Motivation and Concentration
Today many children, youth, and adults suffer from nervousness, hyperactivity, and a lack of concentration. The Waldorf teachers’ tasks are to identify habits and impressions that are harmful to the development of the small child and to keep them away from the child (for example, television at an early age). At the same time teachers are directing their educational work towards health-promoting factors. So regular repetition and rhythmic, creative elements in the daily kindergarten routine, as well as regular attention to seasonal changes highlighted with festivals, all help the child to develop the ability to concentrate.
Ethics and Moral Values
In order to shape their own lives, children, like adults, need mental/spiritual orientation, values, and tasks with which they can internally connect. Children need rules, rituals, clarity, and truthfulness. Children need a coordinated system to absorb the good, beautiful, and true just as they need respect for other people, other cultures, and creation. Children must also learn that the experience of respect, beauty, and truth is linked to personal engagement and involvement. This experience can also be gained by helping each other, practicing charity and apologizing.
A child comes to this life unarmed, without knowledge about the rules of this world, opened for every experience that life can bring. In parents and teachers hands is how they make child’s early perceptions, on which will be based child’s future view. People and environment are forming and effecting child’s inner and outer world and Waldorf pedagogy is a great guidance to use for children education. But not only children must learn, the same goes to their teachers. Adults also have to learn, so they could make children’s perceptions of life as good and extensive as possible.
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