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Genesis of a Waldorf
High School
In 1995 a conference was held. High
school educators from all over North
America gathered in Minneapolis to
discuss everything they could think
of that needed consideration when
contemplating
the formation of a Waldorf High School.
The results of this broad and exhaustive
look at how a Waldorf high school
works, meets the needs of adolescents,
and
fits into its community is Genesis
of a Waldorf High School - 239
pages of information both practical
and deep.
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Study
Is Hard work
Acquiring and Keeping
Study Skills through
a Lifetime
William A. Armstrong
Softbound
This is one book I
truly wish I had had
when I was in high
school and college.
Although I managed
to develop a method
of study that proved
effective, if I had
been able to read this
book first, I would
have faced the task
of studying with a
confidence and surefootedness
that I entirely lacked.
Years of uncertainty
and anxiety might have
been transformed had
I known then what Armstrong
lays out so completely
and clearly.
Study Is Hard
Work was published
too late for me to
use, but not too
late for today's
high school and college
students. It is already
required reading
in numerous prep
schools, and hailed
by college educators
as fostering the
best kind of academic
success -- that founded
on a love of learning
and an ability to
work hard and thoroughly.
I can't recommend
this book highly enough.
It is a truly great
tool.
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Adolescence
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Between Form and Freedom
Being a Teenager
Betty Staley
Softbound
$26.00 |
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In this excellent book, Betty Staley has given us a compassionate, intelligent and intuitive look into the minds of adolescents.... I can only hope it will be read by a significant number of significant people—namely, parents, teachers, and, indeed, adolescents themselves.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Magical Child and The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit
Pass
this book around the family - then stand back for some wonderful results!
The strongest endorsement for Between Form and Freedom is that not
only have thousands of parents found it helpful, but thousands of teenagers
have, too! For parents, Betty Staley's insights shed a much welcomed light
on the many perplexing aspects of raising teenagers. For teens, the light
shines not only as an awakening self-awareness, but as an aid for understanding
their parents! |
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A Grand Metamorphosis
Contributions to the Spiritual-Scientific Anthropology and Education of Adolescents
Peter Selg
Softbound
$15.00 |
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“A tumultuous situation arises in the relationship between the adolescent...and the world. This tumultuous situation is necessary, and as teachers, we need to have it in mind during the years leading up to it. Overly sensitive teachers might get the idea that it would be better to spare young people this upheaval. However, in so doing, they would make themselves the worst enemy of youth.” —Rudolf Steiner
Adolescence is the period during which we first sense, as human beings, our responsibility for earthly existence, and, inevitably, it is a time of turbulent transition and inner turmoil. During the first two seven-year periods of life, our soul, spiritual being gradually incarnates. With puberty, it takes hold of our whole being and turns outward to befriend the Earth and the forces of life and death.
Steiner calls this profound inner transformation “a grand metamorphosis.” As parents and teachers and as individuals who still bear its fruits and wounds, we all know the contours of the upheaval. However, educational and parenting practices too often ignore it, unaware that the great changes in our children call for equally great changes in us. To remedy this, Dr. Peter Selg proposes, “Use Rudolf Steiner’s work to highlight the fundamental structure of the crisis of adolescence and the pedagogical challenges that emerge as a result.”
As a psychiatrist who has worked intensively with adolescents in crisis, and who carries a deep existential and thorough scholarly knowledge of Steiner’s teachings, Dr. Selg highlights the radical nature of Steiner’s approach, which demands that teachers and parents change as their children change. Drawing on Steiner’s practical admonitions during lectures and teacher’s meetings, Selg reminds us that the ideal of Waldorf teachers is “to educate by behaving in such a manner that, through their behavior, children can educate themselves.” This is especially true once children reach sexual maturity, when teachers must not teach young people so much as welcome them as independent, equal individuals, able to transform the gift of sympathies and antipathies into a new moral orientation out of their own essential nature. Teachers must therefore be able to speak directly and authentically about the world. Abstractions and generalities have no place in the dialog; young people want to know the real causes of things and want to be addressed as equals. Selg also points out that teachers must be aware of the growing difference between the sexes and the way each carries a different secret life inwardly.
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An Unchanged Mind
The Problem of Immaturity in Adolescence
John A McKinnon, MD
Softbound
$23.00
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John McKinnon addresses what has to me been the most pressing question of the past two decades: why is it that our children seem to be "getting stuck," developmentally speaking, at ages well below what I remember of adolescent maturity? And then, of course, the real question: What on earth are we to do about it?
I'm very happy to say that his book is filled with insight and with hope. My hope is that every parent and teacher read it long before the children in their care become teenagers - his insights will help avert some of the problem because it is so much easier to prevent than to "fix" these things.
My larger hope is that the wisdom of this book will come to permeate our society as a whole, for it is ultimately a collective healing that is called for.
*****
An Unchanged Mind begins with a clinical riddle: Why are American teenagers failing to develop normally through adolescence? We are presented with case studies from a therapeutic boarding school for troubled teenagers: All new students had been deemed treatment "failures" after conventional psychiatric care. All were bright teenagers, full of promise, not obviously "ill." Yet they found themselves unprepared for the challenges of modern adolescence and inevitably failed—at school, at home, and among their peers socially.
An Unchanged Mind is the discovery of the essence of this problem—disrupted maturation and resulting immaturity. The book explains the problem carefully, with a brief review of normal development and an examination of the delays today's teenagers are suffering: the causes of those delays and how they produce a flawed approach to living. There is a solution. With a sustained push to help troubled kids catch up, symptoms abate, academic and interpersonal functioning improve, and parents pronounce their teens miraculously recovered. This remedy is not a matter of pharmacology—and the cure is not in pills. The remedy is, instead, to grow up.
McKinnon's inspiring message is that no behavioral problem along these lines is hopeless. He shows how he has done it.
—Evander Lomke, Executive Director, American Mental Health Foundation
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Aspects of Youth Guidance
Edited by Cornelius M Pietzner
Softbound
$16.95 |
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Aspects of Youth Guidance asks vital questions about the journey and development of every individual making the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Through independent research supported by the Camphill Soltane Youth Guidance seminar, the authors of these articles make an important contribution toward understanding key developmental milestones in the life of the young individual. In many respects, this book can serve as a "textbook" contribution for educators, students of anthroposophy, curative educators, social therapists, or parents that can illuminate a fundamental approach to healing. This is a healing that belongs to the Camphill way of life.
Contributors included: Cornelius Pietzner, Elizabeth Amlen, Rev. Gregg C. Brewer, Carlo Pietzner, Gregg Davis, Rev. Julian Sleigh and Clemens Pietzner |
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Adolescence
The Sacred Passage
Inspired by the Legend of Parzival
Betty Staley
Softbound
$24.95
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This is a beautiful book. Betty Staley pierces through the discord and tumult of adolescence
to see what is truly there: the birth pangs of the human spirit. I love it that she uses the
legend of Parzival as a guiding light with which we may all see the beauty, even the terrible
beauty, of the adolescents struggle to fight through the crashing world of desire until their
own goodness emerges full in the world.
That this struggle is as real as those fought on any battlefield, and as filled with peril
as it is with hope is never sidestepped. How we as adults respond to these teenagers (whose struggles
are often very off-putting from the outside) is nothing less than a sacred task.
The community of adults in a high school environment is a community of trust in which we need
to foster hope, belief in positive change, and commitment to serve the highest good. This is
our charge and we must never forget it. We have the responsibility to believe in the capacity
for change, for maturing, for transformation in every young person we serve. When these qualities
live in the souls of the adults in a high school community, adolescents can thrive, can meet
their own dark night of the soul and come through it into the light.
- Betty Staley
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Parsifal
a play in twelve pictures taken from the texts of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien
de Troyes
Russell Pooler
For performance by adolescents - with or without eurythmy
Softbound
$8.95
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In this work, Russ Pooler has allowed von Eschenbach's Parzival to
cross centuries and appear in a new form. For the teacher and parent, watching this performance
can transform our thoughts and feelings toward adolescents, helping us become more truly their
friends and companions who, out of a generousity of heart, help them realise their true importance
within the world.
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Loving
the Stranger
Studies in Adolescence, Empathy and
the Human Heart
Contributions by Dr. Lotte Sahlmann,
Dr. Thomas J. Weihs, Anke Weihs, Birgit
Hansen, Angelika Monteux, Michael Schmundt,
Michael Luxford
compiled and edited by
Michael Luxford
Softbound
$19.95
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We must come to understand that our
love can also hurt another person.
There is no assurance that because
we have good will we can only bring
about pleasure. This is a childish
idea. To the extent to which we have
learned to cope with this discrepancy
in ourselves, thus far can we extend
empathy to others and also help them
to cope as well.
- Dr. Thomas J. Weihs
Weihs' thoughts on love
remind us in a poignant way that if we
are to help young people along their
journey from childhood to adulthood,
then we must offer them the empathy and
understand we can develop from an honest
assessment of ourselves.
Loving the Stranger is
a collection of talks and essays by doctors
and teachers who have been involved with
Youth Guidance as part of the work of
the Camphill Movement. They are warm,
deep and wide-ranging in content and
challenge us to examine new ideas and
adopt new approaches in our relationships
with young people, many of whom may find
themselves in difficulties during their
journey through adolescence.
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Education for Adolescents
Rudolf Steiner
Translated by Carl Hoffman
$19.95
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Dr. Steiner's insights into the world of the teenager can
inspire an enthusiasm for working with adolescents that develops
into a quite new, powerful love for them. This love is the
precondition for the positive relationship between adults
and adolescents necessary if the teenager is to find his
or her way to a healthy, responsive adulthood.
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Rudolf Steiner's
Observations on Adolescence
The Third Phase of Human Development
Edited by David Mitchell and Christopher Clouder
Softbound
$16.00
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This book is a collection of comments and writings that Rudolf
Steiner made about adolescence. Here in one volume is practically every
significant comment or observation of Rudolf Steiner about adolescence
ever recorded. Especially valuable now that Education for Adolescence
seems to be destined to remain out of print indefinitely.
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Adolescence: The
Search for the Self
and
Weaving the Social Fabric of the
Class
Two Lectures on Waldorf Education
Eugene Schwartz
Softbound
$15.50
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The first lecture develps a threefold picture of adolescence
and offers helpful suggestions for parents and teachers. I especially
appreciates Schwartz's depiction of the often agonizing emotional passage
that is the hallmark of adolescence - and how that passage can be unseen
by we adults.
The second lecture offers wonderful insights and advice
to teachers as to how to help the students in a class see
each other with kindness and how to foster a willingness
to work together. Schwartz focuses on how the temperments
can be brought into play toward this end.
These two lectures are gems!
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Thirteen to Nineteen
Discovering the Light
Julian Sleigh
$11.95
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Julian Sleigh does not see adolescence as a temporary struggle
for freedom, but as a passage into life where freedom becomes
a possibility even as the options of adulthood narrow one's
choices. Preserving this awareness while helping guide the
teenager through the rocky shoals and narrow channels leading
to vigorous adult is the task of parents, teachers, and adult
friends. Thirteen to Nineteen can help all of us become
more effective and more at home in this work.
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Hathor the Moon Cow
Sex Education - A Creative Approach
Alan Whitehead
$22.95
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I think this journey into human sexuality - and how to convey
its physical, social and spiritual realities and outcomes
to children (beginning at around age 12 for direct teaching)
is one of the most refreshing approaches I've ever read.
In the author's
usual humorous and relaxed style, virtually every topic of
importance is touched upon - actually, delved into far
beyond
the surface - in a way that is open, engaging and utterly
unabashed. I can imagine this one volume being of enormous
help to both teachers and parents as they guide children
into a healthy adulthood. |
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