Andrew Gilligan is a class teacher at Meadowbrook Waldorf School and he wrote the following beautiful story about the founding of the first Waldorf school. He first spoke it on September 19, 2019, the season of Michaelmas when traditional tales of a marauding dragon teach us much about community cooperation and the will to build a brighter future.
Dear Meadowbrook Community,
I want to share with you the story I told the students at our school, K-8th, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Waldorf Education. It is a children’s version of true events. I enjoyed re-envisioning the beginnings of our movement. As I often encounter in my work as a teacher, the greatest wisdom can be found in the thinking of a child.
My Humblest Regards,
Andrew Gilligan
The Founding of the First Waldorf School
A Dragon Story
by Andrew Gilligan
There once was a wealthy man who owned a factory. He employed many people. It was dull work, but the pay was steady and he treated his employees fairly.
One day a dragon came and took away many of the people that worked in the factory to go fight in a war. The owner had to hire other people who had escaped the dragon to keep his factory open. This began a desperate time.
The dragon’s war stretched all across the country, all across the earth. It destroyed farms, homes, cities, lives. Very few places were left untouched by the dragon’s destruction.
Eventually the war was ended. The dragon was defeated and those people who had survived the war came back to the factory where they had once been employed. Other people now did the work they used to do, but the owner welcomed them anyways and made new jobs for them. There was very little food, or money, or proper housing, and the owner did his best to care for his workers. Although the war had stopped, the struggle for survival against hunger and cold was still raging.
Then the owner saw the children of his workers and knew he wasn’t doing enough. The children were hungry and sick and he couldn’t pay their parents enough to cure the damage that the dragon had done. His workers came to the factory each day worried about what would happen to their children while they were at work.
One morning, sitting at the desk in his office, the owner realized that the children of his workers needed a school, a new school. They needed a school different from the ones that had come before - the schools that had educated children to grow up and serve the dragon. He wanted a school that would teach children to be strong, have a feeling for truth, and imagine a future that didn’t already exist. He wanted a school that would teach children how to make peace, not war.
And the owner knew of a doctor who could help him. The doctor had been a teacher for many years and possessed extraordinary wisdom. In a letter, sealed with his deepest hope, the owner asked the doctor to found a school to heal the children of the workers in his factory.
The doctor received the letter and came to visit the factory. He met some of the workers and their children and he agreed to help.
He wrote a curriculum for the school. Then he chose twelve people to learn how to teach it. He taught these twelve people a new way of teaching and they became the school’s first teachers. The teaching methods and curriculum were different than any that had ever been before. The doctor had indeed created a new school. Then, in September of the year 1919, the school opened.
The doctor stayed at the school for five years, continuing to train and direct the teachers and students. The owner of the factory supported the school in every way he could. Each year the children grew healthier. And each year the school grew as well, as more and more children wanted to attend.
The doctor would often speak to the students and ask them one question, do you love your teachers? And the students would resoundingly answer, yes!
All over the world people then began to ask the doctor to help them found new schools like the one for the factory worker’s children. And he did.
Schools, called Waldorf schools, after the factory’s name, grew up all over the world, likewildflowers after a fire. Still, to this day, one hundred years later, Waldorf schools exist as places of healing, as schools worthy of human beings.
