Alan Wagstaff
Director of Schooling
Alan is an innovative, holistic school leader with over thirty-five years experience in the primary, secondary, and special education sectors.
Over the past seven years, as part of his education consultancy work, Alan developed creative systems to assist schools with all core school issues. Many schools in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have implemented these ideas successfully.
However, for more than fifteen years he has been researching and developing his major work: a model of sustainable, holistic schooling. His aim: to create a robust schooling concept, underpinned by thorough documentation, capable of delivering creative, holistic schooling in an ethos of reflective scrutiny.
By writing a highly detailed curriculum, by carefully analysing and trialling the time needed for its delivery, and by creating the policies needed for its governance, Alan has uncovered a form for schooling capable of answering the aspirations of the most mindful parents.
In brief, every day, the school will operate in three discrete ways, namely in holistic, pragmatic and authentic frames.
The holistic frame utilizes multiple intelligence perspectives and centers on the development of the whole person by combing spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical challenges within each learning opportunity.
The pragmatic frame focuses on those core intellectual competencies that require repetition to reach proficiency, namely literacy, numeracy, and languages other than English; attention to detail for individual learners maximizes success in this frame.
The authentic frame links students to real life experiences via workshops that adults operate commercially and via opportunities that arise anywhere in the learning village as a whole. This frame delivers opportunities to develop technological skill and it works back into the pragmatic frame by providing ‘real life’ problems for the students to solve.
Alan’s vision underpins School for Life's concept. It manages time to effect personal development, core-skill, basic competencies, and experiential, real-life learning and entrepreneurship.
The best of all worlds
Interview with Alan Wagstaff
Alan Wagstaff is a radical educator, with special expertise in holistic and developmental education, including Waldorf Education (an approach to learning founded by the spiritual thinker Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s). Alan gave a series of workshops in Bali on 2 - 6 October 2006, which was intended to gear up parents and educators on Holistic Education Learning Principles (HELP). He stresses that, while he has considerable respect for Waldorf Education, his vision for schooling is not limited by it.
Can you tell us briefly your view of education?
Mainstream schooling is, largely, subject centered; its goal is subject expertise. Success, in this system, is judged by subject examinations. Internationally about 30% of school students succeed in mainstream schools and pass into tertiary education. My vision for schooling replaces 'subject centeredness' with 'affirmation' and 'integration' as its main purposes. 'Affirmation': means daily strategies are used to signal to the students that they are O.K. - NOW! ‘Integration': means daily strategies are used to encourage the students to combine Spiritual Intelligence (S.Q.), Rational Intelligence (I.Q.), Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.), and Kinesthetic Intelligence (K.Q.) within one learning context. Thus schooling becomes a place where students come to build self confidence and where they come to develop as whole people. In this vision, schooling is a gateway for all participants into confident adult life rather than a hurdle too high for 60% of our children!
One Steiner teacher has spoken of 'the MUSTS and MUST NOTS that have become so typical of Steiner schools'. What are they? And how do you address this apparent rigidity in your work?
Healthy organizations/organisms are always happy to be transcended and respectfully included by wider and more 'realized' social forms. Indeed any organism that 'feeds' inside one perimeter will eventually starve! The developmental/holistic principles which underpin Steiner Education have been extended by contemporary researchers, most of whom are unaware of his work, and it is exciting to take account of these findings. An education system which traces back to one man has the tendency to become defined as a bag of approved strategies that must be replicated in order to demonstrate 'belonging'. In some Waldorf schools the list of 'approved strategies' can be very long and extends into minutia. To transcend this difficulty it is necessary to find a small set of fundamental achievement objectives that can liberate creativity in the teachers. Further, reflective criticism is difficult in a school if the yardstick is the thoughts of a particular founder. I teach that nothing is above reflective criticism - that schools are, by definition, about learning to do things better, at all levels.
You use music and painting in your workshops. Why?
The workshops are about experiencing holism as well as hearing about it. Music and painting are important languages of E.Q.; both are vital to primary school children in particular because this age group lives so strongly in the imaginative.
What is the place of religion in your view of education?
The teaching of - or even the preference for - a particular religion has no place. On the other hand, adherents of any religion should find a comfortable home in such schools. This is achieved in two ways. The first is by acknowledging and working with S.Q. every day. (S.Q. can be defined as the compassionate human talent for tackling issues that transcend narrow self-interest.) Thus inspiring, but non-aligned or dogmatic, verses and meditations would be included and content embodying general virtues and idealism would form part of the daily work. The second way is by including seasonal festivals in the life of the school which would use the symbols of many religions in their celebration. At the heart of this lies the notion of 'inclusiveness'.
Is holistic education relevant for Indonesians, and in particular for Balinese?
Balinese culture is vibrant with movement, dance, games, stories, myths, music, art, festivals, meditations, songs, architecture, costume, philosophy - a smorgasbord of S.Q., I.Q., E.Q. and K.Q. opportunities and materials. Indeed the content needed to fire such an education is more readily at hand in Bali than in most 'western' style countries. Balinese people are renowned for their heart qualities and Indonesian parents have a deep instinct for 'heart' in the upbringing of their children. Research is beginning to emerge concerning the negative effects of education without 'heart' and E.Q. Indonesian and Balinese people will surely recognize this form of education; it will give organizational shape to something they already know instinctively: i.e. the purpose of 'education' is, and always was, about a child's entry into the adult world as whole, confident, and accepted.
I'll let a wiser man than me have the last word:
"Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate Integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system, and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
—Paulo Freire
