Young musician hopes to bring aid to Africa

Silas Beardslee had graduated from High Mowing School and was ready to enroll as a theater major at The University of New Hampshire four years ago. Instead, he took a detour and went to the college of life — in Zimbabwe.
by By NICOLE S. COLSON, Sentinel Staff, Thursday June 03 2010 - see original article here.

Beardslee, 21, of Keene, performs Friday at The Starving Artist in Keene to raise money for a project he envisioned during that 2006 trip to Africa.

That summer, he attended a camp in northern New Hampshire where a man from Zimbabwe was sponsored to work for the season. “We had an incredible connection I couldn’t put words to,” Beardslee said of Balance Chibangwa, who later became like a brother to him. “He described his triumphs and struggles, the landscape and the people (of Zimbabwe),” Beardslee said. “He told me his life story and I told him mine.” Chibangwa invited Beardslee to stay with him in Zimbabwe. “I saw it as an incredible opportunity,” he said.

He deferred his college application and saved up some money, and was able to visit Zimbabwe for four months from December of 2006 to March of 2007. Chibangwa was getting married in December, and asked Beardslee if he’d be his best man. Of course, he accepted.

“It made me realize I wasn’t ready for school,” he said of his experience in Zimbabwe.

Although Beardslee said he still is in love with the arts and has a far-off vision of becoming a drama teacher, his experience in Zimbabwe made him realize

there was much more to what he was wishing for.

Beardslee now has a house in the rural village of Rimbi (population 3,000) in Zimbabwe, a brick and plaster thatched roof, one-room circular hut. He built it next to Chibangwa’s small three-room house. He learned the native language, and helped his friend run his small grocery store in town and with his wedding preparations. “I had no agenda other than to immerse myself as much as possible in the people and the culture.” He was even given a Shona name by the village chief.

Beardslee noticed early on there are a lot of starving people in Rimbi, but it’s not because there’s not enough food to go around. Because the people of Zimbabwe have endured such hardship, including the HIV/AIDS epidemic, people tend to think about their own families first and foremost. Because so many families are affected by the disease, often there is only one parent left to farm land and feed the family.

“Working together isn’t really a thought,” he said. “It takes a lot of time and attention whereas most time and attention is focused on getting meals for the family.” There is also a lack of work in Zimbabwe, which means many leave to find jobs and cannot farm their own land.

Beardslee and Chibangwa came up with the idea to start a community farming project wherein people of Rimbi could farm shared land and share the harvest from that land.

Beardslee said he left Zimbabwe a totally changed person with full knowledge he’d return. He didn’t feel ready to take the project on then. Instead, he travelled for two years, including to Sweden, where he led a youth initiative project that focused on social change. The connections he made there and the skills he learned from his studies, he said, gave him the tools and ideas to put his vision for the Rimbi Farming Project into motion.

He went back to Zimbabwe last year for a five-week internship, during which he asked villagers in Rimbi what they thought of the idea for the farm. They were very receptive. The farm will be biodynamic — a method of holistic organic farming created by the founder of Waldorf education. Beardslee attended the Monadnock Waldorf School in Keene.

The project is still in its visioning stage; in the meantime, Beardslee formed a non-profit organization to accept donations. He hopes to raise $30,000. So far, he has been using his musical talents toward that goal. He began playing guitar two-and-a-half years ago because he had written poetry about his first trip to Zimbabwe and he wanted to put it to music. He has performed a few shows in the area (there is one tonight in Jaffrey also) and he plans to do more.

No matter how much money he raises, he will go back to Zimbabwe in October to live and get the project off the ground. The village chief donated five hectares (equal to about two-and-a-half acres) of land villagers will be able to farm, and the money raised will go toward tools and the building of a barn. The focus crops will be maize (corn), a food staple in Zimbabwe; watermelon, squash and pumpkin.

Sadly, Chibangwa died early this year as a result of injuries he sustained in a car accident. Although Beardslee said he is still processing his friend’s death, it only fuelled him to continue. “This incredible human being would not want me to stop the work he shared the vision of,” he said.

Why British children are pushed too hard

British children are pushed too hard, too early at school. One writer explains how daughters read less but learnt a lot more in Africa.
From The Times, January 5, 2010 by Penny Marshall

When we took Jessie, our four-year-old daughter, away from her reception class at a London primary school and plonked her in a school in South Africa, we knew that the contrast would be drastic. We didn't know how fundamentally it would change her - and change our views on primary education.

Jessica, like her two younger sisters, was of course destined for the best secondary school that we could find, and that had meant early precision planning almost from the moment of conception to get her into the best primary feeder school for secondary success. For that success, whether in the state or the private sector, doesn't come easily.

So we moved house into the catchment area for the best state school and also took Jessie, then aged 3, to be "tested" at a series of private London day schools. I remember her being led away from us by a kindly elderly lady in a two-piece woollen suit to be interviewed on her own. She was still almost a toddler.

The pair disappeared behind a large oak-panelled door and I was left in the hall, thinking that the assessor had power over my daughter's entire educational future.

When Jessie was "selected" for the private day school, we accepted the place and I was certain that we had set her on a clear path to adult success. She soon started at the single-sex hothouse school, which "guaranteed" excellent entry results to many of the leading London day schools. I felt that I could relax: job done.

Jessie had been unable to read at all when she started school four months after her fourth birthday, but she sprinted through the Biff and Chip books that she brought home faster than I could tick them off on the parental reading chart. Faster, I noticed with some satisfaction, than many of her little classmates with whose mothers I discreetly compared progress each day in the playground.

I dismissed Jessie's morning tummy aches as normal pre-school nerves that she would soon grow out of. Neither did I think it odd at the time that one of her four-year-old friends was being taken to and from school in a pushchair, frantically sucking her thumb and stroking a muslin cloth. Her mother explained that the long school day "left her too exhausted to walk".

When my husband was offered a job in South Africa in the spring of Jessie's first school year, the only downside seemed to be that, for the two years we would be there, our daughters would miss out on their excellent English primary education. I remember promising Jessie's head teacher that she would keep up her Oxford Reading Tree commitments when she started her new life under African skies. The need to stay "on target" for that 11-plus, even in Africa, was paramount.

In return, the school said that it would keep Jessie's place open for her until we came back to Britain. All I had to do was to hire a tutor for her in South Africa because formal education there doesn't begin until the age of 6 or 7. Jessie was facing a two-year "book-free zone" - a potential academic disaster.

In fact, it didn't take me long to realise that two years without books was the best gift that any mother could have given a child emerging from that early English educational experience.

From the day Jessie was assessed in South Africa, it was clear that we had a problem. In London she was judged "highly academic". In South Africa she was designated "special needs". Pretoria, the state capital, was teeming with the children of diplomats and NGO workers from all over the world and educationists there were used to dealing with the offspring of their international visitors. "Don't worry," the child psychologist told me, "we see this all the time with children from your private and public [state] schools. Your system just doesn't develop the whole child."

There was I, bursting with pride because Jessie was practically reading Harry Potter at the age of 4, being told that there was a problem because she couldn't stand on one leg and maintain balance for any length of time with her eyes closed.

It took us four months of swimming, tree-climbing and sunshine to get Jessie out of the "monkey puzzle" room (their term for special needs) and a further two months of bush walking, beaches, African singing and trampolining to forget about the tutor altogether and donate all her Oxford Reading Tree books to charity.

Jessie, like her sisters, learnt nothing "formal" during her time in South Africa but absorbed more than she needed to through play to keep abreast - and, at times, ahead of - her peers back home. She and her sisters started school at 8am, kicked off their shoes outside the classroom and returned home for lunch at 1pm for an afternoon of more play, this time outside and unstructured.

There were no tests, no talk of "correct pencil grips", no enforced "writing" at tables dividing them into the "bright" and "not-so-bright" ones (don't tell me that children don't know the difference between the "triangle" and "circle" groups. Our adult codes conceal nothing). And, crucially, there was no pressure.

We stayed there for six years instead of two, and our daughters all returned to the English system enriched by their "lack" of education and able to fit right back into the academic classroom without any fuss. They were aged 10, 8 and 6 when we came home and "caught up" within a term. Jess even passed the dreaded 11-plus that was her promised portal to a "leading day school". But she didn't go: there is more to education than Biff and Chip.

One of the best experiences that the girls had in South Africa was learning African music, singing a cappella with a Zulu teacher at a Rudolph Steiner school, although they didn't attend the school full-time. The teacher would not let me, or them, see any sheet music or read any lyrics as we learnt the songs - something that I found extremely difficult and they didn't. "The children must use their memories and ears only," their teacher told me. "Music must be learnt in the heart and not in the brain. In your country, you know only how to learn with the brain."

When we came home to England, we, like our daughters, had been changed by the experience and looked for alternatives to that "brain-only" approach to learning. We decided that Jessie would not return to the pressurised hothouse from whence she came. She and her sisters went instead to a local church primary With the eyes of a newcomer, I could see that pushy parents wanting results were as much a part of the problem as the targets and testing that their children were being forced to endure. In conversation with other parents at dinner parties, I was horrified by the competitive obsession with secondary school entry.

But what else is there in this country for parents who, like me, shun the targets, testing and early academic pressure?

In the private sector, high-profile schools offering alternative approaches, such as Summerhill in Suffolk, are still mostly considered options for the rich and eccentric only. But there are a growing number of private Steiner and Montessori primary schools emerging to cater for parents seeking a different approach. Among the 32 Steiner schools in Britain is one in Greenwich, southeast London, that is run by a group of parents who were so determined to offer their children an alternative primary education that ten years ago they founded their own school. It now has 47 boys and 39 girls.

The Steiner movement also has its first state-funded school, established last year in Hereford. Recently the school appeared in the national league tables for 11-year-olds' test results - at the very bottom. But that's because it doesn't believe in testing and so opted out of SATs.

Steiner schools offer an alternative approach to learning. Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was an Austrian philosopher who established his first school in 1919 for the children of workers at the WaldorfAstoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. He argued that children's creative, spiritual and moral dimensions need as much attention as their intellectual one. Schools bearing his name begin formal education as the child reaches 6 or 7. Their founder also believed - before Jamie Oliver told us so - that children could not learn well without a healthy, cooked midday meal.

Critics of Steiner schools see them as soft, suspiciously spiritual and woolly places lacking in academic discipline. They claim that they are staffed by idealists and attended by the children of the "knit-your-own yoghurt" brigade. Enthusiasts counter that these are not schools where children are allowed to do what they like but schools where children like what they do.

Those in the Steiner movement believe that more state-funded Steiner schools are likely as the debate about primary education intensifies here. There are also plans for the first state-funded Montessori primary in inner-city Liverpool. It's not so much that the Government is championing either of these educational approaches: rather, the argument is that if choice is available for those who can pay, it should be offered to those who can't pay as well.

Those seeking alternatives for their children can also choose primary schools that dare to put happiness before league tables - which is what we did when we came home. They can also join me in praying for a much-needed backlash to this obsession with early academic success.

The increasing calls for SATs to be scrapped suggest that this backlash may already be happening - as does the recent Cambridge Review of Education, a carefully researched report written by Professor Robin Alexander. This was the most significant review of primary education in 40 years - and among its recommendations is a call for a later start in formal schooling (age 6 rather than age 4), such as my children had in South Africa. It also recommends a less academic focus in the early school years.

Our daughters are now at three different secondary schools - and have finally stopped walking barefoot down our West London street as if they were still in the African veldt. Jessie is 16 and enjoys all that it means to be a young woman in the city. She attends a church comprehensive where she is doing her A levels (including music) and is planning a summer of volunteer work in South Africa. And she, like her sisters, can also still stand on one leg for a long time with her eyes closed.

No Easy Answers in 21st Century Learning

From 'Children & Young People Now', 10 December 2009 by Howard Williamson

UK Youth hosted a conference at Windsor Castle at the end of November on the future of learning. Chaired by yours truly, it sought to examine and debate what kinds of learning young people need for the 21st century, including "non-formal" learning.

Keynote contributors were Guy Claxton, author of What's the Point of School? and Richard Pring, leader of the Nuffield 14 to 19 education review and co-author of the recent Education for All. Tim Loughton, the shadow children's minister, took part in a panel debate. Though only a small number of people were physically present, it is estimated that 20,000 individuals followed the proceedings closely.

The ideas produced were very different from the developments around academies, the preferred educational trajectory of both the government and the opposition.

These flagship schools were meant to promote both economy (through private sector investment) and excellence, but seem to have done neither. There has been a triple whammy of negative publicity in recent weeks. First, the United Learning Trust, which runs 17 such schools, was banned from taking on any more until standards in its existing schools improved. Second, many of the sponsors who were meant to pledge in the region of a tenth of the overall investment in a new academy have actually contributed nowhere near that amount. And then - the icing on the cake - the new primary school league tables report that the school with the worst average point score (nil point!) is an academy: the first publicly funded Steiner school in the UK, the Steiner Academy in Hereford.

Paradoxically, Steiner is on a bit of a roll at the moment. The Cambridge Review of Primary Education, the first of its kind for 40 years, appears to have endorsed much of the thinking and many of the approaches that have always been advocated in Steiner education: learning through play, not starting formal school until the age of six, a commitment to a broader curriculum, a resistance to teaching to the test, and attention to an individual's spiritual and emotional needs. This approach, traditionally dismissed as rather wishy-washy, has recently been applauded by shadow schools secretary Michael Gove, for producing commendable and credible education outcomes. The Tories appear to be leaning towards closer engagement with the Steiner movement and an interest in its "nurturing capacity".

So how will the Tories deal with the Hereford scenario? We don't know, any more than we really know the school's level of educational performance. Although the sponsors applied successfully for academy status, the parents refused to let their children take the national tests. Will this remain an isolated incident or the start of things to come? Have parents and others (like many at the Windsor conference) finally had enough of politically inspired knee-jerk educational nonsense? We'll see.

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan

Steiner 'cult' is an ethos that fosters humanity

Published in The TES on 11 December, 2009 | By: Catherine Paver

Last week the very first state-funded Steiner school in England appeared in the national league table for 11-year-olds' test results - at the very bottom.

But the school is not ashamed, nor should it be. The parents of pupils at the Hereford Steiner Academy had wanted their children to have a Steiner education, and that means no uniforms, no hierachy among the teaching staff - and no tests. So the parents simply withdrew their children from the Sats.

Many myths are circulated on the internet about Steiner schools, which can make them sound like part of a sinister global cult. But while some of the philosophy behind them can seem hippy-ish, the myths are usually unfounded. I know, because I taught in a Steiner school in South Africa for three years.

There was no head and all the teachers were paid the same salary. Equality was a tangible thing: pupils, teachers, cleaners and parents all chatted at the staffroom kettle. Pupils at the school generally liked what they did. But they did not do whatever they liked, and lessons were compulsory. Each child has the same class teacher for seven years, so the teachers gain authority from knowing the pupils so well.

Being taught formally from the age of seven, rather than earlier, did not lose the pupils anything at all. I was delighted to see Steiner schools in England gain an exemption recently from the Early Years Foundation Stage requirement to teach literacy before the age of seven. Certainly at the school where I taught in South Africa, the pupils' handwriting was clear and fluent.

The academic curriculum also suited the development of the child in ways that I found sensible, not flaky. In history, for example, the pupils studied revolutions at the age of 14, when they themselves are in the grip of violent hormonal conflicts. They related to the topic at an emotional level, which helped motivation.

So why, then, did Plymouth University axe its undergraduate course in Steiner teaching earlier this term? It gave a "lack of interest" as its reason for dropping the only course of its kind in Britain.

I can't help wondering if it was the weirdness of anthroposophy, the Steiner form of spirituality, that may have put applicants off. As one mother wrote online: "I'd sell my granny to send my kids there if it wasn't for anthroposophy!"

So what is anthroposophy? First, it is never taught to pupils. Meaning "wisdom of man", it is Rudolf Steiner's description of human development, seen in spiritual terms such as the "astral and etheric bodies". Steiner was an Austrian philosopher and reformer, who founded his first school in 1919 for the children of workers in the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart. An inspired thinker and reformer, he was still a man of his time: the era of European transcendentalism.

His philosophy ensures that children are treated as rounded individuals rather than measured as units of production. Meanwhile, since freedom is crucial to the Steiner philosophy, they - and the teachers - are free to think his spiritual views are bonkers.

I was once told that a baby should not be taken on an aeroplane because its spiritual and physical bodies have not yet combined. Well, I suppose you would cry too if you had left your soul on the runway. While such claims may be odd, the latent spirituality behind them gives these schools a valuable breadth of sympathy. It's what Steiner called "receiving a child with reverence" and "solving its riddle, from hour to hour". It taught me the value of lateral thinking and keeping calm in conflict resolution.

Take Peter's story. "Right now, his soul is black," said his teacher. Weird - but it was said with compassion, and freed up discussion on how to help him. In time, we found that angry Peter loved making puppets, which improved his behaviour. Would discussion of mark schemes have done the same?

Not all Steiner teachers are anthroposophists. How many teachers share the spiritual beliefs of their school's founder? I never have. And most beliefs look odd from a distance. I have worked in a Catholic school, whose kind, sensible teachers wore miniature instruments of torture (crucifixes) and pretended to drink blood (Mass). It didn't bother me because they were nice people.

Steiner schools are not a "cult", because a cult wants to be a religion when it grows up. Steiner's ideas simply serve the good of the child.

Nik Voigt, a filmmaker and photographer, attended a Steiner school and then a mainstream school as a pupil. He attributes his chosen career to his very first lesson at the Steiner school. "The teacher said, 'Everything is made up of lines and curves.' It may sound simple but it opened my eyes." In a state school, he felt he lost contact with his creativity. "In art lessons we were told, 'This is how you draw a jam jar.' What can you do with that?"

What Steiner schools cultivate is something that underpins creativity and imagination: humanity. Steiner wrote that "the new generation should not just be made to be what present society wants it to become". A valuable statement today, when sometimes it feels as if that is all we are doing.

Catherine Paver, Writer and part-time English teacher.

Steiner schools - has their time come?

Steiner schools are hoping the time could soon come for them to be given state funding. Are they right?

From The Guardian, Tuesday 1 December 2009, by Adharanand Finn

"Children should start school at six", screamed the national newspapers a few weeks ago on the day the biggest review into primary education in 40 years, the Cambridge Review, was published. It was a strange moment for the 31 Steiner schools across the country. Here was a central plank of their philosophy, which on every other day of the year was regarded by many as marginal, woolly and even backward, being proclaimed to the nation as the answer to its educational woes.
Of course, the Cambridge Review was about more than the age children should start formal education, but those headlines rang like a great call to action through the Steiner community. The Steiner Fellowship, the umbrella organisation for the mostly fee-paying schools, immediately issued a response welcoming the report.
"We are convinced that a later start to formal learning allows children to experience the joy of learning without unhealthy stress or the risk of early burn-out," it said. "We hope the findings [of the review] are taken seriously."
Theresa Trapp, a kindergarten teacher at the Exeter Steiner school, was less diplomatic. "It's about damn time," she said. "Children learn so much through play. It's about time we realised that."
The Cambridge Review also seemed to concur with the Steiner approach on a number of other issues, such as the need for a broader curriculum, less focused on "the three Rs", and that testing pupils for the sake of school accountability, namely Sats, was detrimental.
Everything seemed to align further when, a few days later, the archbishop of Canterbury condemned the English education system as "oppressive" for prioritising test marks over children's spiritual or emotional happiness. Steiner has long trumpeted its aim of addressing the needs of the "whole child", including its spiritual and emotional wellbeing.
The optimism all this generated in Steiner schools was only slightly tempered by the immediate rejection of the Cambridge Review's key findings by the government and the Tory party.
But behind the scenes the Conservatives had been making friendly noises towards Steiner schools. The shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, paid a visit to the Meadow Steiner school in Bruton, Somerset in June and came away "very impressed".
"From my visit today," he said, "it is clear to me that the children at the Meadow school benefit from a very nurturing environment, and while the education is based on alternative principles, they also end up with an impressive record of literacy and numeracy. This is just the kind of environment and parental interaction that we should be encouraging."
This was followed by the announcement of the Tories' new schools policy, which would make it easier for independent schools based on alternative methods to access state funding. The policy is based in part on the successful charter schools in the US, many of which are Steiner schools.
A few weeks ago, the Steiner movement held a special pre-election seminar, Moving Forward, with Conservative special adviser Sam Freedman, who turned up to explain how Steiner schools could benefit under a future Tory government.
To qualify for funding, schools would need to have a business plan, to be non-selective, to be inspected and, for reasons of accountability, reach a certain minimum benchmark in terms of exam passes, he said. The schools would also need to demonstrate enough parental demand. Most Steiner schools would happily meet these requirements.
Sylvie Sklan, from the Steiner Fellowship, however, is keen to point out that though the Tories may make state funding more accessible, the big breakthrough for the public funding of Steiner schools has already happened - when Britain's first completely state-funded Steiner academy became a reality in Hereford last year.
"The precedent that Steiner schools could be state-funded was set then," she says. "And we have to be thankful to the Labour government for that."
Despite long waiting lists for pupils to join the academy, the reason a raft of other state-funded Steiner schools haven't followed in its wake, says Sklan, is not a lack of political will, but "because of resistance from local authorities whose strict regulations are designed for standard schools".
Crucially, however, under the Tory plans authorities would not have the same powers to block new schools opening.
On the same night as the Moving Forward seminar, the world premiere of the film We Are The People We've Been Waiting For took place in Leicester Square. The film, produced by Lord Puttnam, is a critique of all that is wrong with the state education system.
The film argues that by focusing too much on rigid academic skills, schools are failing children. It suggests that, at its best, our education system is turning out foot soldiers who may struggle to adapt. At its worst, it is a "scandalous waste" of young people's talents.
Sklan says Steiner education avoids these pitfalls by not simply focusing on the transfer of knowledge and skills, but on "nurturing capacities and supporting the development of the whole child". This, she says, leads to adults who are able to think for themselves and excel in an ever-changing world.
Along with the Cambridge Review and the encouragement from the Tories, many involved with Steiner are beginning to think of this as a "moment" for the schools. With one state school up and running, it remains to be seen if Steiner can capitalise on this alignment of voices in its favour and make the leap into the mainstream, as it has in other countries such as Germany and the US; or whether, once all the noise has died down, its unconventional methods will remain on the fringes of our educational approach.