Humanities
Social Science: History, Economics, Society and Culture: Introduction
Social science in the Waldorf curriculum is very much cultural history, focusing on technology, religion, art, societal forms and how these interact and change over time. It shows how human societies relate to the world and to each in the past and present, not by compiling a compendium of facts, dates, battles and kings but by developing a chronological sense of global cultural change and how people experienced their lives at different times and in places. Starting from archetypal images of human beings and their relationships through folktales, legends and myths from a wide range of cultural settings, the children get to know the nature of human social life in its most basic forms, the family, social roles, peoples and tribes, how societies are organised by rules, social hierarchies and responsibilities. The journey is made from myth to recorded history and how history is shaped by the various forms of cultural memory and the wish of powerful people to record their real and imagined deeds for posterity.
In lower and middle school, the pupils experience the historical period through historical narrative, images and artefacts which show the relationship of a given people to their natural environment (i.e. their economy and lifestyle), how cultures interacted with other cultures, how they traded and learned from each other and also the conflicts they had. This symptomatic approach means choosing significant moments in history that reveal the consciousness of the people at the time and perhaps when new forms arose. Through the skilled facilitation of the class teacher, the pupils learn to recognise and understand the historical processes involved.
By the end of class 8 the students should have an understanding of how the world came to be as it is today (i.e. the digital age, the significance of climate change, the economic rise of Asia and China, 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cold War, emancipation movements, changes in the lives of everyday people, colonialism and its consequences). This provides a basis for the upper school, where historiographical aspects are explored, ideologies analysed and large scale historical trends across the globe are examined and investigated.
Social Science: Purpose of Study
The Steiner Waldorf curriculum offers pupils the opportunity to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of processes in world history, and how they have manifested in the British Isles. Pupils will know how different cultures have related to their geographical environment and how different societies and economies have been organised at different times and in different places. They will also understand how cultures have interacted and mutually influenced
each other across history. Pupils will develop a historical consciousness that enables them to empathise with and understand how people in other times lived and experienced their lives. They will learn to interpret historical material, including historical narrative, art and artefacts and thus begin to understand the emergence of different forms of consciousness as it is expressed in different social forms, as compared and contrasted with our times. Social science
enables pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, cultures, societies and relationships, and thus to be able to position themselves in relation to these, construct coherent identities, and understand the challenges of their time.
Social Science: Aims
● Know and understand historical processes in world history, and how this manifests in the British Isles
● Know and understand how the development of societies and cultures relates to the geographical environment and the history of those people
● Gain and deploy a broad vocabulary of historical terms and concepts, such as ‘social strata’, ‘matriachy’, ‘hierarchical’ and ‘egalitarian’ societies, ‘change and revolution’, ‘civil rights’ etc
● understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses
● understand some significant ideas about how history is made
● gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts: understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales
● relate their historical understanding to their own situation and worldwide current events
The Long Term Curriculum Intents, along with Age-related Learning Opportunities for each Class with the Learning Descriptors are available in the Social Science - Vertical Curriculum document, available to download below.
Geography: Introduction
Geography is an understanding of the earth as a physical space. Long before we learned to map it, humanity dwelled on the land, found its sustenance there and explored the places, moods, climate and weather of the land of which they were a part. Human cultures have been shaped by the places people lived, and whole landscapes have been shaped by human actions. In the modern world, human behaviour is impacting on the earth in ways that are having catastrophic effects on the climate and by polluting or destroying whole regions. Steiner Waldorf education believes that if this is to change, children and
young people need to form a relationship to the earth, its oceans and atmosphere, climate and the space we are all part of through experience, empathy, knowledge and understanding.
This relationship begins by exploring the world before our doors, beneath our feet and that rains on our heads. Children, both urban and rural, need to discover the land around them, how it has shaped our culture (housing, clothing, food) and how we are connected to other places (rivers, pathways and transport routes).
The geography curriculum has the logic of space: it expands radially outwards from where we are to places near and then far, describing as we go the landscapes we pass through, the agriculture and industries that grew there and have often now gone silent. We learn to orientate ourselves in space and how to represent it in abstract but useful maps.
As the curriculum expands, it leads to other continents, other landscapes and life forms, to climate zones hotter, colder, wetter and drier than ours and the people who were indigenous to those places. The water cycle follows a precious resource from dense mist on the mountainside to slow, fat, heavy estuaries dumping their silt in wide deltas, to the ocean and back again to the sky. Beneath the soil we come to rock that breaks through the surface in evocative peaks and cliffs, revealing a whole history of deep time, slow inexorable change, the vast, transformative forces of pressure and sometimes the threat of explosive outbreaks of geo-revolution.
Climate leads us to look up at the atmosphere, its vast movements of air that transport water, warmth and dust across oceans and continents, making the Sahara dead and dry and the Amazon fertile. And beyond the atmosphere we follow the sun and moon, gradually turning our geocentric experience of the earth into an understanding of a complex model of spheres spinning in empty space.
Geography is also the foundation for economics which, at heart, is the process of creating value through the transformation of raw materials to meet human needs and trading them. Where these resources come from, how we get them and what impact that has, who profits and who loses are important lessons to be learned.
Geography: Purpose of study
A high-quality geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people as an integrated living system, and the earth in its context in space, that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. This engagement with geography should engender a sense of adventure, wonder and responsibility. Through an appreciation of the complexity of natural phenomena and processes, pupils should develop a profound understanding of the intimate connection between physical landscapes and the evolution of human societies, cultures, and cultural understandings of the
relationship of human beings to the world as expressed in myth, art, religion and science. Geographical knowledge, understanding and skills provide the framework and approaches that explain how the Earth’s features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change over time. Pupils should have a growing understanding of the changing impact of human activity on the environment over time.
Geography: Aims
The Waldorf curriculum aims to ensure that all pupils:
● Develop contextual knowledge of the earth as an integrated whole, including providing a geographical context for key physical characteristics and human activities
● Understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, how these are interdependent and have changed over different time scales
● Develop geographical skills that allow them to:
- Interpret and communicate geographical information through maps, diagrams, globes, narrative, images and numerical data.
- Learn effectively and experientially through fieldwork