The Cultivation of Qualitative, Inward Values
Dear Members of The Waldorf School of Santa Barbara Community,
If you have not yet done so, please click the link below to purchase your tickets for this Saturday's Spring Soiree.
The Fundraising and Faires Commitee has been hard at work planning this wonderful gift in service of our community. Money raised at this event will support the renovation of our Great Room and the strengthening of our Woodwork Program.
There will be dancing, cocktails, food trucks, an auction, and more.
The event starts at 5 p.m. at The Factory SB (616 East Haley St). There will be a guest list at the door; you will register upon arrival.
We hope to see as many of you as possible!
Our Grade 6/7 students (with the help of Ballard Sensei, Senora Marcela, and parents) create beautiful chalk art at I Madonnari.
The most recent Research Bulletin (a publication of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education) focuses on the ongoing destruction of our earth and how to address it.
In “Environmental Crisis: The Quality of Life on Earth,” an interview in this publication, the late Waldorf teacher John F. Gardner posits that education is key to earth healing as “teachers are in a position to dig down to the beginnings of attitudes”—attitudes which later flower into actions. “Teachers have possibly the most important job to do. They influence the way the next generation will think. That determines how they will feel, and therefore act.”
The transmission of a proper “world conception” to our young people, Gardner suggests, is essential to the cessation of the “ravaging of the earth.” Such a conception reverently attends to “an idea of the whole.” Such a conception poises us to “see things in context, and alive. Out of the sense of the living whole we shall gain the instinct to distinguish between deeds that favor health, beauty, and sanity over those that are destructive.” (This is not how things are now, Gardner states. Now self-interest is the ruling idea in our society. “There is unbridled expansion of the part at the expense of the whole.”) Further, this proper world conception does not over-emphasize “the mechanics, the dynamics, the mathematics, and the economics of natural processes” at the expense of “the morality, spirituality, and the divinity of life.” The cultivation of the latter “qualitative, inward values” naturally leads one to become a caretaker. “What we honor and love and take joy in, we do not exploit or degrade.”
Of the needed revolution of spirit, a revolution Waldorf schools can sponsor, Gardner quotes the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. “I hope we are beginning, as Martin Buber said, to ‘turn.’”
Through our class trips in the great outdoors, our nature walks, our gardening class, our animal husbandry, and the recitation of earth-hallowing verses, we at WSSB aim to support this “turn.”
Important Dates:
Saturday, May 31st: Spring Soiree
Monday, June 2nd at 8:45 a.m.: Strings Assembly
Friday, June 6th: End-of-Year Potluck
Wednesday, June 11th: 8th Grade Flower Ceremony and Graduation
Thursday, June 12th: Classes end; last day of school for students (no aftercare)
With gratitude,
The Admin Team
PS The Thought of the Day is from Pattiann Rogers:
“When our sons and daughters are grown, they might occasionally recall something of what we said to them during their childhoods, but it’s certain they will always remember in their bodies how we lived, how we moved through time, the music and rhythms of our interactions within the family, within the society, within the natural world, what we valued, what we celebrated, how we encountered tragedy, how we defined failure, and success. As adults, these memories will be as integral to them as their breath and pulse.
Flesh of flesh
Bone of my bone thou art and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, weal or woe.
—John Milton, ‘The Eternal Bond’”