A graduate of Columbia University, Eugene Schwartz has worked with all stages of life, from the young child to the elderly and the dying. He began his teaching career by adapting the Waldorf schools' curriculum to educate a group of handicapped and emotionally disturbed adolescents, after which he became a class teacher at Green Meadow Waldorf School. After many years of service to Green Meadow, Eugene is now works worldwide as an educational consultant and lecturer.
In addition to his thirty years of experience as a class teacher, high school teacher, and educator of Waldorf teachers, Eugene has served as a consultant to Waldorf endeavors throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, England, Mexico, Austria, and Italy. Over the past decade, he has worked in this capacity with over one hundred twenty-five schools, including public schools in the New York metropolitan region and Waldorf charter schools in the West. Eugene was awarded a prestigious Teaching Fellowship at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in Princeton, NJ, in which capacity he worked with public school teachers from across the nation. Eugene also worked closely with the late Ernest Boyer, the Foundation's president, to establish new curricular ideas and methods.
Eugene has lectured on new ideas in education at Harvard, Columbia, University of Tennessee Medical Center, Roehampton University in London, and the Aspen Institute. He recently gave the first lectures on Waldorf education ever presented in Turkey. Eugene has also served as an Adjunct Instructor on the faculty of the Waldorf Masters Program at Touro University in Vallejo, California, focusing on educational issues facing public Waldorf schools in the United States. Since 2005, he has been a Fellow of the Research Institute for Waldorf Education.
Eugene's books and articles have been published widely in the United States and have been translated into German, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Over fifty of Eugene's lectures and collections of student work are available at www.millennialchild.com. He is currently producing a series of introductory videos entitled Discover Waldorf Education, which may be viewed on YouTube.com.
He helped produce Waldorf Education: A Vision of Wholeness, an award-winning video which presents Waldorf education to a wider public and has written and directed the new DVD, Eurythmy: Making Movement Human. Books and videos by Eugene are available from the Sunbridge College Bookstore, 260 Hungry Hollow Road, Chestnut Ridge, NY 10977, including:
Waldorf Education: Schools for the Twenty-First Century
Millennial Child
Why the Setting Sun Turns Red and Other Stories for Children
Adolescence, the Search for the Self
Seeing, Hearing, Learning: The Interplay of the Eye and Ear
in Waldorf Education
Rhythms and Turning Points in the Life of the Child
Bruce Dickson, MA, MSS
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Eugene is too modest here, a bit more he does
What I find missing from the above is the facet of Eugene who thinks deeply and actively, an alchemist about what it takes to fix the future, and reform healthy communities.
He has very extensive experience with a certain kind of community: parent initiatives who start and sustain private and charter schools.
He has extensive experience with public school teachers. His interest in affirming the human values of teachers in any setting is strong. His body of work contains considerable efforts to reach out and build bridges between newly minted teachers who exit conventional teacher training, enter the classroom, and then realize, "There must be more to teaching than this!"
Eugene has stood for and gone to bat for the highest creative potential of both children and teachers on many fronts. A tale with much humor and many fascinating lessons about how to “fix the future,” which I will allow Eugene to tell in his own time.
Eugene would likely be the first person to agree with me that teaching the calendar and the date every day for 30-60 minutes, every day, in kindergarten and grade one, draws no creativity out of either teacher or students. Rather it comes from a cynical view of how creative teacher trainees are! Eugene's insights on this topic--as this topic evolves up thru grade 12--are comprehensive and extensive, one of the few resources on this.
Along these lines Eugene is also the prime proponent--worldwide I would say--of the developmental sequence leading to independent thinking:
imitative thinking -> taking on authority -> thinking independently for yourself.
His clearest exposition of this I believe is found in his book Millennial Child. Correct me if a better single source. Some readers will grasp this has great application, that its surprisingly rare to see independent thinking conveyed to children, and that this sequence dovetails with other interesting things like Cultural Creatives and MBTI.
Eugene and I disagree, I think, on Waldorf methods charter schools. I’ve been involved with five Waldorf method charter schools in the 1990s and found all of them miles ahead of conventional, traditional public schools by every single measure. Eugene and I probably agree these public Waldorf schools are difficult to sustain and why that is so.
Eugene, feel free to edit or remove this piece as you see fit. Let me know how else I can assist you.
Bruce Dickson * HealingCoach.org
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