02783193.2016.1221012
Human Relations:
The Cornerstone of a Roeper Education
Lori A. Lutz and Susannah Nichols
This article traces the evolution of a moral philosophy curriculum originally taught by George
A. Roeper in the earliest years of The Roeper School. The first author, a student at The Roeper
School in the 1960s and 1970s, describes the impact of the class George Roeper called “Human
Relations” on her life. Returning to the School as a parent and trustee, she had the opportunity
to re-create for current students the experience of the Human Relations class in a workshop,
liberally borrowing material from a philosophy class taught by Harvard political philosopher
Michael Sandel. In the second part of the article, a current English teacher at The Roeper
School and attendee at that workshop discusses how she was inspired to revise her literature
courses to incorporate the moral philosophy approach of George Roeper and Michael Sandel.
Keywords: critical thinking, ethics, George Roeper, human relations, literature, Michael
Sandel, moral philosophy, The Roeper School, values
I usually stop conversation when I relate two facts about
myself: I saw The Beatles—in person.1 My very hip mother
took my brother, age 5, and me, age 6, to Olympia Stadium
in Detroit and I vividly recall my brother futilely “shushing”
the thousands of screaming teenage girls. The other conversation stopper is that I was privileged to attend the school “at
the top of the hill,” then known as City and Country School,
when George and Annemarie Roeper were headmaster and
headmistress, a fact that generally elicits more envy than the
one about the Beatles.
Fortunately, generations of Roeper School students continued to know Annemarie until her death in 2012. Even after
she was no longer able to travel from her home in California
to Michigan for her annual visit, she communicated through
letters and e-mail and her cherished addresses to the senior
class at commencement. Because George preceded her in
death by 20 years, there are far fewer Roeper contemporaries
who knew George. However, for those alumni (students, faculty, and parents), George Roeper looms large and deep in
our minds and in our souls.
In 2010, a new word entered The Roeper School lexicon: centenary. Centenary means the 100th anniversary of
an event and the event we celebrated that year was the birth
Accepted 20 July 2016.
Address correspondence to Lori A. Lutz, The Roeper Institute, 41190
Woodward Avenue, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304. E-mail: roeperinstitute@
roeper.org
of our cofounder, George Roeper. Befitting of such an auspicious event, an incredible opportunity was presented as a
result of a discovery by our school historian, Marcia Ruff.
IMPACT
As was the tradition, during the first week of school that
September, the entire school—students, faculty, and staff—
gathered together in our Community Center. The assembly
began with the playing of an audiotape of George Roeper
conducting a “Human Relations” class with a group of
second-graders in 1960. Most of the 600+ people in the
room had never heard George’s actual voice. Other than the
rather tinny quality of the sound tape, the large gym was
filled with silence. The human relations issue presented was
under what conditions is civil disobedience called for. But
instead of discussing Thoreau or Gandhi, George disguised
this enduringly relevant ethical question in the story of a
young boy, forbidden by his parents from going into the
woods behind his house. One day, while his parents were
absent, the youth hears the sounds of a baby bear perilously
trapped in the woods. As George colorfully tells the story,
it becomes clear that without the boy’s immediate intervention, the bear cub will die. Through George’s patient, skillful,
Socratic dialogue, the class of 7-year-olds grapples with the
complex moral reasoning.
As a first-grader at Roeper in 1964, I was lucky enough to
be a participant in those seminal Human Relations classes.
Some weeks we would gather together on the floor of his
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L. A. LUTZ AND S. NICHOLS
office on the second floor of that building at the top of the
hill, then know as “The Main Building” and now known as
“The Hill House.” On other occasions, Mr. Roeper (it wasn’t
until my high school years that he became “George” to students) would visit our classroom in the Middle Building,
the second classroom building on the campus, having just
been constructed in 1960. Wearing one of his trademark
cardigan sweaters and seeming very much like our wise
grandfather, Mr. Roeper would say he had come to tell us
a story.
With his thickly German-accented voice, Mr. Roeper
recounted the story of the family who lost their beloved dog,
Chip. Another family finds Chip and, seeing no indication
of his owner, lovingly brings Chip home and adopts him.
Months later, the first family happens to be introduced to
the second family and they recognize their old dog. The first
family is so happy to be reunited with Chip. But now the
new family loves Chip, too, and the dog has acclimated to his
new family. As we first-graders sit there, waiting with baited
breath to hear the climatic conclusion, Mr. Roeper instead
pauses, removes his glasses, and turns to inquire of us, “Who
owns the dog?”
No sooner did one of us voice an opinion than Mr. Roeper
would respond with another question and then another. He
would gently, but skillfully, poke at each answer, probe for
a reason, and, like a champion tennis player, lob back at us
one more question. Indeed, I don’t recall Mr. Roeper ever
giving us an answer or even suggesting what he thought the
answer should be. Instead, the whole point was to get us to
think critically about our responses, to add the slow thinking
to the fast (Kahneman, 2011), and learn to value both reason
and intuition. As we grew older, the stories moved from fiction to fact, from hypotheticals to real situations our school,
city, state, nation, and world confronted; what didn’t change
was Mr. Roeper’s (and later George’s) belief that challenging
us to question, to test our assumptions, to think critically and
complexly were the foremost goals of a Roeper education
and that only by his respecting our answers and our learning
to respect each other’s answers could those goals be realized.
The Human Relations class—and Mr. Roeper—
profoundly impacted me. Given my much later decision
to select Philosophy as my undergraduate major and to
then attend law school (a piece of cake next to those early
Socratic dialogues!), I would venture to guess that those
childhood lessons set me on a life path that continues to this
day.
George Roeper passed away in 1992, the same year I
enrolled my nearly 3-year-old daughter in Roeper’s nursery school. That both of my daughters ended up as “lifers”
at Roeper was not just fortunate for them but for me as
well, because it afforded me a second opportunity to “attend”
Roeper. Though much had changed (the campus, staff, and
student body had all grown), much was still the same: a
community that served to educate children for life in accordance with a philosophy of life developed and articulated by
George and Annemarie Roeper. Though Annemarie continued to frequently visit and be a strong presence in the School,
it became increasingly important to find other ways to
acquaint new generations with George Roeper. I could think
of no better way than to simulate those early life-defining
lessons in human relations.
My first stab occurred when, one Founders’ Day in the
early 2000s, I was invited as a guest to speak about the
Roepers to my daughter’s Stage III class of 7- and 8-yearolds. I brought with me one of the most important moral
philosophy books of the 20th century, John Rawls’s (1971),
The Theory of Justice—a book I had studied cover to cover in
a graduate-level philosophy seminar while in college—these
were Roeper children after all! In order to develop his theory,
Rawls posits a device called the veil of ignorance. Under the
veil, an individual would not know what talents or attributes
she might have at birth or what economic or other social status. Rawls asks (and goes on to answer) what kind of societal
laws and resource distribution one would create in such a
circumstance. I brought to the class of 21 students 21 pairs
of dollar store–purchased blindfolds. After going under the
veil of ignorance by literally putting on their blindfolds, we
developed a set of rules for our new society.
The following year, I attended another Stage III class
where we acted out a story I had written while channeling George Roeper. The theme was bravery and each child
appeared as a character in the story. The children grappled
with questions like, “Do you have to be scared in order to be
brave?” or “Do you have to take a risk or face uncertainty of
the outcome of your actions in order to be brave?” or “What
makes one person braver than another?” Though never quite
as adroit as George, in these guest classes, I never responded
“right” or “wrong” but rather answered a question with
another question, challenging the children to think about
their intuitions and grapple with seeming inconsistencies and
reasoning ever more deeply.
In 2009, I came across an article in the New York Times
about a new venture designed to put a regular college course
online for free. The selected course was political philosopher Michael Sandel’s “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to
Do?”—a highly popular introductory philosophy class at
Harvard University (Sandel, 2011). As I sat at my computer screen entranced by Professor Sandel’s artful method
for teaching concepts from utilitarianism to the categorical imperative and philosophers from Plato to Rawls, two
thoughts came to me:
1. It was abundantly clear why Sandel regularly drew
1,000 students per semester to his course; and
2. I was watching a contemporary version of George
Roeper’s Human Relations class.
With the subsequent publication of Sandel’s (2010) book
based on his course, the potential synergy was difficult to
resist.
HUMAN RELATIONS: THE ROEPER EDUCATION CORNERSTONE
Liberally borrowing from Sandel, I presented a workshop
intended to give first middle-school and then upper-school
students a simultaneous “taste” of moral philosophy and virtual acquaintance with the founder of their school whom they
did not know, George Roeper. Employing the trolley problem
ethical thought experiment, the workshop began:
Suppose you are the driver of a trolley car hurtling
down the track at 60 mph. Up ahead you see five workers standing on the track, tools in hand. You try to stop,
but you can’t. The brakes don’t work. You feel desperate because you know that if you crash into these five
workers, they will die. (Let’s assume it is a certainty.)
Suddenly you notice a sidetrack, off to the right. There
is a worker on that track, too, but only one. You realize
you can turn the trolley car onto the sidetrack, killing
the one worker and sparing the five. Raise your hand if
you think you should turn the trolley car and kill the one
worker. Raise your hand if you think you should keep
going on the track you are on. WHY?
● O.K. Now let’s consider another version. This time,
you are not the driver, but an onlooker, standing on
a bridge overlooking the track. This time, there is no
sidetrack. Down the track comes the trolley and you
see the five workers standing on the track. You can
tell (you know) that the brakes have failed and the
trolley is going to crash and kill the five workers. All
of a sudden, you notice standing next to you on the
bridge a very tall, stocky man. You realize that if you
push him off the bridge, he would fall onto the path
of the oncoming trolley and die, but the five workers
would be saved. (You consider jumping onto the track
yourself, but you realize you are too small to stop the
trolley). Raise your hand if you think pushing the tall
man onto the track is the right thing to do. Raise your
hand if you don’t. Is there someone who thought it was
okay in the previous case but not okay in the second?
WHY?
● What if you don’t have to physically push the man on
to the track but you realize that he is standing on a trap
door and you just have to push a lever that releases the
trap door and he falls on to the track? Does this make a
difference? WHY?
● What if you said to the large man, “This is completely
up to you, but I if I push this lever (which you can’t
reach), the trap door will open and you will fall through
and stop the runaway trolley and save those five workers, but you will die” and the man consents? Raise your
hand if you think then it is the right thing to do to push
the lever. WHY?
● Instead of the last example, let’s say you are back on the
bridge and all of a sudden hear the large man say, “Ha,
ha! My plan worked. The trolley will kill my coworkers
whom I hate because none of them say good morning
to me when I come to work.” How many of you think
●
263
it would then be okay for you to push the lever causing
the man to fall on to the track and save the five workers?
WHY?
The workshop continued with other kinds of examples,
drawn from history and real-life news stories.
I am pleased to report that the workshops achieved
my twin goals—with students responding, differentiating,
analyzing, and reasoning—in ways I never would have
imagined—and with considerable enthusiasm. The exercise
also served to vividly acquaint another generation of Roeper
School students and faculty with George Roeper and his
adamant belief in the value of “reason, logic, and rationality
. . . curiosity, enlightenment and the ability to be discerning . . . to think out a problem before making decisions . . .”
(Roeper, 1981) as foundational to an education that matters.
A terrific example of a contemporary descendant of George
Roeper’s Human Relations class and the continuing centrality of robust ethical inquiry to a Roeper education is discussed by Roeper Upper School faculty member Susannah
Nichols in the remainder of this article.
ETHICAL FRAMEWORK
“Take, pray, your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac,
and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt
offering on one of the mountains which I shall say to you”
(Alter, 1996, p. 103). God’s words to Abraham in chapter
22 of Genesis are the first in a series of ethical issues students are asked to confront in my Western Literature classes.
We encounter similar dilemmas in The Odyssey, Oedipus the
King, and Hamlet, among others, and these plot points have
consistently captivated the imaginations and intellects of my
upper school students. Roeper English classes are often filled
with strong academic performers. They are adept at recognizing themes, symbolism, and literary devices at work in
classical texts; they are able to craft substantive essays in
support of an analytical thesis; they identify moments and
references that play out in the cultural conversation—but
they do their best work when they are compelled to consider the heart-wrenching challenges that can occur when an
individual strives to do the right thing.
This type of ethical inquiry has come to constitute the
foundation of the class, and the challenge can be unpleasant. There are days when my students wish I would interpret
the stories for them, reducing the analysis of the literature to
what they are supposed to know. Though that’s a viable strategy for passing a test or appearing well-read in an Advanced
Placement essay, it robs the students of the opportunity to
burnish their understanding of both the texts and themselves.
The course ultimately requires an emotional investment and
willingness to put oneself in the same situation as the characters and thus the emotional intensity that is a trademark of
gifted students looms large with each new unit.
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L. A. LUTZ AND S. NICHOLS
Our survey of canonical literature begins with a study of
Biblical texts. Though Roeper has no religious foundation,
an understanding of scripture, divorced from any particular faith, proves invaluable when navigating other literature.
Students often worry that this work will be irrelevant, boring, or one dimensionally sanctimonious, but they engage
the material when they encounter the complicated situations
that characters are placed in, by either their fellow humans
or their creator. Though some remain blasé about God’s draconian style of discipline early in Genesis, almost all, even
those familiar with the text, are struck by the charge God
gives to Abraham in chapter 22:
“God should not ask that of Abraham—Abraham has
already proved his loyalty again and again; this is just a
total jerk move on God’s part.”
● “Forget God, what about Abraham? Who does that to
their kid?”
● “He doesn’t even think about it! God says do it, and
Abraham just goes.”
● “He doesn’t even talk to his wife about it. And he totally
lies to Isaac too.”
● “No, the whole point of Abraham’s character is that he
trusts God. He knows that if God is asking him to do
this, it’s going to work out somehow.”
● “If someone did this today, went to sacrifice their kid
because they said God told them to, we’d say they were
crazy.”
● “So then does this even matter? The whole thing could
just be a metaphor for followers doing whatever God
says. Why are we worrying about this?”
●
In every iteration of the course, that final question emerges—
why are we worrying about this? When we find ourselves on
the ethical ropes, it’s easy to evade the matter at hand by
noting the impracticality of the situation. To wit, Abraham’s
decision takes place in a world with different parameters
than ours, particularly a deity who regularly converses with
humans. This is not a scenario to which my students can
relate. Why worry indeed?
“This is why we study literature,” I always respond.
The situations vary, but the questions are universal.
Understanding why Abraham makes his decision allows us
to know him better. Understanding why we would have
made the decision differently allows us to know ourselves
better.
In 2009, I attended Lori’s simulation of George’s Human
Relations Class alongside many of my students and I then
realized that while I’d first delved into these tense moments
because they sparked powerful conversation, what I had
been doing was helping students create their own ethical
frameworks. I also realized that by doing that work more
deliberately, even before encountering a moral quagmire in
the text, they might hone their skills further.
We traditionally close the semester by reading Oedipus
the King (Fagles & Knox, 1982), a play most students predict
will be “gross” because they assume that Oedipus willfully
kills his father and beds his mother—not that he obliviously
moves through life with the best of intentions, unaware of
his true identity and parentage. Late in the play, we learn
that Oedipus’s birth parents, upon hearing the prophecy of
the havoc their newborn son will wreak, ordered a shepherd
to kill the baby. Unable to bring himself to comply, the shepherd gave the infant to another shepherd who ensured that
the baby would be raised far away from his birth kingdom.
In a story full of bad decisions and infuriating choices, this
small act by a minor character is what makes the ruin of the
kingdom possible—and in a world where prophecy is as certain as science, he knows what he is likely setting in motion.
And yet, like so many of the characters in this tragedy, his
motives were entirely benevolent.
Before embarking on Oedipus, we took a few days to
prepare ourselves for the ethical challenges this play would
present. For the daily class journal assignment, I posed the
trolley car example that Lori used in her workshop. As we
waded into discussion, I emphasized that our objective was
not to come to a singular “right” answer as a class but
rather to determine the limits of our own personal boundaries
and beliefs. For some, willfully putting someone in harm’s
way, even for a greater good, was something they could
not validate. Others posited that the needs of many should
always outweigh the needs of a few. People countered arguments, raised more what-ifs, and articulated newly formed
viewpoints to see how they felt. In many ways, the hypothetical nature of the scenario provided a safety net. As Sandel
(2010) points out,
Hypothetical examples such as the trolley story remove
the uncertainty that hangs over the choices we confront in
real life. . . . By setting aside contingencies—“what if the
workers noticed the trolley and jumped aside in time?”—
hypothetical examples help us to isolate the moral principles
at stake and examine their force. (p. 24)
Knowing where Sophocles would be taking us, I then introduced an even more harrowing and real-life ethical dilemma
from Justice (Sandel, 2010)—the Afghan Goatherd:
In June 2005, a special forces team made up of Petty Officer
Marcus Luttrell and three other U.S. Navy SEALs set out
on a secret reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan, near the
Pakistani border, in search of a Taliban leader, a close associate of Osama bin Laden. According to intelligence reports,
their target commanded 140 to 150 heavily armed fighters
and was staying in a village in the forbidding mountainous
region.
Shortly after the special forces team took up a position on a mountain ridge overlooking the village, two
Afghan farmers with about a hundred bleating goats happened upon them. With them was a boy about 14 years
HUMAN RELATIONS: THE ROEPER EDUCATION CORNERSTONE
old. The Afghans were unarmed. The American soldiers
trained their rifles on them, motioned for them to sit on the
ground, and then debated what to do about them. On the
one hand, the goatherds appeared to be unarmed civilians.
On the other hand, letting them go would run the risk that
they would inform the Taliban of the presence of the U.S.
soldiers.
As the four soldiers contemplated their options, they realized that they didn’t have any rope, so tying up the Afghans
to allow time to find a new hideout was not feasible. The only
choice was to kill them or let them go free.
One of Luttrell’s comrades argued for killing the
goatherds: “We’re on active duty behind enemy lines, sent
here by our senior commanders. We have a right to do everything we can to save our own lives. The military decision
is obvious. To turn them loose would be wrong.” Luttrell
was torn. “In my soul, I knew he was right,” he wrote in
retrospect. “We could not possibly turn them loose. But my
trouble is, I have another soul. My Christian soul. And it was
crowding in on me. Something kept whispering in the back
of my mind, it would be wrong to execute these unarmed
men in cold blood.” Luttrell didn’t say what he meant by his
Christian soul, but in the end, his conscience didn’t allow
him to kill the goatherds. He cast the deciding vote to release
them. (One of his three comrades had abstained.) It was a
vote he came to regret.
About an hour and a half after they released the goatherds,
the four soldiers found themselves surrounded by 80 to a
hundred Taliban fighters armed with AK-47s and rocketpowered grenades. In the fierce firefight that followed,
all three of Luttrell’s comrades were killed. The Taliban
fighters also shot down a U.S. helicopter that sought to
rescue the SEAL unit, killing all 16 soldiers on board.
(pp. 24–25)
Usually at least a few students rightly predict that Luttrell’s
decision would backfire, but none have ever demeaned him
for making the choice he did. They are deeply sympathetic
to Luttrell’s dilemma and often find his self-criticism too
harsh:
It was the stupidest, most southern-fried, lame brained decision I ever made in my life. . . . I must have been out of my
mind. I had actually cast a vote which I knew could sign our
death warrant. . . . At least, that’s how I look back on those
moments now. . . . The deciding vote was mine, and it will
haunt me till they rest me in an East Texas grave. (cited in
Sandel, 2010, p. 25)
The scenario of the Afghan Goatherds leads the class to discuss the structures that society or organizations put in place
to make these ethical dilemmas easier. As Luttrell’s comrade said, “The military decision is obvious.” There is a
reason, after all, why soldiers are not permitted to question
orders in the midst of a battle, why the chain of command
is honored. In situations where lives hang in the balance,
human emotion is a severe complication: a reasoned higher
265
power would be most welcome. Inevitably, the conversation turns to what we’ve seen earlier in the semester, and
we realize that this is the faith Abraham places in God,
even though we bristle at what this faith means for his
son.
This brand of compliance—not questioning orders for the
very reason that our ethical instincts might lead us astray—is
a particularly evocative notion in a school that advocates the
individual voice and a constant vigilance in the questioning
of authority, a philosophy that emerged from its founders’
experience as citizens of and refugees from Nazi Germany.
Stifling one’s own voice is anathema at Roeper, yet it’s the
very thing that Luttrell believes he should have done in that
situation.
We return to the Afghan Goatherds when we consider the
shepherd’s choice in Oedipus. The prophecy about Oedipus
becomes comparable to military orders—a construct that
should make decisions easier in theory but actually doesn’t
in practice. Students compare Luttrell’s choice to release the
goatherds to the shepherd character’s impulse to protect the
baby. “If the decision is kill a baby or don’t kill a baby, you
don’t kill the baby,” one student said. “But what if you knew
the baby was going to grow up and be Hitler?” another student responded. The first student paused for a long moment
and then said, “No, you still don’t kill the baby.” We went
back and forth, never arriving at a straightforward conclusion. The absence of a definitive answer is equally liberating
and terrifying, but it is also rewarding, because even without
a simple yes or no, the students have stepped closer to a more
tangible understanding of themselves.
I’ve come to use this practice in nearly all of my literature classes. Before my Russian Novelists class embarks on
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky, Pevear, Volokhonsky,
& Leatherbarrow, 1993), we deconstruct a scenario of a
man robbing a corrupt apothecary for medicine to save his
dying wife in order to elicit discussion on criminal motivation, poverty, and whether the ends ever justify the means.
My American Literature class, which hinges on the question
of what are our obligations to ourselves and to our larger
communities, examines a variation of the situation Sandel
(2011) uses at the opening Justice: a story of price-gouging
during the aftermath of a natural disaster.
Far too often in classrooms, the focus is on what’s
next: an upcoming exam, a more difficult problem, and,
of course, college. George Roeper (1968) didn’t deny this
reality and considered preparation for college “a matter
of course.” But in the same breath, he emphasized that
preparation as “half our job. We also want to help our students to be amply prepared for this world in a social and
human sense. We want our youth to have values, to understand their values, and to help them uphold their values.”
George knew better than to predict particulars of the moral
circumstances our students will encounter in the years to
come. Global conflicts, technological advances, and shifting economic landscapes are only a few of the challenges
266
L. A. LUTZ AND S. NICHOLS
that will make their life decisions every bit as complicated and nuanced as those of Abraham and the Theban
shepherd. I can’t provide answers, and I won’t interpret those
stories for them either, but by helping students to define
their own ethical framework and by giving them both an
opportunity and a safe space to practice self-reflection and
analysis, they will be better able to navigate not just literature but their own journeys, the very purpose of a Roeper
education.
NOTE
1.
Lori A. Lutz wrote the first part of the article. Susannah Nichols
wrote the second part beginning with the subsection titled
“Ethical Framework.”
REFERENCES
Alter, R. (1996). Genesis. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Dostoyevsky, F., Pevear, R., Volokhonsky, L., & Leatherbarrow, W. J.
(1993). Crime and punishment. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.
Fagles, R., & Knox, B. M. (1982). Sophocles: The three Theban plays:
Antigone, Oedipus the king, and Oedipus at Colonus. London, England:
Allen Lane.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
Rawls, J. (1971). Theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Roeper, G. (1968, October). Remarks given by George Roeper to the City
and Country School P.T.F.A., Bloomfield Hills, MI.
Roeper, G. (1981, June). Importance of humanism. Remarks given by
George Roeper at the Roeper City and Country School senior class dinner
speech, Bloomfield Hills, MI.
Sandel, M. (2010). Justice: What’s the right thing to do? New York, NY:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Sandel, M. (2011). Justice. Retrieved from http://www.justiceharvard.org
AUTHOR BIOS
Lori A. Lutz graduated from The Roeper School in 1975. She has a BA in Philosophy from the University of
Michigan and a JD from Northeastern University in Boston. She is the mother of two Roeper alumni: Clara ’07 and
Eleanor ’11. Lori served on The Roeper School Board of Trustees from 1995 to 2008, the last 3 years as Board Chair.
She currently works with The Roeper Institute, a separate 501(c)(3) organization that educates and advocates for
gifted children beyond the walls of The Roeper School. E-mail: roeperinstitute@roeper.org
Susannah Nichols started teaching at The Roeper School in 2005. After graduating from the University of Michigan
with a BA summa cum laude in English, Susannah completed a tour with Teach for America in Detroit and worked in
the nonprofit sector. In addition to teaching in the English department of Roeper’s Upper School, Susannah has served
as a faculty representative to the Board of Trustees, volleyball coach, and helped spearhead initiatives to provide students with resources to pursue their interests in service learning and social justice. She has presented at the Progressive
Educator’s Network conference on the topic of student-directed staffing as a tool for academic empowerment. She
blogs about her teaching practice at: susannahnichols.wordpress.com. E-mail: susannah.nichols@roeper.org
651521
research-article2016
IMP0010.1177/1365480216651521Improving SchoolsMoss
Article
Loris Malaguzzi and the schools
of Reggio Emilia: Provocation
and hope for a renewed public
education
Improving
Schools
Improving Schools
2016, Vol. 19(2) 167­–176
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1365480216651521
imp.sagepub.com
Peter Moss
University College London, UK
Abstract
Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994) was one of the great educationalists of the last century, helping to create a
system of public (or municipal) schools in his home city of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy that is, arguably,
the most successful example of radical or progressive education that has ever been. The article gives an
introduction to Malaguzzi and his work, starting with a short overview of his career, then outlining some of
the most important understandings, values and practices that came to define his pedagogical thinking and
work, and counterpointing this with the attention he paid to organisation, which he believed was vital but
always subservient to values and practice. Finally, the article considers his significance to education today,
expanding on how Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia provide both provocation and hope for a
renewed public education. The author draws on a recently published translation and collection of Malaguzzi’s
writings and speeches, on which he worked as co-editor, ‘Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia’.
Keywords
Early childhood education, Loris Malaguzzi, public education, Reggio Emilia
Loris Malaguzzi (1920–1994) was one of the great educationalists of the last century. He helped to
create a system of public (or municipal) schools in his home city of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy
that is, arguably, the most successful, most extensive and most sustained example of radical or
progressive education that has ever been. A strong claim, but difficult to deny when today there are
47 schools in the city’s system (33 managed by the comune (city council) itself, and 14 provided
by cooperatives under agreements with the comune), and when Reggio Emilia has managed to
maintain an innovative, dynamic and creative culture of pedagogical work for more than 50 years.
If Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia may not be familiar to many readers, it is because
he and they are concerned with the education of children below compulsory school age, from birth
to 6 years. In the fragmented and hierarchical world of education, that puts them beyond the knowledge and awareness of most educationalists, who are involved with primary, secondary and higher
Corresponding author:
Peter Moss, Thomas Coram Research Unit, University College London, London WC1H 0AA, UK.
Email: peter.moss@ioe.ac.uk
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education, and who may well see early childhood education mainly as a form of preparation for
what follows, necessary perhaps but not of great interest to education per se. But in the field of
early childhood education, Reggio Emilia has attracted global attention and a worldwide following, becoming widely recognised as one of the most important experiences in this sector of education; the city receives a constant stream of study groups from many countries, while its exhibition
has been touring the world since 1981.
The contention of this article is that Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia merit attention
from all educationalists who seek to resist the current dominant educational discourse with its
intense instrumentality, its reductionist denial of diversity and complexity and its fixation on technical practice, not least the deployment of strong managerial accounting and other human technologies to govern children and adults alike. Moreover, as a system of publicly provided schools
inscribed with values of democracy, cooperation and solidarity, Reggio Emilia confronts other
shibboleths of neoliberal education orthodoxy, not least its belief in the primacy of private provision, competition and consumer choice. Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia are not to be
exported and copied; they are (like all education) very much of their time and place. But they show
that there are alternatives, not just on paper but in reality.
In what follows, I will offer an introduction to Malaguzzi and his work, to coincide with the
publication of a new book that presents for the first time in English a selection of his writings and
speeches, covering the period 1945–1993 (Cagliari et al., 2016). I will give a short overview of his
career, highlighting the complexity of his role as Director of municipal schools and his avid border
crossing. I will then outline some of the most important understandings, values and practices that
came to define his pedagogical thinking and work, and counterpoint this with the attention he paid
to organisation, which he believed was vital but always subservient to values and practice. Finally,
I will consider his significance to education today, expanding on how Malaguzzi and the schools
of Reggio Emilia provide both provocation and hope for a renewed public education.
The life and times of Loris Malaguzzi
Malaguzzi’s life, from 1920 to 1994, spanned most of what has been termed ‘the short twentieth
century’.1 He was born soon after the end of First World War, and grew up and entered adulthood
under fascism and during the Second World War. Following the heady days of liberation, when as
he later said ‘everything seemed possible’ and one was ‘inside a sort of great adventure’, he lived
the remainder of his life first during the rapid economic growth and social change experienced by
Italy in its post-war ‘golden years’, then during the early stages of the rise of neoliberalism to
global hegemony. He died shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet
regime.
He became an avid border crosser – not only literally but also in terms of his prodigious and
wide-ranging reading and his later commitment to inter-disciplinarity:
For me personally the great problem today is … how to move towards a form of renewal that attempts to
interweave the single disciplines and make them interact in a way that has never been done before in
learning. We are proposing something in very uncertain terms, which does not envisage abandoning
specific disciplines but at the same time does not want to exalt them; something that would like to have the
disciplines penetrating each other and reciprocally enriching each other. (Loris Malaguzzi from Cagliari
et al., 2016, p. 264)
Yet he lived in one place for most of his life, the city of Reggio Emilia, about 70 km west of
Bologna. His early working years were spent as a teacher in state primary and middle schools,
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including a formative stint in an isolated mountain village, as well as in adult education for young
men whose education had been disrupted by war. He then moved to work in a variety of municipal
children’s services, starting in a pioneering centre for children with psychological problems and in
summer camps, before, in 1963, he was appointed Consultant to Reggio Emilia’s first municipal
schools, scuola dell’infanzia, for children aged 3–6 years. He subsequently became Director of the
city’s schools, overseeing their expansion including the addition of asili nido, or schools for children under 3.
Reggio Emilia was in the forefront of what has been termed a ‘municipal school revolution’
(Catarsi, 2004, p. 8), in which a number of left-wing administrations in Northern and Central Italy
decided in the early 1960s to assume responsibility for the education of their young children,
despairing of the state’s willingness to do so (a national law permitting state schools for 3- to
6-year-olds was only passed in 1968, the issue having previously been fought long and hard, bringing down an earlier administration) and wanting an alternative to the then dominant position of
church schools. Malaguzzi, therefore, was part of a network of fellow educationalists working to
create a new secular public education. Although each local experience had its own identity, this
network provided a rich source of exchange and mutual support.
Malaguzzi formally retired in 1984, but continued to be active in the city’s schools, as well as
nationally; he edited Bambini, a national magazine for early years educators, and was President of
the Gruppo Nazionale Nidi (National Nido Group), founded in 1980 with the aim of promoting
debate on issues about services for children under 3 years. But he was also increasingly active
internationally. The 1970s saw the first overseas visitors come to Reggio Emilia’s municipal
schools, a trickle that was to turn into a flood. While the 1980s was the decade when Reggio Emilia
went out into the world to share its experiences and, in the course of doing so, began building a
large international following.
The city’s travelling exhibition, first called ‘L’occhio se salta il muro’ (If the Eye Leaps over the
Wall), later renamed ‘The Hundred Languages of Children’, was an important part of this reaching
out. Drawing on some of the most significant project work from the municipal schools, this was,
in Malaguzzi’s words, ‘an exhibition of the possible’ (cited in Vecchi, 2010, p. 27). Shown first in
spring 1981 in Reggio Emilia itself, in autumn of the same year it travelled to Sweden, attracting
tens of thousands of visitors to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and establishing a close relationship
between Reggio Emilia and educators in Sweden that has lasted to the present day.
Sweden was only the first stop. The exhibition began travelling throughout Western Europe,
while in 1987, a second updated version began a North American tour. Indeed, the exhibition was
to be continuously updated and translated into different languages, with work from other schools
being added. By 1995, shortly after Malaguzzi’s death, the exhibition had been to 44 venues in 11
countries. In a matter of a few years, The Hundred Languages of Children brought Reggio Emilia’s
pedagogical work to the attention of a vast new audience and, together with the many visitors to
the city, helped create an international network of people engaged with Reggio Emilia’s schools for
young children. At the time of his death, Malaguzzi was working on developing his last major
project, which was the creation of ‘Reggio Children’, an organisation set up to foster and organise
exchanges between Reggio Emilia and the world beyond its borders.
Before retirement, Malaguzzi headed a growing number of municipal schools in Reggio Emilia.
What did his role involve? It was highly complex and multi-faceted, well-illustrated by the documents in the book of his writings and speeches. So, one moment he is the administrator, the head
of the emerging early childhood service in Reggio Emilia, writing to the Mayor, other city politicians or officials or to schools – about problems with the construction of a new school, or arguing
for the school to have an atelier [arts workshop]; or warning against the comune assuming responsibility for a sub-standard Church-run school; or proposing measures to school staff to implement
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the comune’s new Regolamento delle scuole comunali dell’infanzia (Rulebook for municipal
schools); or chiding some schools for failing to ensure representation at meetings. The next moment
he is the educator, organising series of lectures or other events for parents and teachers, in which
he also often participates as a teacher himself. (For example, in 1965, reference is made to
‘Pedagogical November’, a 2-week programme of talks on pedagogical issues, open to families
and educators, with presentations from leading figures in Italian education, including Malaguzzi
who also organised these events in Reggio.) Then, he is the pedagogical director, setting out his
ideas about summer camps or schools and their underlying pedagogy, to a variety of audiences,
locally, regionally or nationally, but also constantly putting these ideas to work through experimentation, in close cooperation with teachers in the municipal schools. This activity is closely connected with that of pedagogical researcher, for experiment and research are central to his idea of
the identity of the school and the work of the teacher. Another time he is the student, learning from
innovative work on maths by Piaget and other Swiss psychologists, and always reading to keep
abreast of the latest thinking in many fields. While on other occasions, he is a campaigner, arguing
the case for more and better services for children and families or for the defence of what has been
achieved in the face of threatened cuts – all this within the wider frame of a passionate commitment
to the idea of public education.
Should we describe Malaguzzi, then, as an educational leader, a concept much in vogue these
days? There are reasons for thinking that the term ‘leader’ is inappropriate for Malaguzzi. First,
because the term never crops up in the new book, at least in relation to Malaguzzi and Reggio
Emilia, and he was opposed to hierarchy and believed strongly in the creative power of the group.
So ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ are not terms that seem to sit comfortably with the ethos of this pedagogical project or the character of Malaguzzi. Perhaps, although this is pure speculation, the word
‘leader’ had negative connotations, a reminder of ‘Il Duce’ (‘the leader’), as Mussolini was known,
and his 20-year fascist dictatorship. This was an experience that Reggio’s schools deliberately set
out to contest and to prevent recurring, as Renzo Bonazzi, the mayor of the city during the early
years of municipal school expansion, made clear when he told some visitors that
the fascist experience had taught them that people who conformed and obeyed were dangerous, and that in
building a new society it was imperative to safeguard and communicate that lesson and nurture a vision of
children who can think and act for themselves. (Dahlberg, 2000, p. 177)
Second, because the concepts of ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ – and their corollary of ‘follower’ and
‘being led’ – do not sit comfortably in an educational project that, as discussed below, takes democracy and cooperation as fundamental values, and makes them central to its practice. Of course, a
leader may try to use the trappings of democracy to secure compliance, making a point of consulting widely and building teams to further his or her purposes and goals. But here, democratic language and methods are instrumentalised and put to work in the interests of power. What is the
situation though if you start from a position of democracy and cooperation as fundamentals, as was
the case of Reggio Emilia? Where schools themselves have no hierarchy or fixed leadership.
Where there is a desire to create a participatory project, based on a recognition that ‘individual
knowledge is only partial; and that in order to create a project, especially an educational project,
everyone’s point of view is relevant in dialogue with others’ (Cagliari, Barozzi, & Giudici, 2004,
p. 29).
Perhaps a different language is needed to describe Malaguzzi’s position: or perhaps an old language, such as the Latin term primus inter pares, first among equals, a recognition of general
equality within which one figure may attain a special standing due to respect and trust gained by
acknowledged authority in a particular field.
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Pedagogical understandings, values and practices
Space precludes going in detail into the pedagogical ideas and practices identified with Loris
Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia (for those wanting to read more deeply into the subject, see Cagliari et al., 2016; Edwards, Gandini, & Forman, 2012; Rinaldi, 2006; Vecchi, 2010).
However, some key features should be mentioned, starting with the understandings – constructs or
images – that are the foundations for the city’s pedagogy. Most fundamental of all, education is
understood, first and foremost, as political, political in the sense that it is always about making
choices between conflicting alternatives.
One of the most important choices concerns the image of the child – who do we think the child
is? From the answer to that question, Malaguzzi argued, everything else – policy, provision, practice; structure and culture – must necessarily follow. Of course every educational policy and service is based on a particular image, but one that is usually implicit and unacknowledged; national
and international policy documents typically neither ask nor answer the question. But Reggio
Emilia does, recognising that the choice made about the child’s image has to be explicit and public,
and therefore subject to discussion and argument. Malaguzzi insisted that ‘a declaration [about the
image of the child] is not only a necessary act of clarity and correctness, it is the necessary premise
for any pedagogical theory, and any pedagogical project’ (Loris Malaguzzi, from Cagliari et al.,
2016, p. 374).
He was very clear about his image, the image of the ‘rich child’:
there are rich children and poor children. We [in Reggio Emilia] say all children are rich, there are no poor
children. All children whatever their culture, whatever their lives are rich, better equipped, more talented,
stronger and more intelligent than we can suppose. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 397)
Rich children are born with a ‘hundred languages’, the term he used to suggest the many and
diverse ways children have of expressing themselves and relating to the world – ranging from
manifold forms of art, music and dance to maths, sciences and technologies. Indeed, in the 1970s,
Malaguzzi wrote a now famous poem about the hundred languages, which also contains a damning
indictment of the damage done to them by ‘school and culture’:
Children have a hundred languages: they rob them of ninety nine
school and culture
work to separate
bodies-minds
making them think without their body
and act without their head
making conflict between
play and work
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
inside and outside. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 259)
‘Rich’ children are not only complex and holistic beings, but competent and determined from birth
to make meaning of the world. They are protagonists, not ‘bottles to be filled … [but] active in
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constructing the self and knowledge through social interactions and inter-dependencies’ (Cagliari
et al., 2016, p. 377); not bearers of needs, but of rights, values and competencies.
This image of the child makes strong demands on the adults who live with them and the institutions they attend. It calls forth an image of the rich teacher, for rich children request ‘rich intelligence in others, rich curiosity in others, a very high and advanced capacity for fantasy, imagination,
learning and culture in others’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 397). The teacher should be understood as
a co-constructor of knowledge, but also as a researcher, experimenter and ‘a new type of intellectual, a producer of knowledge connected with the demands of society’ (Cagliari et al., 2016,
p. 210), working closely with parents and other citizens.
The image of the school similarly complements the image of the child. Malaguzzi paid much
attention in the early years of the municipal schools to constructing their identity, how they should
be understood. This was particularly pressing because of the negative identity that clung historically to schools for young children – as welfare-orientated services that substituted for mothers and
whose staff were primarily to display motherly qualities (the old term of ‘scuola materna’ captures
this idea). His concept was very different: the scuola dell’infanzia that was first and foremost for
children and their education, understood as education-in-its-widest sense, education ‘no longer the
art of teaching; in its broadest sense it becomes assistance with the psychological growth and
maturing of human beings, making possible the growth of a rich, original, socially and individually
normal personality’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 41).
But schools were not just places for children and teachers. They were public spaces, without
boundaries, open to their neighbourhoods, welcoming parents and other citizens, while reaching
out into their surrounding neighbourhoods:
schools that are living centres of open and democratic culture, enriched and informed by social encounters
that let them go beyond their ambiguous and false autonomy and centuries-old detachment, and which let
them abandon the prejudice of ideological imprinting and authoritarian indoctrination. (Cagliari et al.,
2016, p. 180)
We are a long way here from the current English view of schools as autonomous businesses, competing for the custom of parent-consumers, distantly related to a central government that provides
funding and regulation. For Malaguzzi, schools are a social responsibility but also responsible to
the whole society, playing a vital role in sustaining democracy, creating culture and ‘offering to
participate in building an educating society in which [schools’] contents and purposes can be
debated and integrated dialectically’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 227).
If making choices about understandings was an important part of viewing education as a political practice, the choice of fundamental values was another. Malaguzzi’s choice of values included
uncertainty and subjectivity, wonder and surprise, solidarity and cooperation and, perhaps most
important of all, participation and democracy. As a ‘living centre of open and democratic culture’,
open not only to families but also to its local neighbourhood, the school should be capable of ‘living out processes and issues of participation and democracy in its inter-personal relations, in the
procedures of its progettazione (project) and curriculum design, in the conception and examination
of its work plans, and in operations of organisational updating’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 354).
Democracy, for Malaguzzi, was not just a matter of participant social management, important as
that was, but also of participatory accountability (discussed further below), and should suffuse all
relationships and practices – democracy in a Deweyian sense of ‘a mode of associated living’.
These understandings and values, together with his wide and inter-disciplinary reading, led to a
distinctive pedagogical practice. Malaguzzi was quite clear about the pedagogy he did not want,
what he called ‘prophetic pedagogy’, which
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knows everything beforehand, knows everything that will happen, knows everything, does not have one
uncertainty, is absolutely imperturbable. It contemplates everything and prophesies everything, sees
everything, sees everything to the point that it is capable of giving you recipes for little bits of actions,
minute by minute, hour by hour, objective by objective, five minutes by five minutes. This is something so
coarse, so cowardly, so humiliating of teachers’ ingenuity, a complete humiliation for children’s ingenuity
and potential. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 421)
This is pedagogy reduced to a simple equation of predetermined inputs and outputs, obsessed with
achieving linear stages of development (‘let us take stages and throw them out the window’,
Malaguzzi suggests) and predefined learning goals. This is a pedagogy of certainty, predictability
and intense control, closely wed to what he termed dismissively ‘testology’, with its ‘rush to categorise’ and ‘which is nothing but a ridiculous simplification of knowledge and a robbing of meaning from individual histories’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 378). The proposed baseline assessment, that
would have reduced 4- and 5-year-olds in England to a single number from 1 to 5, may have been
dropped (for the time being at least), but the very notion of such testing was anathema to Malaguzzi,
a ‘ridiculous simplification’ of ‘rich children’.
Malaguzzi worked instead on constructing a pedagogy fit for such a child: a pedagogy of relations, listening and liberation. This is a pedagogy of children and adults working together to construct knowledge (and values and identities) – meaning-making through processes of building,
sharing, testing and revising theories, always in dialogic relationship with others, working in particular through the medium of open-ended project work. It is a pedagogy that welcomes the unexpected and the unpredicted, that values wonder and surprise. The strength of Reggio Emilia,
Malaguzzi believed, came
precisely from this fact that every other week, every other fortnight, every month, something unexpected,
something that surprised us or made us marvel, something that disappointed us, something that humiliated
us, would burst out in a child or in the children. But this was what gave us our sense of an unfinished
world, a world unknown, a world we ought to know better. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 392)
And this had major implications for all those working with children, for ‘to be capable of maintaining this gift of marvelling and wonder is a fundamental quality in a person working with children’
(Cagliari et al., 2016). If prophetic pedagogy ‘does not have one uncertainty’, then pedagogy for
the rich child calls for educators able to work with, indeed to relish, uncertainty. Being an educator,
Malaguzzi declared, is ‘a profession of uncertainty’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 322), and ‘uncertainty
can be turned into something positive when we start to test it and see it as a state of ferment, a
motor of knowledge’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 335).
Pedagogical organisation – creating conditions
Malaguzzi was a thinker, researcher and experimenter, but he was also intensely practical. In the
earliest document in the new book, a newspaper article from 1945 about the emergence of a postfascist literature in Italy, we find him asking under what conditions is renewal possible: ‘[w]e cannot create an artist at will, but it is equally true that the conditions for an artist to be born and to
develop can be created from now on’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 37). He was to continue to ask this
question for the rest of his life.
He was a great believer in the key role of democratic local authorities. At a time when local
authorities in England have been reduced to passive husks in early childhood education (and much
else besides), kept away from providing services that are the preserve of private providers and
autonomous state-funded schools, it is striking to see a self-confident and committed local authority
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in Reggio Emilia stepping up to the plate to open its own schools. Moreover, this was not an isolated
act, but part of a wider civic activism expressed in a range of services and cultural initiatives. In
1961, we find Malaguzzi (himself a great enthusiast for the theatre) writing about how
the Comune and cultural organisations of Reggio Emilia … have presented an almost incredible programme
of works in recent years, filled the gap in academic institutions, study centres, journals and magazines, and
extended their influence to ever more layers of society. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 66)
This programme included measures to broaden and increase theatre audiences such as cut-price
tickets and good transport provision. When it came to early childhood education, he thought the
right policy was for the state to fund, the region to regulate and the local authority to provide.
But his concern with conditions went far beyond delivery of services. For Malaguzzi, strong
organisation of services was vital, an organisation both intelligent and at the service of values.
Some of the main features of such an organisation are incorporated into the 1972 Regolamento,
which specifies a raft of conditions to support the development of good pedagogical work. These
included the following:
•• A support team of pedagogistas (workers with a psychology or pedagogy degree, each supporting a small group of schools) and psychologists;
•• The provision of ateliers and atelieristas (art workshops and educators with an arts qualification) in schools, embodying the idea of the hundred languages of childhood and offering
‘a sort of guarantee that our educational experience will remain fresh and imaginative, help
the experience not to be trapped in routine and habit, or become over schematic’ (Cagliari
et al., 2016, p. 223);
•• Valuing all environments indoor and outdoor as spaces of learning, including kitchens, bathrooms and gardens;
•• Ensuring priority access for children with special rights (the term adopted in Reggio Emilia
for children with disabilities);
•• Promoting the participation not only of parents but of all citizens in their local schools,
including ‘social management’ by regularly elected representatives of these groups plus
teachers, a role that should include a wide range of responsibilities, pedagogical as well as
administrative, and would take parents from being passive consumers of a service to becoming active protagonists.
Malaguzzi paid particular attention to conditions for the schools’ workforce. He insisted that all
workers in schools – teachers and auxiliary staff – should have proper pay and time for professional
development and other ‘non-contact’ activities, creating ‘the conditions for re-evaluating and valuing their contributions’ (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 210). Working with values of cooperation and
equality, he replaced hierarchy with equality of status:
The auxiliary’s role [in school] was freed so that she can study, meet and discuss on equal terms with
teachers, with exactly the same working hours and commitments as her [teacher] ‘colleagues’ … [t]here
are no ‘dirigenti’ [managers], there are no ‘educational directors’. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 223)
Instead, teachers, auxiliary workers, parents, social and political representatives, citizens were all
understood as
internal and external protagonists of school processes … [who] want to participate as equals, and have the
conditions that make this possible without privileges of any kind. This is what makes it possible to
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construct an experience of socialisation, of cooperative filtering, of educating to a participation in which
each person feels they can manage their own changes and bring their individual consciousness together
with the group’s, which is the vital leap in quality. (Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 234)
Malaguzzi reacts in particular against the traditional ‘pitiful isolation’ of the teacher, working alone
in her classroom. Just as he places great emphasis on the group for children, so too he emphasises
the importance of teachers working together and creating the conditions for that to happen, with the
Regolamento specifying two teachers per class group, and regular professional development for all
educators (teachers, atelieristas, cooks, auxiliaries).
Finally, Malaguzzi addressed the issue of evaluation, through the evolution of a condition that
has come to be termed ‘pedagogical documentation’, a way of working that brings together a number of issues already discussed: the commitment to democracy and wide participation, the hundred
languages with their many forms of expression, the value placed on (rigorous) subjectivity and
uncertainty. Put simply, pedagogical documentation makes learning processes and educational
practices visible by being documented in numerous ways (by means of notes, photographs, videos,
recordings, children’s artistic or other creations, etc.) so that they can be shared, discussed, reflected
upon, interpreted and, if necessary, evaluated – always in relationship with others. It can and does
involve everyone – children, teachers, auxiliary staff, families, administrators and other citizens –
and gives ‘the possibility to discuss and dialogue “everything with everyone” and to base these
discussions on real, concrete things’ (Hoyuelos, 2004, p. 7). It makes education and the school
transparent ‘by enabling the active and visible exchange of ideas between a school and its surroundings including the families, community members, and political leaders’; and it transforms a
school ‘to become a meeting place of co-construction … (and) a place of democracy (by inviting)
multiple ideas, debate, and negotiation among different points of view of an experience’ (Turner
and Wilson, 2010, p. 10). Instead of current ideas of evaluating education, that offer final statements of fact in an exercise of managerial accounting, pedagogical documentation offers a process
of democratic accountability leading to a provisional judgement of value.
Provocation and hope for a renewed public education
Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia may be a relatively small-scale experience in
just one sector of education. Yet they are, I believe, an extreme provocation to the dominant discourse in today’s education (for all ages), with its narrow and reductionist purview, its technical
and managerial veneer, and its obsessions with competition, markets and private providers. For it
shows that not only are there radical alternatives, democratic, cooperative and public in character,
but suggests such alternatives can be stimulated and fostered: if there is sustained political support
(given, in this case, by the comune of Reggio Emilia), if a democratic politics of education is
revived, if education is open to new thinking and perspectives and if careful and sustained attention
is given to identifying and creating the right conditions (just as the present education regime has
devoted huge resources and time to creating conditions in which its project can survive).
Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia do not, in my view, offer a blueprint or approach that
can be copied and applied elsewhere; like any educational project, it is context specific. Rather, Reggio
Emilia’s schools can be seen as a local cultural project of educational renewal, open certainly to influences from far and wide yet creating a distinctive pedagogical identity. But the values these schools
have adopted and the pedagogical ideas and practices they have evolved can stimulate thought and
action by others, and contribute to co-constructive processes of project design and building.
So a provocation certainly, but hope also. The hope that Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of
Reggio Emilia offer is for the very real possibility of a renewed public education expressed not via
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some attempt to impose national control over school systems, a dystopian society of control, but
rather through local cultural projects, networks of local schools, these networks connected to each
other and with some aspects in common, but with each assuming its own distinct identity, creating
sufficient difference to act as a constant stimulus to new thinking and new ways of working.
Note
1.
Originally proposed by Iván Berend (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) but defined by Eric Hobsbawm,
the British Marxist historian, ‘the short twentieth century’ refers to the period between the years 1914
and 1991, from the beginning of the First World War to the fall of the Soviet Union.
References
Cagliari, P., Barozzi, A., & Giudici, C. (2004). Thoughts, theories and experiences: For an educational project
with participation. Children in Europe, 6, 28–30.
Cagliari, P., Castegnetti, M., Giudici, C., Rinaldi, C., Vecchi, V., & Moss, P. (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and
the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches 1945-1993. London, England:
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Beyond executive functions, creativity skills
benefit academic outcomes: Insights from
Montessori education
Solange Denervaud ID1,2,3,4*, Jean-François Knebel3, Patric Hagmann4, Edouard Gentaz1,2
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1 The Center for Affective Sciences (CISA), Campus Biotech, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland,
2 Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (FAPSE), University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland,
3 The Laboratory for Investigative Neurophysiology (The LINE), Department of Radiology and Department of
Clinical Neurosciences, Lausanne University Hospital and University of Lausanne (CHUV-UNIL), Lausanne,
Switzerland, 4 Connectomics Lab, Department of Radiology, Lausanne University Hospital and University of
Lausanne (CHUV-UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland
* solange.denervaud@chuv.ch
Abstract
OPEN ACCESS
Citation: Denervaud S, Knebel J-F, Hagmann P,
Gentaz E (2019) Beyond executive functions,
creativity skills benefit academic outcomes:
Insights from Montessori education. PLoS ONE 14
(11): e0225319. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pone.0225319
Editor: Ronald B. Gill…