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Waldorf education: Strengthening adaptivity

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Waldorf education:
Strengthening adaptivity
WA Steiner Schools Conference

Perth, 27 September, 2019

Dr Neil Boland
[email protected]
 Waldorf education: Strengthening adaptivity
I would like to respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of this country, the
Whadjuk Nyoongar, and to acknowledge the wisdom of the elders past, present and
emerging. I would like to pay my respects to their ongoing connection to land, water and
community and to acknowledge that we meet here today on land that was never ceded.
Good morning. I would like to thank the organisers of this conference from the West Coast
Steiner School for inviting me to speak to you all in this hundredth anniversary year of
Steiner education. A hundred years is a good time to look around, take stock. As you all
know, this has been happening around the Waldorf world this year, perhaps more so than in
any other year. On this anniversary, we look to the past to see all that has happened and
been achieved, look at where we currently are and also, and perhaps most importantly, we
look forward into the next century of Steiner education.
When I think of all the reflections on Steiner education I have read or heard recently, two
things are repeatedly highlighted. The first is how much has been achieved in the last
hundred years, the spread and increasing growth of the Waldorf movement, the diversity of
settings Steiner schools can be found in, aspects of Steiner education being adopted
elsewhere, the education’s obvious resilience, continued relevance and so on. The second is
an acknowledgement of the need to change. After 100 years, it is clear that there is a need
to renew, to reinvigorate, to recast, reform, re-impulse, to reframe Steiner education.
Why is this? Over the last few decades, just about all countries have noted a decreasing
number of teachers going through Steiner trainings, a reported lessening of the connection
with the inner nature of the education—with anthropsophy, a degree of performativity
(teaching the curriculum becoming what Denjean has called “a mere list of norms”, (2014, p.
20)), the increase in administrative requirements, changing societal circumstances, parental
expectations, changing children and so on.
So, there is a need to renew and reframe Steiner education.
This is an easy statement to make. But like many easy statements, it is immensely complex.
What is it which should be renewed? What should we stop doing? What should be left as it
is? Who decides? How do you know? Once you have identified something, how should it be
renewed? There is the age-old problem of the baby and the bathwater. You want to refresh
the one without discarding the other, but identifying which is which in this century-old
bathtub is far from straightforward.

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I would like to acknowledge this straight away. It is how things are. It is a situation we have
to work through; doing nothing and purely maintaining the status quo is an option I seldom
hear put forward.
I’m going to divide this talk in the three sections. The first, looking at approaches to the
education. The second looking at contexts. And the third looking at what we might do which
could offer a path forward.
Ida Obermann wrote a book (2008) on the history of the Waldorf movement in the United
States. In it she identifies three very useful attitudes which I would like to take up by way of
introduction today. The terms relate to individuals’ attitudes to Waldorf education; they can
also be used to describe schools’ attitudes and, I would argue, national attitudes. I should
point out that we all embody each of the three attitudes to some degree; which one is most
prominent is the differentiating factor. Like the temperaments, each attitude is positive;
each one can have negative characteristics. Think about yourself, your school or centre as I
go through these.
The first of these attitudes is the traditionalist. The traditionalist does not want to disturb
the status quo, a small-c conservative. We have always done it this way, it has worked, what
we need to do is to continue as we are. If any change is needed, it is to do what we are
currently doing but better. This is a classical response when faced with the need for change.
Do the same but better. You know these arguments. We all have a traditionalist in us. What
happens when a whole school (or group of schools) is strongly traditionalist though?
There are a couple of passages by Steiner which act as a goad for me when I think about
this. The first is from The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (1917/2008) which is both
stimulating and sobering:
We … must seek ever-new ways, look for new forms over and over again …
however good the right may be that you want to bring to realization—it will
turn into a wrong in the course of time. (p. 66)
The second is from Towards social renewal (Rudolf Steiner, 1919/1999):
Social structures continually give rise to anti-social forces. This has to be overcome
again and again. (p. 7)
This is an interesting phrase. Social structures have a tendency to become anti-social, and
have to be repeatedly overcome. Putting these together always reminds me that
maintaining things beyond their time is not at all what Steiner intended. To perpetuate
something beyond its time “will turn into a wrong” no matter how well intentioned it is. If

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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something is to remain contemporary, there is a built-in need to renew, to change, to adapt;
a traditionalist approach was not Steiner’s intention.
In fact, remember the first page of The Study of Man: the task of Waldorf education is “to
reform and revolutionize the education system” (1919/1996, p. 29)—these are not the
words of a traditionalist.
The second term is accommodationist. The accommodationist seeks to accommodate
others and others’ points of view. She sees the need for compromise, for finding common
ground, for ensuring relations with governmental institutions are as harmonious as possible,
that parents’ views are heard at all times, that colleagues’ ideas can be taken up and so on.
Who can say that these are negative qualities? They can however lead to undesirable
consequences. In accommodating this point of view then that point of view, pleasing the
government on assessment, pleasing demanding parents about some policy or other, falling
in line with a new administrator with some ideas they picked up on a PLD course recently, a
Steiner hybrid can emerge which changes slowly over a period of time into something quite
different. It is often only long institutional knowledge which can notice the changes. It
reminds me a little of the game you play where you start with four letters and, by slowly
changing individual letters one at a time while always forming a word, you end up with a
completely different word at the end to the one you started with. Boiling a frog could be
another image. Accommodationism.
The third of Ida’s terms is evolutionism. That something evolves, something which responds
to its surroundings, to those around it. This is what I want to talk about today.
I imagine we recognise traditionalism within us, within our schools. Accommodationism has
its place and is at times necessary, though I believe not as a guiding force. Evolutionism is, I
think, harder, more challenging, more strenuous and more exciting.
Where do you see yourself in these three tendencies? Which is strong in you? Which would
you like to be strong? How about the schools and centres you work in? To what degree are
they traditionalist, accommodationist, evolutionist? What about WA as a whole? Australia
as a whole? The Waldorf movement as a whole?
This capacity to evolve is what I am going to talk about. An organic, evolutionary process,
keeping ones roots anchored securely in the same earth, gaining sustenance from the same
ground but growing, changing, developing, maturing, entering new stages, manifesting new
forms and so on.
I have titled this talk Strengthening adaptivity. Adaptivity is a good word and, if you are not
familiar with it, I’d like to explain it briefly. It is of course friends with adaptability, being

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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adaptable. Adaptability is the capacity to be able to change when faced with changed
circumstances. It speaks of flexibility, awareness of context, good things.
Adaptivity takes this a step further. Whereas adaptability is when you are able to change,
adaptivity is where the change happens instinctively, automatically. A chameleon’s
colouring is adaptive. It is not only able to change, it intuitively changes as soon as its
surroundings alter. It is so in tune with its context that it modifies itself constantly to best
suit where it is. Some octopi and squid are also astonishingly good at expressing adaptivity,
instinctively changing their colouring and also the texture of their skin to match their
surroundings.
So much for the octopus. How adaptive is Steiner education and what does it have to adapt
itself to?
In the 100 years Steiner education has been around, what has changed? An easier question
may be, what has not changed, but we will stick to what has changed. A quick list would
include addressing the needs of different people in different locations and in a different
time. Place, time and community. It’s possible that some of you have read some articles I
have written about this (Boland, 2017a, 2017b, 2017d). My thinking has moved on in the
years since I wrote those articles and I am not going to repeat what you may have read
before.

Let’s start with place. Steiner education began in southern Germany. You are teaching in the
southern hemisphere, beside the Indian Ocean. How does that affect what you need to do?
What needs rethinking because of this context? Although this is the first time I have been in
a WA Steiner school, I am confident that you have already made progress in this area.
Waldorf pedagogy is a pedagogy of place, a place-centred curriculum. I take that one of
the main aims of a Waldorf education is to allow the growing person to harmoniously
inhabit their body and to find their place on the earth and a connection to the earth in
order to be able to make a valuable contribution to society.
To do that, the curriculum journeys outwards from where the child is in ever larger
circles, immediate surroundings, locality, general area, country, continent, whole world
and out into the universe. Place and awareness of place and response to place are, I
think, central concepts in Waldorf education.
What is place-based pedagogy? Laurie Lane-Zucker puts it like this (2004):

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 Place-based education might be characterized as the pedagogy of community,
the reintegration of the individual into her home ground and the restoration of
the essential links between a person and her place.
She continues:
Place-based education challenges the meaning of education by asking seemingly
simple questions: Where am I? What is the nature of this place? What sustains
this community?
It often employs a process of re-storying, whereby students are asked to respond
creatively to stories of their home ground so that, in time, they are able to position
themselves, imaginatively and actually, within the continuum of nature and culture
in that place. They become a part of the community, rather than a passive observer
of it.
For me this seems to be a good thing; it is something I would wish students to be able to
achieve, to create essential links between a person and her place. It is perhaps doubly
important given the troubling ecological state of many places in the world, and the
deterioration of global ecology in general. If one has a deep connection to place, you will
likely oppose that place being degraded. If you have a weaker or no connection to the
place, it is not going to affect you so much.
I have lived in different countries on different continents and have worked all over the
world. When I live somewhere new or visit somewhere, I try to get a feel for the country
by imagining what Lane-Zucker calls the “continuum of nature and culture” of that place.
I’d always thought of it existing vertically stacked in layers, but her idea of a continuum is
perfect.
I will certainly not attempt to do that for where you live. Instead, I will give you a little
time to think through this continuum.

ACTIVITY
Take a moment to construct a mental continuum of nature and culture of where you
live, over thousands and tens of thousands of years.
How does it look? And how do you relate to it? Where is your and your family’s place
in it? Can you feel yourself as a part of a continual flow of nature and culture spanning
millennia, wherever in the story you and your family make their entry?

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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 Are you equally connected to all parts of the continuum? If there are breaks, where are
they? And why are they there? How do you feel about them?
What might you do to remedy these breaks?

There are a number of excellent people who have written provocatively about this. One I
admire is Wendell Berry, writing about the United States. He describes aspects of the
colonial New Zealand situation perfectly:
People come from elsewhere … with visions of former places but not the sight to
see where we are. (1977, p. 35)
Does that fit the Western Australian context at all?
Or as Wes Jackson puts it, again referencing North America,
[A]s we came across the continent … we never knew what we were doing because
we have never known what we were undoing. (1993)
He said elsewhere,
Conquerors are seldom interested in a thoroughgoing discovery of where they really
are. (1996, p. 15)
Tina Evans pushes these buttons even more strongly, saying
... the abuse of place by modern conquerors derives, in part, from perceptions of
conquered spaces as other. (2012, p. 155)
In other words, colonists impose what is familiar to them onto the land. A “thoroughgoing
discovery” of the place they have moved to is rarely undertaken. The land becomes
‘other’, to be subdued and its resources plundered. How much of this applies to where
you and I live?
This gives us a lot to think about. If I read the quotation by Laurie Lane-Zucker again, it
may sound differently. It also contains the seed of how to move from the perception of
conquered place as other to embedding oneself firmly in one’s place.
Place-based education might be characterized as the pedagogy of community,
the reintegration of the individual into her home ground and the restoration of
the essential links between a person and her place.
Place-based education challenges the meaning of education by asking
seemingly simple questions: Where am I? What is the nature of this place?
What sustains this community?

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

6
This simple question, where am I, is, I think, huge. Like all simple questions. Where am I? If
you can live strongly into this continuum of nature and culture so that you embed yourself
in it, you begin to make a “thoroughgoing discovery” of where you are. How might that
affect what and how you teach?
A few years ago, I worked with this question with teachers of the Honolulu Waldorf School,
exploring their connection to place, to living and teaching in the middle of the Pacific
Ocean. We worked with Wes Jackson’s statement of a lack of “thoroughgoing discovery” by
non-Indigenous inhabitants of the place, instead countering this by working to establish
living connections with the surroundings. Jackson calls this, becoming “homecomers” –
“digging in” and beginning “... the long search and experiment to become native” (1996, p.
97). The notion of becoming native to a place will not meet universal acceptance, but it is
an interesting notion to work with. The then-administrator of the school, Dr Jocelyn
Demirbag Romero, and I wrote a couple of articles about the process which may be of
some relevance to your circumstances or of other interest (Boland & Demirbeg, 2017;
Boland, 2018).
I could talk a lot more about place, but I need to move on.

The next aspect I would like to touch on is community. People.

Who is your community? Who are your communities? Put more bluntly, who are your
schools for?
Obviously, they are for your current students, for your parent body, for your teachers,
boards, etc. There are other communities however we can consider.
The communities around your schools—do the students in your schools form a rough
cross-section of your local communities, of your larger community? If this is not the case,
who is ‘missing’ so to speak? Which groups within society are not represented in your
schools? Are there groups who are visible by their absence?
Are some perceptions of Waldorf education keeping people away? Which people
specifically? What could those perceptions be? Are they accurate? To what degree might
families understand what is behind the school’s ideals but won’t send their children if they
don’t see their culture reflected? How might you find out if this is the case?
How does your curriculum represent and support the diversity of students and their
families? Have you analysed the hidden curriculum taught by your schools?
In case there are some of you who have not come across this idea before, the hidden
curriculum is, in essence, a combination of the values you see being enacted by others

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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(Snyder, 1970). Environments in which we have been brought up, educated and live, are
awash with values. We live with historical racism, complex legacies of colonialism, health
and wealth disparities, marginalisation of some groups, gender inequalities, and so on.
When you are young, if society in general puts greater value on people of one group than
another, this teaches you that one group is held to be superior. If you are not of this group,
the effects can greatly undermine your well-being and sense of self-worth. It is at its most
powerful when we are young and just forming our values, but it is a mechanism which
operates throughout life. It is for instance rife in advertising.
It affects huge groups of people. We have all received silent messages that science is not
for women, early childhood teaching is not for men, that a ‘good’ student is one who
doesn’t step out of line and sits neatly at their desk, that certain kinds of people are better
at maths than others, that one group is often late, another parties hard, that some forms of
knowledge are more valuable than others and others less.
Things which feed into the hidden curriculum include:
• Whose cultures or viewpoints do you (not) acknowledge through the poems
you say, songs you sing, plays you choose, literature you read?
• Do they represent who the students are, where they live and what their lived
experience is? If not, why not?
Are there aspects of your local and community cultures which are not represented (could
be Indigenous, people of colour, other religions, gay community, children of gay couples,
the ‘Other’ in all its manifestations) How do you think it would be to be at school and never
feel that anything you do is about you? Or that what is implied about people like you is
negative.
If these resources do not represent your classroom community, school community or the
wider community, who is missing?
• What are your thoughts on this? Has a thought crossed your mind to change
something, but then you’ve thought ‘but that isn’t Waldorf’? If so, where did
you get that opinion from? What was is grounded in? Why do you think it?
Might you reconsider? What would be the benefits of reconsideration? What
would be the benefits of keeping the status quo?
• What do you think about addressing this (im)balance?

The third of the three areas is time, how Waldorf education responds to the needs of the

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time, how it responds to the nature of the present.
We can only imagine the circumstances surrounding the founding of the first school—the
consequences in Europe and in Germany in particular of four years of war. How society
was, what children had been through. Steiner spoke to those needs and the first school
grew up in response to them.
What then are the circumstances surrounding us now as we teach and how are we
responding to them? In short, what is the nature of NOW?
Take a moment and speak to your neighbour about what you think the characteristics of
the current time are? How is the world in 2019? What are its needs?

ACTIVITY
What do you think the characteristics of the current time are? How is the world in
2019? What are its needs?

And my question to you is then, how are we as a school movement responding to this? Are
we doing the same-old, same-old or are we responding with innovative, engaging ideas,
leading the educational conversation in Australia, reaching out to partners we can work
with, being leaders in the field? Is Waldorf known in Australia as a forward-looking
movement, cutting edge education? A leader which is looked up to? Or do we have a
reputation for being something of an anachronism, a blast from the past, representing the
best of how things used to be?
How do we combine these two, seemingly disparate features? I strongly suspect the
students are right up there, closely in touch with current trends and attitudes. Is the
Steiner education we offer strongly contemporary? Is it in the same place as the students?
Are we strongly contemporary? Do we want to be?
In an address to young people in the Netherlands in 1924, Steiner says this rather
remarkable sentence.
Most [sic, most] people are not people of the present day. One can have the feeling,
one could have seen them 100 years ago or even longer. (1924-5/1987, p. 337)
This is really worth thinking about, I think. To what extent does it apply now?1 In which
century or decade do you see yourself as most naturally fitting in? Your colleagues? The

1
A study has recently been published asking exactly this same question:
Youth Section of the Goetheanum. (2019). The spiritual striving of youth: Shaping our reality. Dornach,
Switzerland: Youth Section at the Goetheanum.

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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person sitting beside you now? Isn’t this a fascinating concept to grapple with. It is much
more than just a question of younger people coming through and taking the place of the
older generation. That is always happening. It is a larger and more urgent question.2
Further, he asked the young people attending,
… Young people have another impulse in their souls. … How should the world be in [11
years’ time, 1935] if the desires you have now are to have a place?
This is really worth considering as a teacher as well. What are the impulses in the souls of
young people now? How should the world look in 10 years if the impulses they have in their
souls are to be able to find a place in that future world? In Steiner’s case, this took the
young people to 1935 which you can be certain was not a manifestation of their souls’
wishes. But it is a question I think we must ask of all young people we meet. For any high
school teachers it is essential.
In anthropsophy we talk a lot about the spirit of the time, the Zeitgeist. Of Waldorf
education being a Michaelic movement, a movement of the will, of courage. I was thinking
a couple of days ago of who in the world represents this most to me at the moment—
showing courage for truth, responsibility of soul, as Steiner writes at the end of The Study
of Man (1919/1996, p. 22). I realised that this person is a 16-year-old school girl.
Speaking personally, I think the degree to which Greta Thunberg represents an aspect of
the Zeitgeist is astonishing. And how a then-class nine student sitting alone outside the
Swedish parliament in August last year with a home-made placard has become the catalyst
for global action such as is happening all over the world today.
If you recall the verse at the end of the last lecture of The Study of Man – have courage for
the truth, responsibility of soul – can you think of a stronger example?

For me, Waldorf education should be at the driving edge in many areas, ecological, social,
local, pedagogically and so on. As I have learned more about education from non-Waldorf
perspectives, I see others claiming ‘Waldorf’ topics – place-based education being one of
them. What will it take for us to find or strengthen our Michaelic voice? What leadership
qualities are needed? Can we identify what is holding us back?
These then are three areas in which we need to respond to change. Place, community and
culture and time.

2
On a topical note, people refer to the current leader of the UK House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg, as ‘the
honourable member for the eighteenth century’, because he appears not of the current time, or wanting to be
of the current time. I am sure there are other examples you can think of.

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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So how do we go about this renewal process taking these changes into account?
This is something which I have spent and continue to spend a lot of time over. I would like
to address it with you in the multiple ways I have considered it. Because of time, I will make
do with just one. It has had me strip much of what we characterise as Steiner education
away, basically asking what I can do without and still recognise myself as a Steiner teacher.
It boils down to a few (what are for me) essential things. I’d like to add more, but for
brevity I have stripped it right back.
Here’s my list.
• Not meant facetiously, I need children, students
• I need myself as a teacher (interestingly, I do not need a school)
• I need an understanding of:
- The growing child, the incarnation process—a detailed knowledge and good
perception of Steiner’s understanding human development
- Where I am (place)
- The context I am teaching in (community/culture)
- The needs of the time I am teaching in
If I have these, if I really understand child development, know where I am, know my social
and cultural contexts and the needs of the time I am teaching in, all else can be created. It
can be renewed according to where and when I am working—it can be renewed
spontaneously.
If I can talk through the process I went through to get here, it might give you come context.
I have been thinking about what I see as a need for a renewal process within Steiner
education for years now (N. Boland, 2017c). I have spoken to lots of people—some
supportive, some not—written articles, given talks, worked with people around the globe
on this. I have looked at the issue through a ‘standard’ Waldorf lens—starting off with a
strong connection to the ‘traditional’ way of doing things, including important emotional
attachments to what I have experienced and done in the past as a teacher, emotional
attachments to what I am used to and love.
I have looked for ways to improve things by doing the same but more effectively.
I have looked at it through other theoretical lenses as I have worked in different areas of
education. I have looked at it using standard theories of change management—which is
essentially what is proposed—when I was sent on a year-long change management course

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at university. Lastly, I have looked at it with a small group of experienced educators in the
Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum—you may have read some of our initial proposals
in the bi-annual Journal of the Pedagogical Section (Osswald, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c). I am in
Perth today on my way up to Dornach for another meeting of the group. This is the most
forward-looking work I have been involved with to date.3
In thinking about this, I come back again and again to basics. Not a tweaking around the
edges, but a re-framing of the basics, the essence of Steiner education. And that has led me
back again and again to The Study of Man, the first teacher education course, what that
was, what that did.
I am sure that some of you have read The Study of Man and been baffled, frustrated,
inspired, whatever emotions it excited. I know I have been. Thinking about change has led
me to consider, again and again, why Steiner gave this particular course to a group of non-
teachers who were about to make a daunting career change. Reading Practical Advice and
Discussions at the same time as The Study of Man gives a bit of classroom context but,
every way I turn, I come back to The Study of Man as the lecture cycle which gives teachers
the background they need.
Steiner talks about the need for the teacher to ‘read’ the child—to adapt the education to
the needs of the child being taught (Wiechert, 2014). I think it is profitable to consider how
much we are doing that. To what degree do we modify what we know as the curriculum to
our students? He talked elsewhere of ‘creating the curriculum out of [the observation of]
the students.’ This is a fascinating idea to toy with. What did he mean? How do you do it?
He envisioned teaching to be a path of exploration, of constant questioning, of critique. In
essence, all Waldorf teachers were expected to be action researchers. This is emphasised
already in his opening address to the new teachers in 1919: “We want to transform what
we can gain through anthroposophy into truly practical instruction … We will practice
teaching and critique it through discourse” (1919/1996, pp. 30-31). One of my favourite
quotes. I think we are really good at practising teaching and not good at all at critiquing it
through discourse. Would you agree?

I firmly believe that Waldorf education has the potential to do astonishing things. To do
more astonishing things. And that to do it, it will need to re-establish its foundation in
“what we can gain through anthroposophy” and use this to address more concisely and
effectively the three areas I mentioned: how we respond to changes in time, place and

3
We are looking for schools or training institutions to work with the guidelines we have drawn up. If you are
interested, please let me know: [email protected]

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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society.
When I started working through some of these ideas, I was drawn most strongly to the
question of community, that schools need to represent their communities much more
strongly if they are to be healthy social organisms. Then I got involved in the pedagogy of
place and all that that involves. Then I began investigating time, looking at what it is to be
of now, the ever-changing, constantly evolving nature of now. This is where my attention
has been since.
If we can live in the present, we can practise adaptivity towards what comes towards us, to
what engages with us and in this way remain relevant and vital. This for me is what
evolution looks like.
And we need to value the power of enthusiasm. Steiner, in the same address to young
people I mentioned earlier, says that “enthusiasm carries the spirit within itself” (1924-
5/1987, p. 346). Your enthusiasm to question, to discuss, to study, to challenge, to engage,
to take your understanding ever deeper – your enthusiasm to work together, your
enthusiasm to make Steiner education a revolutionary movement perpetually of the present
is what your students need. Then they will gain the strength, the courage and the wisdom to
tackle the immense world challenges they have chosen to take on.

Thank you.

Neil Boland – Strengthening Adaptivity, Perth WA, September 2019

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REFERENCES
Berry, W. (1977). The unsettling of America. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.
Boland, N. (2017a, August 9). Engaging (or not) with community. Retrieved from
http://www.waldorf-resources.org/articles/display/archive/2017/08/08/article/engaging-or-
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