Glockler, M., Langhammer, S., & Wiechert, C. (2006).
Education - health for life
education and medicine working together for healthy development. Switzerland:
Anthroposophic medicine foundation and the medical section of the Goetheanum.
" 'Understanding' has become a hackneyed word. Is it not better to 'love' these suffering adolescents? Unobtrusively, but with all the greater intensity in accordance with Steiner's motto which says that the difference between teachers and other people is that teachers can love more?
It is hard to escape the impression that educators (both parents and teachers) often respond to the phase of puberty with a fearful attitude. Fear has always been a bad counselor. How often adults show fearful helplessness which then, without fail, leads to wrong measures being taken.
If the school, parents and teachers manage somehow to keep a young person engaged in the subjects taught of his own volition, that is generally sufficient to get through this period. But such voluntary engagement with school subjects places th greatest demands on teachers specifically at a time when it is commonly said that teaching in the upper school should be more neutral or sober as pupils are now capable of making their own judgments. Precisely the opposite is the case. Lessons do not call for sobriety but the most intensive struggle to keep the interest of pupils. Every teacher knows that precisely these years are a roller-coaster ride.
Rudolf Steiner gives some advice in this respect in the last lecture of The Foundation of human experience ('Study of Man') when he says that specifically the age between 12 and 15 is dependent to a high degree on the imaginative accomadation of the teachers, on the imaginative capacities of teachers. Specifically at this age! We can build on that and say that the whole way in which we deal with this age must be inventive, free and without fear, seeing the pupil as a developing human being and not as someone there merely to supply work. The latter approach would, indeed, be more appropriate for years 5 and 6 since the work performed at that time is still free of the self-referential soul.
A pupil in year 10 smokes (illicitly) in the school. Should we give him the standard punishment or should we be more inventive? Such banal decisions may, under certain circumstances, decide a pupil's future. The standard punishment takes the attitude that you are not actually our pupil but a subject that requires correction. But a teacher who is inventive and requires the pupil to give a botanically exact presentation of the tobacco plant as an exercise addresses the nascent human being in his developmental attitude. Such a 'punishment' will be remembered for the rest of one's life with considerable amusement, whereas we will try to erase the standard punishment from our memory as quickly as possible: somehow the latter fails to take account of the nature of the human being."
