From the age of 11, a change is starting to happen within the child. Childhood is being left behind, making place for a state Steiner calls Erdenreife, readiness for the earth. The children no longer ‘ride’ happily on the authority of adults. Their feelings and will impulses start to break through, without as yet being carried by their own self’s strength.
This change goes hand in hand with physical changes as well. The heaviness of the earth takes hold of the body, and within the child’s own body it is the skeleton that begins to play a dominant role.
A new challenge is put to the growing human being: to master the physical body with its new domineering aspects.
It is at this time that the joy and playfulness of the physical activities make place for other ones. Whereas the children were happy in Class 5 to be part of the Greek Olympics, in a serious-playful manner, from about Class 6 they ask for new focus points.
The children need more physical activities, activities that meet the needs of their changing physical body. And because they are breaking through the boundaries of childhood, and are challenging the existing structures, authority, rules, etc, they themselves need to be challenged as well and pushed beyond their boundaries.
Challenging physical activities, demanding physical activities that push their own boundaries are now ready to be tackled. It was out of the awareness that the pre-adolescent needs to experience extending activities that the following initiatives were taken.
Swimming and Water Polo
Australia is surrounded by water. About 90% of the population lives by or near the ocean, or has easy access to it. As a consequence, Australian beaches are always populated by swimmers, surfers, body boarders, beach dwellers, holiday goers, etc.
Australia was the first country in the world to establish a volunteer Surf and Life Saving club. Each major beach will have patrols of volunteers and professional people who look out for people in difficulty in the water. Still, every year deplores several deaths by drowning.
Because of the fact that water plays such an important role in the life of the Australian people, many schools have a Water Safety Awareness Program. From early age onwards, the students have organised swimming lessons, so that, if they start in Class 1, they can have their rescue certificate by the age of 13.
When most of the children of Class 6/7 of the Noosa Pengari Steiner School had reached the last stage in their swimming program, the swimming instructors could not teach them anything more for their age level. As a consequence, the children became bored. New activities were being asked for, especially since the school had timetabled the water awareness program in terms 1 and 4.
One year the swimming lessons at our school were replaced by water polo, and the children loved this activity. Not only because they could put into practice what water skills they had mastered over the years, but also because these skills were challenged in a totally different way.
It was no longer a question of swimming laps. Now the swimming techniques of speed and accuracy were a basis for acquiring and developing new ones.
On top of that, swimming was no longer an individual matter, but a group activity. Teamwork had to be learned, withholding one’s impulses in function of the group, learning that some players were good at passing the ball, others at scoring, discovering one’s own strengths within the team, and so on.
As each week the teams changed, there was never an opportunity to get bored or complacent.
Surfing
Australia is a land of surfers. If there is one culture, apart from swimming, that is ingrained in Australia’s society, it is undoubtedly surfing. It is an activity that is social but can be done on one’s own as well.
Surfing is more than just sitting on a board and ride a wave. It is a whole world in itself, a world that involves mastering skills of speed, balance, water awareness, observation of waves and tides.
As the surfing teacher told me: “It is a question of feeling.”
It is indeed. I had the opportunity to learn the basic surfing skills together with the children of Class 6/7 when water polo was replaced by surfing.
It once again proved that it is much easier for a child to learn something than for an adult.
When the children realised how much I had to struggle with just trying to get on the board, they came swimming alongside me, offering their advice and insights:
“You’re leaning too far at the back of your board.” Or: “Try it this way, it’s easier.”
The older ones would ask with a smirk: “Have you actually caught a wave today, or are you still trying?”
Then they would smugly surf past me, yelling words of encouragement.
It was good for them to be able to do that. I had always been the one with superior knowledge, insights and skills, and now, just before they left for high school, they could feel superior to me.
And did they ever love it! But at the same time it was their way of saying goodbye, of farewelling a time in their life that would never come back.
The image of those young people, standing freely on their boards and riding on the crest of a wave past their struggling teacher, was one that perfectly fitted the aim: to send the children on their way with their own skills developed, off into a future that is their own, leaving ‘old age’ behind.
Looking at it from that point of view, I was glad I had engaged them in the activity. (In the end I did manage to catch a few waves. But of course nobody noticed.)
Scuba Diving
As special treat for the school leavers, I took Class 7 on a scuba diving experience. Being a scuba diver myself (a skill I acquired only a few years ago), I felt that it was good for the children to have their water awareness and water skills challenged in a different way.
I also realised that consciousness for the underwater world, compared to our awareness of land-based beauty, fauna and flora, is one that is very little developed.
We need to build a closer relationship with water, in whatever form this element presents itself. Failing to do so may have as disastrous results as with the element of air (pollution) or earth (land poisoning, land clearing, etc.)
Partly out of this consciousness, and partly out of an observation that these 12 to 13-year-olds needed a different physical challenge, I contacted a dive shop to give the children an experience of scuba diving.
The activity took two days: one of theory and swimming pool practice to get used to the equipment, the next day an ocean dive proper, to a depth of 8 metres. Not very deep, but deep enough for that age group.
Note: People who have their first diving certificate can go down to 18m, the next stage allows them to go to 30m. 40m is considered the maximum depth for safe recreational diving.
Of course the children were scared before they went into the water. Breathing underwater is an unnatural thing to do, especially because the mask covers the nose and one breathes through a mouthpiece.
But that was the idea: the children, at the beginning of puberty, do need challenges that will extend them beyond their physical limitations.
Scuba diving definitively is one of them. In the end all the Class 7-ers went diving, overcoming their fears and thoroughly enjoying the experience.
Heights and Ropes
The year I had Class 5/6, I took the children on a camp that physically challenged them.
I realized that the older children were entering the stage in their life where physical challenges become more important, but that the whole class needed activities that brought them closer together as a group: A camp that answered the need for individual challenges as well as group building activities.
An organisation was found that offered exactly that. Activities included high rope courses (cables strung between trees, up to 15m above the ground), abseiling, a 137-metre-long flying fox over a valley with a creek flowing through, and more.
The children were confronted with their fear of heights, of unsteady surfaces underfoot (at times at considerable height above ground), of gaping voids all around them.
They had to put their trust in the safety gear, but most of all they had to have courage. They needed courage to face themselves in their weaknesses.
All children managed one level or another. Some went on cables that were strung no higher than one metre above the ground – with considerable trepidation. Others managed fifteen-metre-high balancing beams, sometimes getting stuck so they had to be “rescued” (helped) before they could continue.
But they all did it – on their own level. And for all it was a personal victory.
Canoeing
The same organisation [no longer in business] offered a 5-day camp canoeing up and down a river in the Noosa Everglades. This river runs through a national park, so the only access is via bush tracks or across the river. There are no roads, except for emergency four-wheel-drive vehicles.
The focus of the canoe camp was not in the first place for the children to acquire canoeing skills, but to take responsibility for their actions.
Divided in groups of three, each team was given a tent, food for the week, a menu, a cooking fire and plastic bags. They were now responsible for everything during that week: cooking (the first night the instructors showed them what to do), food, tents, cooking fires, etc.
If they decided to eat all their food during the first two days, that was fine. They then had to live with the consequence that they’d be without food for the rest of the time.
That didn’t happen. What did happen was that the children started to barter their food, exchanging items they didn’t like with items another group wanted to get rid of. The adults did not interfere with this process.
Self-management
Whatever deed is done has a consequence. At the age of 12, the intellectual forces of the child are ready to understand the world in terms of cause and effect.
This was certainly the experience the children were faced with.
It went from little things like not packing their bags properly within the plastic bags they had been given, so all their gear got wet (luckily the days were hot, so everything dried quickly), to bigger things like having to carry their own rubbish. Because the camp places were situated in a national park, everything that was brought in had to be taken out again, including rubbish.
For most of the children it was a big challenge to carry their own food scraps around for days in hot weather, having to store them close by at night so the animals could not feed on them, and to see the processes of decay at work.
Looking Back
The camp was a success, but not in an exhilarating way. The year before, the children had come back elated and full of joy about their camp on the high ropes. This year they were exhausted.
They had been physically challenged beyond their natural limits, had been confronted with heavy physical activities for five days, had to look after themselves from morning till night, had to be with people they normally did not socialise with on a twenty-four-hour basis, on occasions had been put together for certain exercises with peers they normally did not relate to very well, had to confront the consequences of their own actions, etc.
Parents commented afterwards how successful the camp had been, but they all added immediately: “It was not easy for him. He was really confronted with himself.”
Or: “It was good for her to be responsible for her own things. She doesn’t do that enough at home.”
Both the instructors and the accompanying adults could see how the children struggled. Some needed help, and were given it before they asked. Some came to ask for it – for one particular boy a giant step in his development.
Others again managed with the support of their friends, or found their own ways to cope with the situations.
All participants, adults and children alike, however, learned and grew through the experience. For the children it was a step towards maturity, self-reliance, self-confidence and inner strength.
It showed once more that this age group does need physical challenges to meet the needs of their developing personality. One only wished one could do more of them.
Gilbert Van Kerckhoven emigrated from Belgium to Australia where he became a class teacher at the suggestion of Francis Edmunds, the founder of Emerson College. He retired after doing the equivalent of five class teacher cycles in several schools. During those years he studied and published extensively on the aboriginal culture, and one of his short stories on indigenous events was highly commended in a national writing competition. Since retirement, Gilbert has been collating resources for teachers.
Comments are welcome, so don’t hesitate to share experiences, questions and feedback below.
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