The Importance of Being Asked
Independent, alternative schools, like Waldorf, are growing in number all over the world, particularly in the Western hemisphere. They are improving in quality and beginning to pose genuine competition to public schools—especially within the outreach of big cities. Admittedly, these types of schools have difficulty penetrating rural and suburban communities. In responding to this challenge, in 2017, I joined the South Shore Waldorf School (Blockhouse, Nova Scotia) Board of Directors to help improve the overall affairs of the school. In 2018, in my new role as Co-Chair of the Board, I play a more active role in upholding the values and standards of Waldorf education.
My work—officially a monthly but often bi-weekly commitment—is an activity performed without monetary recompense. In this case the strong relationship between being asked and volunteering is firmly endorsed by my 19 years of Waldorf-related knowledge, as a teacher, educator and leader. And, by taking these experiences into account, I am able to contribute meaningfully to socially acknowledged aims and thus experience life as a, what I call, “conscious good activity.”
Is my abovementioned volunteering sufficiently important to merit more than a footnote in my scholarly work? Or confronted as I am with the depredations and violations of an uncaring society, shouldn`t I ponder the scope of drug addiction in North America instead, and act upon it? Or stop the fearful expansion in the number of abandoned children, and support the housing of homeless people? Or stand up against racism? Solve school drop-outs? Do something about the violence in the streets? Voice my concern over the influence of fake news in schools? I cannot do it all. However, I can relate my quest to an orientation to the good as I try to determine my place and my life direction relative to the good. Michel Foucault, in Discourse on Language, talks about the importance of “established order of things” (p. xxi)—pedagogical things. Being an educator, I always think education first. Where education is concerned, Maxine Greene further notes, solutions hold huge relevance. And attending to educational issues, as both John Dewey and Paolo Freire have helped me see, is not merely contemplation; it must involve bringing about actual change.
In Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change, author Maxine Greene further asserts that we have to find ways of creating situations in which “persons…choose to engage in cooperative or collective action in order to bring about societal repairs.” (p. 66). Dewey and Freire coming together with Greene ought to counter the tendency that living in indifference is not an option. My urge to do something more goes beyond the premises of my current academic endeavours and pertains to my restless interest in social issues.
The current public education system seems depressingly disjointed and atomized, therefore, I regard myWaldorf contextualized leadership work as a symbol of hope for personal, professional, and institutional refreshment. Defenders of the status quomight argue otherwise and point out that some indefinable essence is lost if anyone other than a government agency operates a school. I shall certainly welcome this discourse, as I intend to communicate what this can mean in academic journals.