选自<Waldorf Education-------A Family Guide>
edited by Pemela Johnson Fenner and Karen,L. river
1992
<Waldorf and Montessori:A Comparison>
第97页至第99页作者: 期待诗雅 时间: 1.1.2008 23:18 http://www.michaelolaf.net/MONTESSORI%20and%20WALDORF.html作者: 期待诗雅 时间: 1.1.2008 23:19 标题: 抱歉，下面的还没有中文翻译 What a pleasure it was to read the open and tender dialogue between four wonderful Montessori and Waldorf educators (Holistic Education Review, Winter 1990). I have cherished both movements for years. I helped found the Shining Mountain Waldorf School in Boulder, Colorado, and have worked with the Montessori movement during the past five years as well. It has been a delicate business, straddling the fence with these two dear friends. Each kindly granted me an exemption, agreeing to overlook that I was also befriending the other in my spare time. Nonetheless, I rarely saw openings for sharing the wonders of one movement with the other.
For a long time I held each movement in separate compartments in my heart and my head, considering the paradox of how they could both be so sound, so "right" - and so different. Then, one day I was attending a lecture at the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist-inspired college in Boulder that is my third dear friend, and where I love most to teach. Dr. Jeremy Hayward commented that the Buddhists regard wisdom (basic goodness) and skillful means (right action) as the two wings of the dove. All of the Eastern parallels tumbled through my mind then - the feminine and masculine principles, the yin and the yang, and the way each contains the other in seed form.
In that state of mind I thought again about my paradox: How could it be that Montessori and Steiner (founder of the Waldorf Schools) made sense, not as mere halves of what could be a good system if only put together, but as wholes themselves? Suddenly I saw these two inspired leaders and their movements as a pattern of reverse symmetries. I would like to describe some of these patterns here.
Rudolf Steiner began his spiritual activities with the Theosophical Society, eventually breaking away to form his own movement, which he called anthroposophy. Whereas Steiner's affiliation with theosophy occured early in his life, Maria Montessori's happened late in hers. She was visiting in India when World War II broke out and prevented her from returning to Italy. She was interned in Adyar, India, for six years and forced to slow her busy life to the tempo of that Indian city - which just happened to house the international headquarters of the Theosophical Society.
It was also this war experience that drew Montessori to press for peace education above all else. War played a vital role in drawing forth Steiner's vision, too, although it was the aftermath of World War I in his case. Steiner was asked by Emil Molt, owner of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory, to devise an approach to education that could serve both the children of the workers and the management, and work toward reuniting a culture torn by war and class differences.
War brought about Steiner's initial invitation to participate in the formalization of an educational philosophy, and it brought to Montessori a deeper spiritualization of work already well underway. Her work in education had begun with children in the Italian ghettos, children who would have been destined to find no niches in society without her dramatic interventions.
There are other reverse symmetries as well. Steiner, a male in a masculine country at the end of a very masculine act of war, was asked to instill the feminine principle of honoring the basic goodness and inner wisdom of the child by reintroducing the arts and reawakening the heart forces. In contrast, Montessori, a female in a feminine country already infused with the arts, offered disenfranchised children the masculine service of enculturation, apprising them of the environmental niches in society and building up skillful means in them so that they could take their place in the society. Whereas Steiner worked to rekindle the imaginations of overly hardened children, Montessori worked to diminish the excessive imaginative life of children who used that realm as an escape from a reality they couldn't grasp. She strove to "normalize" them, to bring their practical activities and their imaginations into proper balance.