4
THE EIGHT-YEAR CLASS TEACHER

A Clarification

On first hearing that in a Waldorf School a teacher carries a class right through the elementary school years from age six to fourteen, people often ask: ‘What if the child doesn’t get on with the teacher? Would that not be a fearful imposition?’ The fact is that such a case occurs extremely rarely, and this needs explanation.

It must be clear that the class teacher is normally with her class during main lesson time only, that is for the first two hours of the morning. After that time other teachers take her children in the non-main lesson subjects, languages, music, eurythmy, handicrafts, gymnastics, games and so on, while she teaches other classes during that time. That means that every class teacher must have a special subject of this kind.

This arrangement means that the children are by no means confined to one teacher, that the class teacher has a group of colleagues with whom she can consult at any time, and that she serves similarly in other classes in association with other class teachers. Each class teacher is certainly a central figure for her children and their parents, but the teachers together create a web of interrelated gifts and faculties. The class teacher, by teaching in other classes than her own, enters more widely into the life of the school.

The picture of a Waldorf School is thus one of the daily interweaving of human beings with their different abilities and fields of responsibility, all united in the goals they serve, which are to lead every child along a path towards greater fulfilment in life. The teacher himself is always engaged in a learning process to further her work. The whole nature of the work carries it beyond the merely personal and protects it from onesidedness. A child is known to several teachers, and, if a problem arises, the class teacher has the benefit of their several observations and suggestions. If need be, the matter is brought before the whole college of teachers for even wider consideration.

In these circumstances, as already stated, an impasse between a child and the class teacher occurs only very rarely. If it does, it has to be studied thoroughly and a solution found. There have been instances where parents’ lack of confidence in the teacher has led to such an impasse. In that case, rather than live in this lack of accord between home and school, it is best for the child to leave. There have also been rare instances where it has seemed best to move a child into an adjacent class; every class has a range of a year within it and there have been borderline cases where the actual connection with the other group of children as well as with their class teacher has proved beneficial. Experience has taught that, almost invariably, a wonderful bond of loving respect grows up between the children in a class and their class teacher which carries forward far into life.

In regard to this question of continuity there are other important considerations. How long, we may ask, does it take an experienced teacher to know thirty children or more— really to know them, understand them and be able to enter into their intimate needs? And likewise, how long does it take children to grow so accustomed to the quality of mind, the temperament, the mannerisms of a teacher that they feel happily anchored, understood and secure?’ And what can it mean in a child’s life to have to make a new adjustment to a different individual every year? What can be the effect on young children of being thus uprooted and transplanted year by year during the most formative years of their life—a different quality of discipline as well as everything else?

And what does it mean to a teacher to be for ever dealing with the same age group, the six-year-olds, the nine-year-olds, and so on, knowing hardly at all what went before and without responsibility for what comes after? Where is the sanity in this, which is accepted as universal practice?

We have seen that a child’s life is not only a succession of years—it is a life-developing process, and like all such processes there are nodal points and intervals and crises, that is, times of vital transition which have to be specially known, prepared for, met and carried over. All this is part of a teacher’s profoundest service, and how can it be achieved without the kind of continuity with the children in their growing, and with their parents? How, in these turbulent times, can we hope to find people with an inner sense of security, feeling strongly anchored in themselves and in their tasks in life, if they have not experienced that anchorage and security in their growing years? All these are questions to be faced. The benefit and the wisdom of Waldorf practice have found their proof in the lives of many thousands of adults who look back with deep gratitude to their years with their class teacher.

Another question arises, ‘Where do you find teachers of the calibre to undertake such an eight-year programme?’ They are not found all at once. They have to be continually finding themselves, learning, growing, advancing from stage to stage with the help of others in their own school or in other schools who have more experience. There is no repetition of last year. Every year is a new adventure, a continuous exploration, not easy, but in its effect a life-renewing process—a life of growing and developing, maturing and discovering, in intimate working with one’s colleagues, a life of dedicated service to the child becoming adult.

At the end of the eight years what happens to the teacher then? He or she should have a sabbatical. Rudolf Steiner’s advice was to engage during that year in a quite different type of activity, to travel, to make new connections. Then, if they come back to take a second class through, will that be easier? Maybe in some ways, but it will never be the same; it is not just a case of different children, but children have become different, and the teacher is different, is older and working out of other forces, and life, too, has become different. It will be a new adventure all over again.