A Declaration of Cultural Independence

By Craig Byrne

In Chelsea, Vermont we have two commons, North and South. Each mixes the old and the new. Our North Common is bounded by the church, Chelsea's twin stores, and a mix of stately and not-so stately homes. It also hosts our burgeoning farmer's market every Wednesday in the summer. Our South Common is home to the county courthouse, another mix of houses, Chelsea's public school, and the Wellspring Waldorf School, where two of my three kids are enrolled (the third is more of a mascot, at nearly age 3).

The Waldorf educational philosophy, developed by Rudolf Steiner in 1919, is nicely summed up for me in the title of a lecture given to the Chelsea community recently by Eugene Schwartz, a Waldorf teacher and consultant: “No Childhood Left Behind.” Mr. Schwartz' play on words speaks to the Waldorf belief and concern that children need time to come into the world, to unfold, and that to rush this process deprives children of a necessary process needed to thoroughly master and integrate their “heads, hearts and hands” and enter adulthood fully awake and engaged in life.

One of the practical tenets of this educational philosophy is a very deliberate restriction on exposure to and consumption of television, videos, radio and the Internet. Simply put, Waldorf educators believe that a child's imagination – her capacity to create something out of nothing – is stunted by premature and/or over-exposure to the media.

Imagination being a fundamental asset of independent, free-thinking individuals, this is no small matter.
When our oldest child was in kindergarten, his teacher explained this to us and asked all the parents in his class to eliminate television and video viewing, and to be watchful of audio content as well. This happened to be a few days before September 11, 2001. After being glued to the television non-stop for what started as news but after several days became a macabre self-flagellation (I happened to be on vacation that week, lucky me), my wife and I decided that this would be a good time to stop television.

Now, I've never had one of those “Kill Your Television” bumper stickers. In fact, being old enough to remember 13 channels and rabbit ears, there was still novelty for me in endless rapid-fire surfing of the hundreds of channels that satellite TV offered us. And I occasionally found and enjoyed excellent programming. Moreover, I really like movies. My wife and I have always watched LOTS of movies; it's one of the things we've always loved to do (couldn't say whether this is in spite of or because of an imagination deficit disorder). Since we live 45 minutes from most movie theaters, giving up TV and videos posed a dilemma.

Our compromise was videos only, after kids have gone to bed, and with headphones so there's no sound to listen in on, just in case the kids don't fall asleep instantaneously. Thank goodness for Netflix and S&L Video in Chelsea.
More than five years later, I think I can say that with the possible exception of the Olympics, we don't miss real-time television. We certainly don't miss the commercials (though the ones I wind up watching on business trips seem more entertaining than most of what's supposed to be programming). We certainly don't miss what's become of the news. With the exception of the first nine months, we have not seen any of the Bush II presidency on television, including his war. Don't feel like I've missed much.

Since most of the great shows that we read about in the newspaper are available on DVD, we haven't missed out. We've enjoyed the presidency of Josiah Bartlett, have learned management lessons from Tony Soprano, have been sternly reminded never to judge a Cylon by its cover thanks to Battlestar Galactica, and even gotten a feel for the (since reduced) 120-hour work week of the interns on Grey's Anatomy.

We're not watching television shows as they're aired, but we can skim the cream and watch a bunch of episodes in one week. Oh, and since older kids go to bed later, we don't often have time to watch a movie; 41 minutes of good TV (okay, 82 more often than not) is actually kind of handy.

So, my wife and I certainly can't say that we've pulled the plug (we also occasionally eat white flour, too). What has happened is that we have already experienced a partial cultural secession of sorts. Is this like being half-pregnant? I don't think so; it feels more like deciding to cook every night – albeit with store-bought ingredients, not home grown veggies – rather than eating out at chain restaurants most of the time.
For our kids, it's a different story. They have very little concept of television, and for that matter, radio and the Internet. They don't watch commercials, so they don't clamor for stuff they see on TV. Their conversations are more about what books they've read than what they saw on television.

Are their imaginations more intact? I honestly don't know, but they seem to be able to entertain themselves pretty well without TV. That seems good. Moreover, our lives have just a little less noise in them. We take time to finish dinner, play games or musical instruments, and read books. We talk about what happened at school, and what our plans are for the evening or the weekend.

We have separated ourselves from something, but I feel a gain, not a loss. I'm still thinking about whether Vermont as its own country is a good idea. But I can say for sure that achieving some cultural independence feels good. And we have time to talk about things like political independence!

Homegrown culture

We're lucky that many of the folks we hang around with are fellow Waldorf parents. Some are more earnest about media control, some less. It's a balancing act, but the bottom line is we all seem to be living our lives a little more consciously, with more intent than we had before shackling the tube.

A few weeks ago, the Wellspring students performed their first all-school musical, which I instigated. This is a somewhat rare event in the Waldorf world, where teachers stay with their classes from first through eighth grade, and each class usually performs its own play every year. There's incredible richness, intimacy and autonomy developed at the class level, but the sense of a total school experience, at least at a younger school (Wellspring is not yet 20 years old) is a challenge to create in this more “federalist” educational structure.
One of the reasons I approached our faculty with this idea was that I wanted to build some good-old-fashioned school spirit. But the thing that really motivated me was to home-grow some culture, and to do it with other people. I didn't realize it at the very beginning, but our play was to become another Waldorf-inspired act of cultural independence.

At first, while I realized that our Waldorf faculty was not likely to embrace the idea of an off-the-shelf mainstream play, there was a certain practical appeal to having lines, music, and lyrics ready to adapt to our particular aesthetic. As a conversation starter I offered the option to create something from scratch, or maybe borrow from something in the public domain. While our faculty recognized that this approach might be more work, it seemed that we'd have more success involving the full spectrum of our 42 students if we custom-built our musical.

Grimm's Fairy Tales are a staple of the Waldorf storytelling diet. They are elemental, inspire the imagination, and leave lots of room for interpretation. We decided that perhaps the best way to create something of our own was to challenge an icon. We stuck our heads in the lion's mouth and chose “Little Snow White,” a simple tale with which I'll bet you're familiar, thanks to its most famous rendition.

Naturally, the look, the feel, the songs… everything about the famous version was considered off limits. This was not hard for the kids, as many of them had actually never seen it. But for the adults producing the play? Can you say “Heigh Ho”?

It took some effort to re-imagine the world of “Little Snow White.” It helped that the original Grimm's tale was nine pages long. There are a lot of key plot points packed into those nine pages, but an awful lot of room for interpretation, too.

Our first grade teacher and I spent about 30 hours writing a 20-page play in four kinds of verse. We even spent a whole day trying to imagine a prologue about how the queen had become so vain and attached to her mirror. We almost hatched “The Queen and the Mirror,” but regained our bearings when we realized that we'd need 40 other parts.

We used iambic tetrameter for royalty, pentameter for Snow White, haiku for the Huntsman, and limericks for the dwarfs. Our students, teachers, and parents penned and arranged themes for each major character that they sang, and our PTO (that's parent teacher orchestra) of violin, accordion, cello, flute, guitar, mandolin, piano and percussion performed with vigor.

We cobbled together beautiful costumes, simple but beautiful sets, got some great help with lighting, and put on what we think was a completely original re-imagining of “Little Snow White.”

It had occurred to me that adapting a fairy tale that already has an iconic interpretation might take on a significance it doesn't ordinarily have. It might even seem like the ability to say what it's not going to be becomes a creative driver. But the amazing thing was that the experience was nothing like that. Our students didn't have to put familiar songs out of their minds. Our teachers wrote, sketched, and composed not out of some impulse to be different, but out of their imaginations and desires to make something beautiful and to retell a classic story in their own voices.

And the standing room only audience in Chelsea's Town Hall – which was loaded, of course, with relatives and friends of the performers – “got” it. They were blown away by the freshness this team had brought to this story.
With their participation and appreciation, we made our own little declaration of cultural independence.