PROJECT SUMMARY: NATURE AS A PERMANENT SCHOOL
SUBJECT: Project for the realization of a Biodynamic Farm that can accommodate a Waldorf School for Steinerian pedagogy at its center.
From observation and experience, we know that the school belongs to the cultural and spiritual sphere. It does not produce goods that can be traded and therefore must be supported by a community that shares its cultural ideals.
The Waldorf school is run by a board of teachers who are not organized in a hierarchical structure. Instead, it is based on the teachers’ inner freedom, their love for the children, and their desire to protect and accompany the child in the delicate phases of their development so that they may gradually develop the absolutely human faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing:
of thinking, feeling, and willing.
In this long process (two to three years of Kinder Garten) plus the (eight classes led by a single teacher), children, teachers, and parents have the opportunity to grow together on three levels, bodily, spiritual, and soul, then to mature inwardly, to share socially and freely deepen the various cultural aspects.
The biodynamic farm, as we know, is an organism in itself that can accommodate an entire society. From his attention to the environment and nature, the agricultural entrepreneur will be led to care for the fertility of the land, which will be a generous producer of food, then he can invest part of his time in the contemplation of nature and the study of biodynamics. Just as the teacher must face a hard apprenticeship to reach his formation, the farmer must also face his apprenticeship to become a biodynamic farmer.
Now, it is essential to consider the passage from the concept of a company (an enterprise organized by an entrepreneur) to the concept of a Triarticulated Corporate Body, in which all the people who freely join it, bringing their talents, are equally important and indispensable. In the Triarticulated Corporate Body, the three spheres coexist the cultural-spiritual one, where freedom lives; the economic one, where brotherhood pulsates; and the juridical one, where equality is practiced. These three spheres permeate the human being entirely in thinking, feeling, and willing.
Life teaches us that Schools are born in urban agglomerations: villages or cities. So, because of the need for space, farms are outside of cities. If he wants to be beneficial to society, the farmer must take care of the fertility of the land entrusted to him because fertility makes the land productive.
However, I ask myself: in the small community of the School, made up of children, parents, and teachers, what fertility needs to be taken care of? Every human being is fertile soil for any seed.
The Waldorf School ensures that the consciences of children, parents, and teachers are the fertile soil, but it needs the true relationship with “nature” that only a biodynamic farm can give it.
In our time, from the spasmodic search for well-being, an interest in the environment has been aroused, and this is a good thing. However, so that this interest does not remain just a fashion of the moment and therefore something superficial that will be swept away by the next fashion, it is good to bring to consciousness that the Biodynamic Farm care for the environment, the fertility of the earth, is a fundamental condition sine qua non. Biodynamic agriculture was born in 1924 from 8 conferences requested to Rudolf Steiner by farmers of the time worried about the continuous decline in the quality of agricultural products!
A farm, even a biodynamic one, over time, can become overwhelmed by production needs and lose sight of the cultural element that the Waldorf School can bring to it.
Even the Waldorf School can become overwhelmed by the city, losing contact with “nature,” forgetting it!
The “social” today requires to be always in “contact” with the Web; the consequence is that there is no time to devote to all that is “nature.”
So, we see that both the Waldorf school and the biodynamic farm require a study, a training that lasts many years and even a lifetime. If the farm hosts the Waldorf school, a positive synergy can be established where the various families, once they have completed the years of schooling required by the institutions, can start a sort of permanent school (for adults) that involves all the arts and crafts. It will be possible to create and gradually form a community that can support itself and becomes a driving force for the surrounding area.
From these considerations, more and more aware comes the following:
NATURE AS A PERMANENT SCHOOL PROJECT outlined above.
Schelling wrote in the late 1800s:
“Nature must be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature” 1
Silvano Angelini July 2020
1 CFR. F.W.J. Schelling- Introduction to Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Edition consulted by La Nuova Italia, Florence, 1967).
