International Further Training for School and Kindergarten Doctors

The therapeutic tools of Waldorf education for children’s distress and parents’ worries

Dear Colleagues,

One hundred years ago, Rudolf Steiner with his Special Needs Education Course gave us a new perspective on children who follow a special, sometimes difficult or simply slower developmental path. In this course, he emphasises how crucially important it is to be familiar with the archetype of healthy development and the education based on it, and to learn to see the so-called divergences as a basic disposition in every person. Against this background, we would like to dedicate our upcoming advanced training conference to the characteristic features in the development of children today and to the worries of parents and carers, as well as to the healing potential of Waldorf education. Digitalisation and virtualisation are enriching our lifeworlds and at the same time presenting us, and children and young people in particular, with enormous new challenges in terms of perception processing, learning, self-regulation, sleeping, waking, social behaviour and much else besides. We are living in a highly dynamic turning point in time. Imagining the world in 10 years' time is overwhelming and unsettling. Not only the new media world, but also wars, pandemic planning, economic uncertainty and concern about the earth and climate occupy our minds and move our souls. Alongside central inspirations from the Special Needs Education Course and the constitutional types described there, the conference will focus on restless children in a restless world, language and perceptual development, as well as the possibilities of good inclusive support and encouragement in our Waldorf schools in line with current conditions. Additionally, we also want to exchange views on current isses in school medicine and explore the question of what we can contribute to educational and therapeutic community building in our schools. Looking forward to meeting and working with you, the preparatory group sends its warmest regards,

Michaela Glöckler, Johannes Kux, Ulrike Lorenz, Claudia McKeen, Karin Michael, Bettina Pump and Martina Schmidt

For programme and further info, please visit https://goetheanum.ch/en/events/sae2024