Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

We’ve been immersed for the better part of the last year of the presidential campaign in national vitriol. Linguistic anthropology indicates that, among cultures everywhere, language initiates and holds its members within its unique discourse.

A community’s way of speaking is the unofficial but lived record of community values and acts. It presents an ideal image of how a culture sees itself and wants to be seen, as well as a shadow portrait of whom people are not, how they definitely do not live, and what topics, attitudes, practices, or perspectives are prohibited. 

For our nation to be healthy, our common discourse of engaged-citizenship and its social embodiment must make room for diverse, dissenting views. Are will up for it? Only democracy is at stake.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

In our credential obsessed culture, Waldorf’s developmental approach to learning focuses upon cognitive capacities arising in progressive stages that determine what students can authentically learn, thus avoiding educational activities appropriate to older students.

I support its fundamental shift in early childhood education away from a premature accelerated academic approach that too often creates a dread of student learning in favor a holistic approach of cognitive capacity-building and a wide range of skills acquisition via imaginative play, free time, art, and experiential learning.

Waldorf learners come to embody an intelligence not simply by arriving at ‘correct’ answers, but by discernible acts of embodied ‘presence’ within the subject of study. They discover the unknown without flinching, as they grow into different qualities of being. The key to Waldorf learning is the complete involvement of the learner’s interiority and social self that fosters a whole body thinking that fosters curiosity, inquisitiveness, discernment, and memory.