Introducing Artbeat
“ Our highest endeavour… .free human beings who are able of themselves
to impart purpose and direction to their lives”| Dr Rudolf Steiner
Artbeat Education is dedicated to positively empowering each individual to realize and achieve their fullest potential by identifying, enriching and strengthening their unique life journey through person-focused learning processes. Artbeat works out of the assumption that each individual (adult and child) has an invisible inner/spiritual life that accompanies their outer/physical expression and that this spiritual life lives within laws that are wiser than we can access through merely intellectual and abstract methods.
“Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist
without consciousness, but consciousness can exist without thought.”| Eckhart, Tolle The Power of Now
Through its educational and artistic courses, workshops and social activities for all ages Artbeat is committed to providing quality personal and professional development in an experiential learning environment that supports the love for learning over the accumulation of facts and figures, and where Imagination, Intuition and Inspiration are valued over the mere gathering and accumulation of information. Artbeat wishes to be a counterforce to the intellectual one-sidedness of our times.
“ Anthroposophy does not seek to impart knowledge. It seeks to awaken life.”
| Dr Rudolf Steiner
Artbeat’s programmes are evolving constantly in response to its client’s needs, and many sources inspire their foundation. However, Rudolf Steiner’s revealed wisdom of Anthroposophy is one of the main pictures out of which Artbeat works. Steiner’s pictures of the human being evolving through the individual life span, and of human consciousness evolving over time, are two pictures that deeply inform the work of Artbeat.
Are we engaging children or are we merely teaching them?
Artbeat’s work with children and parents is indebted to the research done by the Steiner Education branch of the Anthroposophical initiative, explored largely through the International Waldorf Schools over seven decades. The paramount importance of play for young children and dedication to the use of Creative (non-violent, non-intrusive) Discipline is part of Artbeat’s mission.
Profiles of Trainers
Linda Hall
Margaret Glass
Anthroposophy
Dr Rudolf Steiner (1861- 1925)
Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861 in what is now Croatia and died on March 30, 1925 in Dornach, Switzerland.
Words to describe the work of Rudolf Steiner: unusual – not easy to approach – filled with stimulating ideas. His monumental projects of drafting an alternative science, a new pedagogy, new perspectives in medicine and agriculture have entered into the spiritual heritage of the present time. They live in today's cultural life as an impulse and an inspiration.
As philosopher, scientist and Goethe scholar Rudolf Steiner developed Anthroposophy as a «science of the spirit.» An individual path of spiritual development, Christcentered at its esoteric core while embracing aspects of the esoteric spiritual wisdom of all spiritual paths, Eastern and Western, its fruits are visible in art, social forms and practical initiatives.
Anthroposophy
“Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge aiming to guide the spiritual element
in the human being to the spiritual in the universe.”| Rudolf Steiner
The word “anthroposophy” means “wisdom of the human being,” or, for us today, “awareness of one’s humanity.”
Knowledge of spirit can only be found by spiritual means. Anthroposophy offers an inner path of schooling to attain such knowledge. It takes its starting point from modern critical consciousness and our contemporary orientation toward technology and science. It is a kind of study and schooling that leads to concrete experience of the spiritual dimensions of the human being and the world.
Spiritual knowledge can be fruitful in various fields of life – in art, religion and science. Examples are education, medicine, pharmacy, agriculture, social work, economics and much else. Over time, about 10,000 institutions and initiatives have been founded that endeavor to apply anthroposophy: schools (often called Rudolf Steiner schools, Waldorf schools or independent schools), homes, workshops and schools working within curative education and social therapy, clinics, doctor’s practices, pharmaceutical companies, biodynamic farms, banks, art schools, stage groups, businesses, etc. The thing that connects these endeavors is their mutual basis in anthroposophy.
Anthroposophy is dedicated to the potential towards freedom within each individual. Although its wisdom is derived from all esoteric spiritual paths it is not allied with any religious organization or creed, Western or Eastern. Steiner warned us about the growing fundamentalism of all kinds that would manifest in the early 21st Century due to the increasing loss of true spiritual insight and the dominance of mechanistic, intellectually biased and materialistic thinking, including even the thinking about spiritual matters.
“ Adapt each one of your actions and frame each one of your words in such
a way that you infringe upon no one’s free will. ”| Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom
“ To live in love towards our actions and to let live in the understanding of
the other person’s will, is the fundamental maxim of free humans. ”| Rudolf Steiner
Another central theme in anthroposophy and Waldorf Education is the narrowing of the gap between theory and practice. For Steiner, unpractical thinking and thoughtless practice were equally useless as a criteria of truth.
“ No one can become a great philosopher if he cannot sew a button on his trousers.”
| Rudolf Steiner
For more information:
Goetheanum
SteinerBooks
Waldorf Education
Rudolf Steiner founded the first Waldorf School for the children of the factory workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart in 1919. The impulse for ‘Waldorf Schools / Steiner Education’, has since spread throughout sixty countries, to become one of the largest private school movements in the world. There are also Waldorf-based public and charter schools, homeschooling environments, and schools for special needs. Numerous educators teaching in other state and private schools have adopted Waldorf methods. There are now universities offering courses in Steiner Education Teacher Training.
From preschool through high school the goal is the same, but the means differ according to the changing inner development of the child. The structure of the education follows Steiner's pedagogical model which views childhood as divided overall into seven-year developmental stages, each having its own learning requirements of child develoment as understood from Anthroposophy.The stages are similar to those described by Piaget.
During the early childhood years the child is surrounded by a homelike environment and taught through the principles of imitation, movement and rhythm. The education emphasizes learning through practical activities.
In the elementary school years (age 7-14), learning is regarded as artistic and imaginative. In these years, the approach emphasizes developing children's "feeling life" and artistic expression. All of the subjects are presented in a lively and pictorial way, because the elementary-school child learns best when information is artistically and imaginatively presented.
Analytical thinking is developed in the Waldorf Secondary School, where subjects are taught by specialists in their fields, who try to help the adolescents develop their own thinking powers and their capacity for abstract thought and conceptual judgment. The emphasis is on developing intellectual understanding and ethical thinking, including taking social responsibility.
For more information:
Goetheanum