Kay Hoffman is a retired teacher, school administrator, out-of-the-box thinker who also happens to be Dr. Sciarretta's mom. This conversation, which kicks off season 2 of the podcast, touches on topics including education, medicine, school leadership, aging, and much more.
Kay Hoffman is a retired teacher, school administrator, out-of-the-box thinker who also happens to be Dr. Sciarretta's mom. This conversation, which kicks off season 2 of the podcast, touches on topics including education, medicine, school leadership, aging, and much more.
Welcome to the superintendent's hangout, where we discuss topics in education, charter schools, life in general, and not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, dr Sharedda. Come on in and hang out. In this episode, I sat down with my mom, k Hoffman.
Speaker 1:I traveled to Santa Fe, new Mexico, for the holidays in late 2023 to celebrate my mom's 79th birthday and took advantage of that time to record some thoughts and allow her to talk about her biography, her ideas about education, medicine, nutrition, community, the role of love in teaching and in school leadership, and much more. This was a powerful experience for me and gave my mom an opportunity to share some things about her past that I had not yet heard. I hope that you enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with my mom, a remarkable woman, a retired educator she's never really retired, though she continues to teach in various forms and just a pretty amazing woman all the way around. This is a great way to kick off season two of the superintendent's hangout, to start off the new 2024 calendar year. Welcome, mom. Thank you for taking the time here in freezing cold Santa Fe, new Mexico, to sit down and chat for a little bit.
Speaker 2:I look forward to having this conversation.
Speaker 1:So, as you know because you've listened to episodes before on this podcast, I'd like to start out with all the guests talking about their origin story, where they come from, but about their background, their family and wherever that leads. So if you could start out today's conversation with that.
Speaker 2:My ancestry is English, scottish, german, a bit of Irish as well. My grandparents on both sides were children of immigrants and found their way in this country by doing menial work or, later on, skilled crafts such as carpentry or. My grandfather on my father's side was ostracized from his home at the age of 14 because he was late to church. So he became a hired man in a local farm, learned how to butcher animals and opened a butcher shop which became his living. On the other side of the family they were carpenters skilled carpenters.
Speaker 2:My mom and dad were both only children, which was unusual in those times. My, my father's mother and father came from families of more than 10 children, all of whom were very poor. In fact, my grandmother used to talk about one pair of shoes for four sisters and they would go to school on the day every five days when when they could wear the shoes. So mom and dad grew up somewhat during depression years, and we're always very conscious of the need to be careful about money, to be careful about resources. My father was an extremely intelligent man, an only child, somewhat babied by his mother, I think, and that theme of needing things to be the way he wanted them to be had an enormous effect on my childhood.
Speaker 1:We were today, we would call that having control issues.
Speaker 2:And my mother, an only child as well, was the opposite. She was an accommodating you might even say, in some circumstances, enabling person, who wanted everyone else to be comfortable and would do whatever was needed. Her father had tuberculosis, and so she lived a very, very poor life in the early years, with questions always about where the next money would come from, the next meal would come from. My father finished college and had a scholarship to Cornell University, but because my grandfather needed him to come home and work in the butcher shop, he never completed that master's degree in English literature, and it had a profound effect on his life, always the feeling that he had never quite done what he had wanted to do. My mother was an artistic person who sold all of my clothes, who tended to garden and froze and canned foods and made sure that we had everything that we really needed not much extra, but everything that we really needed.
Speaker 1:my brother and I and for the listeners here, I want to refer to your parents as Lovie and Bumpa. Lovie was my grandmother, your mom, and Bumpa my grandfather, your dad, lovies and we'll get a little bit later to kind of where those names come from, but they stuck in now through multiple generations, that's what we referred to them. As I think it's interesting that we're recording this in New Mexico, because we're not that far from the Picos River, which by my understanding, is where Lovie's parents came to sometime I'm going to say sometime in the 40s, in the war years, during the World War II because Lovie's father had tuberculosis Can you talk a little bit about that process and what that was like, and did you ever visit that place or you just saw any photos?
Speaker 2:No, so my husband jokes that I'm really a native New Mexican because my father was shipped overseas and my mother didn't want to stay back East, so she traveled. She drove from back East all the way to the Picos River where her mother and father were living. They were living there because of his tuberculosis and she was pregnant with me at the time. Although I was not born in New Mexico, but I feel a tremendous connection to it, my mother always spoke about it reverently as the land of enchantment and they lived on a maybe these are just things that I remember for my childhood.
Speaker 1:They may or may not be accurate, but I remember all these stories about them living in a shed or something and on someone's property and a chicken coop and boulders rolling down the mountain at night and crushing the chickens and a swinging bridge across the river. Do we know if that still exists? Do we have an address for that?
Speaker 2:We don't have an address and I've been wanting. I know the name of the people who own the land and I hope I will someday get to find out exactly where it is. I have a sense for where it is when we drive up the Picos River into the mountain. But my grandmother was a very spunky small woman and she used to have to drag the feed sacks across a swinging bridge to the little house they lived in for the rabbits and the chickens, because the man who delivered the food for the rabbits and the chickens wouldn't go across the swinging bridge. So that always gives me an idea of who she was as a person, a kind of pioneer woman in a certain way.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's like what 80 years ago or so. So New Mexico? Well, even today there are very few people living in New Mexico, so I think they're two million in the whole state, and which for me is like shock coming from California, where there's two million in the city. It seems like nobody lives here. But at that time it must have been desolate.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And really the frontier. Lovie probably drove part of the way on dirt roads coming across America because that's before the interstate highway system was really where it is now.
Speaker 2:And when I was born, two women from the telegraph office rode horses up the canyon alongside the Picos River to just deliver the news to my grandparents.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's a Pony Express type of days.
Speaker 1:Wow, and that's. It's pretty amazing because that's within 80 years time. Things have changed drastically and massively right when it comes to communication and how small it makes the world feel at times. So you've only you've given the origin of where your family comes from, and I think that matches up pretty well with my 23 and me DNA analysis. But what about you? So you grew up in upstate New York. Tell us a little bit about that, and why don't you bring us up to at least up through college and the start of your teaching career, because a little bit later we're going to talk about education.
Speaker 2:Okay. So I grew up in the Inchitokwa County, which is in the western southwestern most part of New York state, and went to a small four room school from grades one through four and then on to a slightly larger school in Chitokwa, New York. I have a younger brother, three and a half years younger than I, and he and I spent much of our childhood together, pre-screen days, playing, and I loved to read. I found escape and enjoyment in reading and have continued throughout my whole life with that love affair with reading. We lived closer into Jamestown, new York, and then we moved out into the country and my parents had a house built there for us to live in and I remember with joy living in a on a 37 acre plot of land with many apple trees. It used to be a commercial apple orchard and there were so many different kinds of apples. I wish today one could find those apples. There were so many, and there were wild strawberries. There was a pond there was. There were wild animals. Obviously it was in that way a very idyllic way for a young person to grow up. We grew our most of our food, most of our vegetables ourselves and we were somewhat isolated from neighbors. You couldn't see any neighbors from our, from our house.
Speaker 2:I was a very good student, I would have to say. I was always very interested in learning and I was chosen as valedictorian of my high school class. It wasn't an enormous school, so maybe that wasn't such an accomplishment, but at the time I thought it was. And I went on to study at the State University of New York at Albany, where I majored in English literature and French, and while my college years were uncomfortable from a social standpoint because I just didn't match with the kinds of activities that were happening in the 60s in college colleges, but I loved the learning part, I remember that my grandmother said to me before I went off to college don't ever smoke any cigarette that doesn't have a label on it. I had no idea what she was talking about and I went through four years of college without knowing what that meant.
Speaker 1:And you and Bill Clinton.
Speaker 2:It was from it. I was in college from 1962 to 66 and everything changed. At first, when I was first there, girls were not allowed to wear pants. You had to wear skirts. We had a curfew. You had to be in by 11 o'clock at night, Otherwise you were punished. By the time I graduated from college, you could wear blue jeans, you could wear pants. You didn't have to come in at 11 o'clock at night. Men could be on the floor.
Speaker 2:It was very different at very different life, and as soon as I graduated I got a job teaching French at my old alma mater school and then after that in several different places where I taught French and I loved working with young people. We had really active French clubs and we did a lot of things together. The students were really responsive and I really loved that. And in fact in later years there were a few times when I would get a phone call from somebody who would say hello, do you know who this is? Of course I didn't, because their voice had changed since then and it was many years later, but they spoke about what an influence they had had, having had a relationship such as all of us had as student and teacher at that time. So that was very rewarding. And in 1970, I stopped teaching to give birth to my first born son, David Soon. After that we, the three of us his father and David and I took an ocean voyage to England. So that.
Speaker 1:It's pretty cool that you're referring to me in the third person. Yes, I'm just going to let that go, yeah okay, so that we we went.
Speaker 2:David learned to walk on a boat and then when we got off the boat, he was walking like a drunken sailor and then.
Speaker 1:So it is true that my superb balance comes from learning to walk across the Atlantic. Yes, I can really tell people I walked on water before. Yes, you walked on water Before.
Speaker 2:Just I wasn't the first to walk on water, that's right, and so we spent two years in England, in Sussex, where where Roger Charetta went to trainings to become a Waldorf teacher and I had my second child, and then we moved back to the States and I had my two others, so David, peter, christopher and Teresa, and that formed our family.
Speaker 1:So you touched on a lot of different things. I've made a list for today of just like key words, almost like hashtags, from things that I'm curious about growing up, okay, and I'm going to throw out a couple of them and you just speak to whatever comes to mind. Obviously, this podcast is fundamentally about education, but I don't think that many conversations we have in society stay away from education for too long. It's kind of the the gravitational pull that most stuff comes back around to learning in some capacity, whether it's formal or informal, and so that's the beauty of this. So you just mentioned Waldorf education and that my dad, roger, was studying to be a Waldorf teacher in England. So that's my first hashtag Waldorf education.
Speaker 2:Okay, well, waldorf education is now a hundred years old. It had its beginning in Stuttgart, germany, in 1919. And it is meant to help the child to develop over the learning years in such a way that whatever materials are coming toward that person, whatever curriculum is coming toward, is answering the unspoken questions that are there in the development of the child. It is an education which depends greatly upon artistic expression, so that the child learns to express through the artistic and later on to come to a relationship to those same things in a cognitive way.
Speaker 2:There are Waldorf schools all around the world, in more than 35 countries, and it has. It became for me as a parent, first of all, it became for me a necessity that my children would have a chance to experience this education, and I was lucky that that was possible. I became a teacher Roger, your father was a teacher as well, and that afforded us the possibility of having an education which I wish I had had, because I see capacities and all of you siblings capacities for thinking, capacities for artistic expression, capacities of empathy, capacities of articulate expression, which I believe in many ways come from the education.
Speaker 1:So Waldorf education. My understanding is that the founder, rudolph Steiner or at least he was one of the founders, I guess the main proponent, spiritual scientists right from the late 1800s, early 1900s and then started a school for the children of the Waldorf story a Waldorf.
Speaker 1:Waldorf cigarette factory, so started with people who were helping other people smoke. But in all seriousness, there's a spiritual underpinning of Waldorf education and when you think about schools based on the teachings of individuals right, montessori and others that have stuck, have stayed around for decades, sometimes centuries, a century or more, how does, how does, how does or how does or how should education stay relevant? I mean, in your lifetime you're going to be 80, or in your 80th year now, and the world has changed. When you were born there was a telegraph being carried by a horse or something, and so here we are, 80 years later, and my child and certainly my grandkids won't know a world without phones and maybe chips embedded in there. Who knows, right, like we, don't like we, maybe by that, by that time living on other planets, like it's, it's possible. So how does how does education, with its basis in early 1900s, stay relevant in today's world?
Speaker 2:The most important tool for relevancy in education is the observation of the child, a recognition that a first grader is not the same as an eighth grader or 12th grader, that the way you approach teaching for the first grader or the fifth grader or the eighth grader is going to be different. I would say that the most important underpinning of Waldorf education, coming from Anthroposophy, which is philosophically connected with what Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian philosopher, was able to bring to the world, is that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, as Théardre Chardin said, and so-.
Speaker 1:Can you say that in French?
Speaker 2:No, I cannot. So it's really important for us to look at the child not as a vessel to be filled with as much knowledge or as many facts as possible, but rather to look to the child and see what it is that we can draw out of the child. That's what education means, out of the Latin to draw out. So we observe the child, we see what lives there as potential and we work to draw out of the child the genius that lives in that child's destiny. So education has very little to do, I think, with measuring the products that come from the child's performance, but much more to do with looking at the child and seeing what the child is bringing, because every child brings to us a puzzle or a riddle or a mystery, and we must know enough, we must be observant enough to be able to at least approach that puzzle, to be able to approach that mystery.
Speaker 1:How can or how should so, assuming that Waldorf education is the relevant form for-. Let me phrase it this way If you had the ability to somehow make Waldorf education be something that was paid for with public funds, so that there wasn't the private school restrictions that most people cannot afford a Waldorf school, how should we think about accountability and consistency and fidelity when you have teachers who have this approach of drawing out what's there and wait till the right time for it to come out? I'm going to give you a counter example, and this is from my life and that of my daughters. Full disclosure I attended Waldorf school from the womb through 12th grade, my daughter from preschool through eighth grade, and then she went on to a charter high school and there was some huge value. I saw, for example, the power of attention to aesthetic beauty and awe and reveling in nature, and those are things that are largely absent in my work in the public sector. Maybe we'll come back to that in a little bit.
Speaker 1:But what I also saw was at times that this idea of well, this is Waldorf, so it's different it was used as an excuse and a foil for kids actually not being taught things. So my daughter left her school and went on to high school and this is a kid whose report cards had always been stellar and she gets to high school and the level of math, for example, that they were doing. She needed a lot of support to get that up to speed. I think she talked about this on another podcast and she's certainly not alone in that. There's a lot. That's a common refrain. The same could be said of kids learning to read Okay, so it comes when it comes and you draw out what's in there, but at what point does that become an excuse for inadequate teaching and how could you scale that up?
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting because my own background is in public education and I have spent over 30 years in Waldorf education, first as a teacher and then later as an administrator, and now I see my grandchildren who have transitioned this last year into public school from a local Waldorf school that failed, and I see all of the really brilliant practical things which are being done in the school they're in now. There are things which are missing.
Speaker 1:Shout out to El Dorado.
Speaker 2:Yes, there are things that are missing, I think my granddaughter, who is nine, said we're learning a lot, but I don't feel like the heart is in it in the same way, and that's an interesting comment. What Waldorf education has, waldorf education is a brilliant curriculum and many, many things that are now being done in the public sector, in education or in other educational practices head, heart and hands, all kinds of different things really originated with Waldorf education.
Speaker 2:However, most Waldorf schools that I have been acquainted with in this country are not yet implementing, in all seriousness, the completeness of the Waldorf curriculum that was originally given. For example, the mathematical curriculum is so far ahead of what is being done in Waldorf schools. What is the answer? What is the problem? There are two, in my way of thinking. First of all, that the people who go into the trainings to become Waldorf teachers need to already be expert in reading and writing and in doing mathematics, in an understanding of the human being and an understanding of the scientific world, in an understanding of the educational systems that are in use in this country at least in this country, before they step into training institutions where they learn about the particulars of Waldorf education, what stands behind it, and develop, if they don't already have it within their souls, develop an artistic way of working with children, so that the children feel that they're being seen and nurtured. The problem is that too often Waldorf teachers do not understand that there's a difference in approach between the way you, as a kindergarten teacher, work with your children and the way you, as a fifth grade teacher, work with your children. Nurturing looks different in the kindergarten when you're preparing stone soup than it does in the fifth grade, where they have to have their time stables, they have to know their phonics, they have to be able to write cogenously, and so forth. A lack of understanding, or lack of a deep enough understanding of the different roles or the different approaches that teachers have to have at the different stages, I think has been a downfall. The other question which lives so much everywhere in human beings is how much freedom does one have and how much does one need to adhere to form?
Speaker 2:The people who have gravitated toward Waldorf education have in many ways been the people who wanted freedom and Resisted form, resisted the forms which they felt restricted them in their own educations, and that has led to Some, I think, enormous failures, mostly in the administrative area and in the area of accountability for teachers, so that it might even it perhaps could be said that teachers Would prefer to be given the freedom to do whatever they felt was the right thing without oversight, and and that doesn't work. There has to be freedom in the cultural sphere in order to have the ideas and to Put forth what, what seems to be intuitively the best thing, but there also has to be a sphere in which there are certain expectations that have to be met and they can't be ignored without Weakening of what the students are receiving. The administrative area of Walder schools has been in many ways a disastrous one because of this resistance to form. Also, I would say and I think I was like this too, in a feeling that Waldorf Education was everything and I could just live in that cocoon, whereas I've learned Later on that there's so much wisdom and in the practical life of schools that Waldorf teachers, waldorf administrators could learn from but resist learning from because they see it as filled with materialism or or filled with form without freedom, and I think that is also a Fallacy in judgment which has had results that have been disastrous.
Speaker 2:So if I were the fairy godmother In my later years and could wave a wand Across education in general, I would be saying have form, but don't let the form Become rigid, so rigid that life cannot breathe in it, and Let there be freedom to bring to students what they need, but make sure that what that you already know as teachers, what they need, make sure that you can see what they need, make sure that you have the skills to do it and if you don't have the skills. Learn the skills, because without that you are doing damage, and no child, whether they're in a Waldorf school or any other school, deserves to be limited by their education.
Speaker 1:So you touched on a lot of different themes and I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of jump around. Maybe we'll come back to the form form versus freedom tension a little bit later in here. But Another hashtag the three-fold community, that. So, before you answer, that just for listeners. You know we were raised in a community that was oriented around a Waldorf school and then also some other entities In a community, in the community, and I just want to hear your perspective on the three-fold community and I'll share some of mine.
Speaker 2:Well, first of all just say the three-fold community, which is an anthroposophical community Founded by those Early in the 20th century who wanted to have a place where they could live together, not all together in the same houses, but build houses and live in a community where they could enjoy conferences, enjoy activities, enjoy studying and and in fact Participate in the founding of a Waldorf education. It's interesting that most of the people who were in the founding years were people without children, but they Believed so strongly in Waldorf education that they wanted to give their resources and their efforts toward the starting of a school for other people's children, which is an interesting Selfless way of looking at it. And obviously that community has grown over the last few years and I think that's a very important thing to remember about the people who were in the founding years. The community has grown over the years in ways that one might not have imagined before, into a community which supports a school of Eurythmie, which is a form of movement done to the spoken word and music and is taught in the Waldorf school as well as used therapeutically, a Waldorf training institution, a Biodynamic farm farming program, a a Fellowship community which is close by, which is a community for the care of the elder person. It gave you, my children, the freedom of being able to get on your bike and ride up and down the street and go through the woods and go fishing in the stream and Know that if there was any problem you could go to this house or this house and it would be safe. And and Still. A community is made up of people. There are people who share more and there are people who share less. There are people who are more balanced and people who are less balanced, and People doing things for the right reasons. Maybe not all doing things for the right reasons, it's, it's human beings, but the eye felt as a, as a parent, that it was really as Wholesome a place for my children to grow up in as I as any I could think of, and I'm grateful for that. Most of my concentration, and theirs as well, was around the school and the activities of the school and the threefold community.
Speaker 2:The name threefold refers to an idea of Rudolph Steiners of the Social life of the human being, based actually on the three tenets of the French Revolution Liberty, egalité, humanité. So that we are free in our cultural, spiritual life. We are free in the world of ideas. Nobody can take that from us. We can, we have them. People may try, but we have that. We're free in that area.
Speaker 2:And then there's the area of egalité, which is Equality, and that's the area of the rights. So you and I have the same rights. We may come from different circumstances, but we have the same rights. And then the other one is fraternity. I'm sorry, it wasn't humanity, was fraternity. And that is the area of brotherhood and that's the economics fear. And the idea in the economics fear is that I Do what I can to serve your needs, you do what you can in order to serve my needs, and there is nowhere in the world, as far as I know that that, that those concepts have been brought to complete fruition. However, there are little sparks of it, which you can see In the threefold community and which you can see in other communities around the world.
Speaker 1:There. That was a lot there about the community, obviously, you mentioned a little bit about at the. Fundamentally it's made up of human beings and you know my experience of threefold was attention between that safety, as you mentioned, and then fear, fear of anything that was not of that community. So it could be a kid who went to the public school that was Half a mile away, that somehow and this might have been my imagining it as a kid, but they were somehow painted as being, you know You're dangerous, or you know soulless or whatever, or it could be riding your bike beyond the confines of the community into a neighborhood that didn't subscribe to the, to the threefold social order. Did that ever occur to you as a adult raising kids in a community like that, that we would have that kind of interpretation of Everything that was not the community being, I'm not even going to say lesser, but just so foreign that it seemed like it was threatening, menacing.
Speaker 2:Well, it certainly didn't occur to me then. You've pointed that out to me since, and I can really understand how that could come about, because At this time we're talking about the 70s and 80s one of the strongest Requests that the teachers in the Waldorf school made of parents was to keep Screen experience away from children as long as possible. So you, I remember, when you were a little boy, going to visit and I say this with great embarrassment, going to visit neighbors and standing in front of their television that was on trying to keep you from, as a three-year-old, watching the television. That seems completely ridiculous to me at this time.
Speaker 1:Or the first movie I saw, which was without your permission because I was at a summer camp and it was raining and so the raging alcoholic camp leader decided to take us into town so she could go to the liquor store but then also take us to Indium Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is the first movie I saw in a theater and I had my hands over my eyes the whole time. I was probably 11, 12. Or the coronation of, or not the coronation the wedding of Charles and Diana, which happened that summer actually. And again, everyone at the camp is watching on this black and white TV and I'm standing around the corner popping my head in and out, and I don't think you could have anticipated how that would lead to socially awkward situations. But also real soul searching, because we knew when we went to parties no junk food, no soda, no cake and no TV. Well, we're talking about freaking 1978. There's orange soda, fanta or whatever, there's Carvel cake, there's Wonder Bread and there's TV.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, there are many things about growing old that aren't so great, but one of the benefits of growing old is you begin to see perspectives that you didn't see before, and obviously, in my mind as a parent, I was wishing that you would have the very best and that you would be the healthiest possible, you would have the fewest disturbing experiences, and that, in terms of screens, I wanted you to be able to form your own very vivid capacity for making your own inner pictures, for imagining, rather than having them imposed from the outside, and if I had it to do over again, I would make it much clearer that I would rather you didn't do this. But if you are in a circumstance where it feels awkward not to, then you should go ahead and do what you think is the right thing. But I was much more. I was much less flexible in my thinking about how to navigate all that than I am as a grandparent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that was. I've talked to my daughter about this too. In the episode where she and I spoke about it, she talked about that kind of forbidden fruit thing where then it becomes something that you're super drawn to because you didn't have it, and that didn't really ever happen to me. It was more of a situation where I felt so strange and on the outside looking in, because even other kids who grew up in the same community didn't have nearly the strict rules at home that we did, so you could go to your neighbor's house and the kids were watching TV.
Speaker 1:Some of our best friends growing up one of your best friends, monica, had a totally different approach with her kids, and so that was the hard part, was like navigating that, whether it was that, whether it was vegetarianism with kids. You go through these stages where you're looking to see what other kids do and the experiences they have, and so I remember having a cookout because that's what we call them in those days on a school related cookout, and there's hot dogs and hamburgers and I was like in fear that someone was going to come and give me a hot dog and the teacher gave me new that we were vegetarian and so this is way before tofu dogs and put celery and carrots in a hot dog bun and put mustard and ketchup on them and gave it to me.
Speaker 1:And it was kind of getting dark so no one noticed. But then I was chewing my hot dog and everyone's like why is it crunchy? So those were all things that I don't think that there's damage. That's done when you feel like you're different as a kid, but it definitely takes a lot of processing to figure out, to take the good out of it, to figure out then for the next generation what you want to take from that and what you don't want to take from it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that one of the influences for my childhood of having a father who was very authoritarian and a mother who was very compliant with that authoritarianism is that I had not the same techniques for it, but the inner soul gesture of I know what's best for my children, this is what we're going to do. And it was only in the course of then saying to you what's time, if you want to have hamburgers, you'll have hamburgers, and working with all of you as you grew into adolescence and onward that I began to see ways in which things needed to be approached differently. Yeah, and I would say in my defense, I was making these decisions out of what I thought was the very best.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:However, in looking back at it, some of the things just make me laugh and others probably make me cry, because now, when I talk with any of you about your children or when I interact with my grandchildren, I'm much, much more able to look at questions from a wider perspective and say, okay, well, for example, there came a point when the question about soccer was a big question in our school and it was based on worry about damage to knees, with the side activity kicking and also head trauma, and I was pretty strong about not having soccer for students for those reasons.
Speaker 2:Ten years later, when screens had become something that students spent their time on instead of running around outside, I was able to say I'd rather have soccer, because they need to have the activity and they need to have the interactions, and maybe we can make some rules about heading the ball. But it's that kind of wider perspective thinking that I've had to try to adopt in my own biography, and I think the Waldorf schools need to make sure that their people are also working toward adopting those wider exercises of thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember when one of the steps in the process of enrolling my daughter in a in the Waldorf school was that the kindergarten teacher would come over and do a home visit and it was like a known thing that they were coming over to check if you had a TV. We're talking about 2005. And I remember you know families talking about how they would you should. Should you just put a cloth over your TV when miss so and so comes to the house, or should you take the TV and put it in another room? And it was nice. Now, when I think about it, it just seems almost a fool's errand. Because Kids in first grade, waldorf or not, or have access to cell phones, ipads. You go to the gas station. There's a screw, you know it's. So Times are different now though to the they're different.
Speaker 2:It was much easier in your day, when you were young, to lessen the influence of these things. Now now I see with my grandchildren it's absolutely a fool's errand. And you, instead, you have to look to ways to counteract rather than to deny. You have to think about ways to keep exposure to nature, to act, other activities, to make sure that there's a lot of social interaction, that people are learning the right cues and how to be with one another. But I guess that's why we're, that's why we incarnate, so we can learn.
Speaker 1:Well, and you, you've lived in a through an interesting span in some ways I often think about, like loving Bumpa. So bump was born in nineteen ten, and so he and he lived to ninety three, nineteen, ninety three, right so eighty three years old or so. And so he really. He was born before World War one and died when, just at the dawn although I don't think he really realized it, but just at the dawn of the internet as we knew it, like Email, was just starting to be a thing, but we didn't realize what that was going to look like.
Speaker 1:But you live through VCRs and he lived through, you know, definitely advances technologically and man on the moon, and so we thought, wow, he's really. And when he was born there was no such thing as flight. So that was Kitty Hawk, was what, nineteen, eighteen or somewhere around that, right from nineteen, fifteen and so it's a tremendous. But actually you have perhaps even lived through a span of even greater change that is accelerated so massively, even, let's say even, within my lifetime, and even, let's just say, from the time I was in high school till now, the last thirty something years it's incredible and what the whole question of what education really is has changed.
Speaker 2:Back in the day, we memorize things that we needed to learn in order to have a framework, and today we just ask Google or Siri. Right, and today, what seems to be the imperative in regard to education is to somehow teach people to think for themselves, to discern truth from falsity and to develop enough imaginative capacities so that they can have real empathy for other human beings, and that's a different order from what Was being taught to me when I was sitting in my little forum schoolhouse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's, it's, it's quite a you know, I think we're gonna. We may actually be facing a time when when we will look back on the start of screens in kids lives and look at certain behavior patterns that are a result of that, the, the ubiquity of ubiquitousness I'm not short the word of screens and people losing connection to nature, and things like that will be interesting to see in the future how that plays out. I have, I you've been very generous with your time, but I do have a couple more things I want to ask you about, mom.
Speaker 2:I could, I just interject something that I say I think is really important, and I've noticed that the capacity for self direction and willed activity in young people has decreased over the years of screens, over the years where everything seems to be at one's fingertips, and that's another element of education that we really are going to have to address. How do we ignite the motivation to do the hard things so?
Speaker 1:And also to realize that those things are at our fingertips because someone actually did the hard and is still doing the hard thing. So, for every one and creator in the tech space and someone who's thinking of ideas and building a company or whatever it is and a product, around that, there's millions and millions of end users, right, who just don't think about how it works, but but that work is still going on, right. It's just that you know, we're not even, we don't even think about what's under the hood, as we was. We log into an app, one of the things that I'm most grateful for and I joke about it, because people asked me how I got into podcasting and In the last episode, episode 50 of season one, I talk a little bit more about this, but you know, I remember asking you if I could have a radio. I was like I was probably like twenty five years old.
Speaker 2:You were in sixth grade.
Speaker 1:I was in sixth grade and you said I think it's time, but you have to build it yourself. And so Bumpa took me to Radio Shack, which was a thing back then, and we bought a crystal radio kit and he and I put this thing together and I learned at a basic level how this thing worked. And you know, I remember he soldered the things together and we taught me how to do that and that's how I actually started to listen to the radio baseball games.
Speaker 1:Baseball games games here had an earpiece, it only got a radio and and it was very, very basic, but at least I understood and had appreciation for kind of what was happening under the hood. I think that's. You know there are hard things still going on. To start a company, to think of a new product, to think of an app to. You know all of these, you know things come whoever started Uber eats or Uber or whatever it is like that's. There's a that's a lot of hard work, a lot of thinking, a lot of technical challenges to overcome.
Speaker 1:The challenge, I think, for raising our kids is how can we get them to see that and what the possibilities are, and that also that there's value in doing hard things like going out and going for a five mile run and you know that's cliched and cheesy, but it's true. You know Jeff K said we went to the moon not because it was easy but because it was hard. And so how? Like the open question, the rhetorical question is how do we educate For the next 50 years or 100 years, where it's very likely that the world of work will change so drastically that the average person may not even need to work, certainly won't need to work 40 hours, they might not need to work at all. So we may be coming into this area this time of of. You know, universal, what's it called? The universal income, where everyone earns kind of enough. Just they just get paid even if they're not working.
Speaker 1:I know there's some proposals around that that were in the last election cycle. We're not there yet, but with AI taking on huge chunks of work, I think we're gonna see a time when and it's gonna be huge big social turmoil and upheaval. Right is, how do you find value in your daily life now, knowing you don't have to go and put eight hours in and in office remotely? We're even in person. Rather, we even saw it now during COVID. Right that the technology Zoom. It would be no big deal for me to text you and say, mom, can we do a Zoom call? That's not a big deal at all. But five years ago you wouldn't even know what that was and I wouldn't maybe know what it was that's opened up. I've interviewed guests from all around the world on this show and it's simple, it's seamless, so it's very interesting.
Speaker 2:And part of this element of imagination, the capacity of imagination that one needs to have as a human being, is that you can then imagine the processes that are behind how a refrigerator works or, very simply, how a car works, because only through that do you really feel you have confidence as a human being to be in the world. So that's an important part of what education is.
Speaker 1:So a couple of other things. You had some ideas that were very much cutting edge for the 70s and now some of them are borne out in big, successful companies that are multi-billion dollar companies. So tell me about the organic food co-op and what the start of that was, because I have memories of some of that and mice running around on our back porch where we had barrels of grains that were stored there because you started a co-op. So what was behind that?
Speaker 2:Well, in the three-fold community there were many people who wanted to have as much quality food as possible, more than could be grown in the backyard and so I decided that I would start a co-op, which would mean then that people would put in orders once a month and we would collate all the orders and then we would go to New York City and pick up the big rounds of cheese and we would make orders from various companies and they would deliver them.
Speaker 2:And at first it happened all on our back porch and people would come. I think they ended up being 50 or so members. Families would come and pack, some people would be packed, some people would be packing, some people would be cutting all the different cheeses, and then people would come on a Saturday morning once a month and pick up their big box of all the things they had ordered. And it was really important to us in relation to trying to give our families the healthiest food that they could possibly have. So I was involved in that for quite a while. In fact, I was so involved that when Christopher, my third son, was born, when the older people would ask you and Peter about where Christopher comes from, you said mama got him at the co-op.
Speaker 1:Oh geez, and then it went on to become quite a. I think it's still around right, it's still.
Speaker 2:It became a store.
Speaker 1:A successful store and I don't know if it's a membership thing or not.
Speaker 2:It isn't the same kind of membership thing. Because they're paid employees and there weren't any paid employees back in the day when I did it, but it's still successful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's an early, early, early form of Whole Foods in a way. And interestingly, arawan which I remember an Arawan truck pulling into our driveway and thinking this is the weirdest thing Arawan has stores now around the country with the most ridiculously overpriced organic hipster food possible. So that's why I say you were about 45 years ahead of your time. Ok, I want to wrap, kind of pull some of the threads together. You've mentioned growing older. Tomorrow's your 79th birthday, so as of tomorrow, you'll be entering into your 80th year.
Speaker 1:So we've had a kind of a conversation about different parts of your life and experiences and you mentioned something about growing older and that not all parts of it are positive but some things are Originally when the impetus for today is really that you had mentioned to me about a year ago. Hey, at some point I want to do a podcast about what it's like to grow old. I was like, ah, that's. I don't know how uplifting that is, but that's certainly part of it. So what do you want to share about your reflections on that? And I'll leave it there.
Speaker 2:I remember hearing an interview with Laura Linney, the actress, someone asking her if she regretted growing older, and she said no. When I think of all of my friends who never had that opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's better than the alternative is what they say, right?
Speaker 2:And the French saying if youth would and if old age could. So obviously one looks back on a life and regrets many things, and one looks back on a life and is grateful for many things.
Speaker 1:Without. I don't want to put you too much on the spot, but what's your biggest regret? And then we'll go to the thing that you're most grateful for.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest regret is, at various times, not being able to overcome myself, not be able to transform enough to make the steps that were necessary. Being an administrator, as you know, and I had an experience, although not as extensive as yours and not as profound as yours, but being an administrator and wanting to do the very best at that and doing some good things and wishing I hadn't done other things. So it's always a question of trying to keep up with the necessity for change and development, I think, is the regret that one can't always do that, or I couldn't always do that. Maybe other people can, but I couldn't always.
Speaker 2:Gratitude for a life that gave me areas of study and insight that have kept me from despair. And gratitude for my children and my family, my extended family, my friends, who have shown me so much about what the world really means and what caring and kindness really mean in the world. And as I grow old, there is, of course, a very definite and definite horizon, which grows closer and closer how to cross the threshold? What does it mean for those one leaves behind in terms of being able to still give support? What does it mean to be able to face one's own karma and learn and look toward the possibility of redoing and redeeming.
Speaker 2:One of the hardest things about growing old has been that one becomes invisible In gatherings of younger people without any other older people around. The younger people are actively involved, conversing, having ideas and thoughts, and the older person is sitting and listening and I so many times want to add what I have gained out of a life of trial and error. But often there isn't that space and I wish to tell all the younger people in the world listening to older people can be an education in itself. I think that's really important.
Speaker 1:Do you think there's a cultural side to that? In individualized countries where the family unit is pretty dispersed so even in our family we've got 3,000 miles between siblings and between you and some of your kids and grandkids, and so you might only physically see them once a year or something we don't have multi-generational living arrangements, for example, in a way that a lot of other cultures have and still have been able to preserve that. Do you think that's part of the fact that it's just kind of like survival of the fittest when people are talking and so energy is just going to whoever has the most energy wins in the short term?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm sure that's part of it, and we live in a society that values moving toward the future and that values what the intellect can bring.
Speaker 2:And often in older years, what an older person can offer is not so much of the intellect as it is of the richness of life experience, which is different.
Speaker 2:It has a different quality to it and sometimes the value of looking to the past in order to understand what not to do in the future, and we don't tend to do that as much in a direction yeah, we don't tend to do that. But, on the other hand, one of the greatest values of in my life anyway of growing older, is seeing how you, my children, my grandchildren are meeting the world, and that for me is really exciting to see that a way of thinking and a way of life that is now passing away with those of us who are older is being transformed into something different, with different challenges. I do worry about what my grandchildren will face in the future, hoping that they have the courage, because it takes courage to grow old. It takes courage to face the world as it is, it takes courage to stand in the face of evil, it takes courage for all those things, and I hope that that is there and that I can help with that, even as I'm across the threshold.
Speaker 1:Do you think Lovey and Bump had similar reflections as they were your age? I mean, I kind of thinking back on my last interactions with both of them, they were 79, 80, 81, 82. And do you think they had similar experiences? Did they talk to you about what it was like to grow old, or you were in the midst of parenting young kids, and so the beat just went on.
Speaker 2:I think I read an interview that my mother had someone interviewed her at the fellowship community and it was a really cool, but did they have tens of listeners like this?
Speaker 2:And it was a wonderful interview, and she talked about how important her belief in the power of the spiritual world was, and I share that. My father didn't talk about these things. He may well have thought about them, he didn't talk about them, yeah. But I do remember one thing and it gives a different face to the actual experience of dying, and that is that my father had been having exercises in curative urythmi as he became more and more ill with lymphoma, and one of the exercises that the teacher was doing with him was to drawing his hands from above his head slowly down toward his heart to find his heart. To find his heart, and the night that he was dying, this very bright intellectual man for whom reason and thought were so important, the gestures that he was making were drawing toward his heart. And I think in education as well as in life, that's what we have to do.
Speaker 1:Do you think that the 80 of today is not the 80 of 30 years ago?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm luckier than my parents in terms of their health, that I'm more mobile and more able to get around.
Speaker 1:You can still drive. I can still drive In quotations. You can drive in Santa Fe I can still operate.
Speaker 2:I can do all my household chores.
Speaker 1:I can help out around.
Speaker 2:You can volunteer and stay active and do things, and that wasn't possible by then for my parents.
Speaker 1:For either of them right For either of them. So you think that was a reflection of just the times in which they lived and you know, or it was just the luck of what happened?
Speaker 2:It's probably a desk, any question. And for me, when I look now at what can you do as an 80-year-old person in the world? You're no longer working, you're no longer on a daily basis, interacting in such a way that you could actually make a difference.
Speaker 2:But you can make a difference, but you can make a difference. And if what Riddar Steiner says is true that thoughts are as real and potent in the world as actions, then I can work on intensifying the positivity and accuracy of my thinking, while also helping my grandchildren with their homework.
Speaker 1:That's good stuff right there of a life well-lived. I'm going to ask you a hypothetical question in a minute, but is there anything that we didn't touch on today that you would like to add as a coda to today's conversation?
Speaker 2:Well, since this podcast centers around the question of education and education happens in the home and it happens in a school and it happens throughout life given the experiences one faces, it has really begun to be for me that, as educators either as parents, as educators, as friends, as educators as teachers or even as administrators, as examples the one most important thing, strangely enough, is love, not in a sentimental way at all, but a respect and appreciation for the existence of the other human being.
Speaker 1:That's a good place too. That's a good coda for today's conversation. My hypothetical is this you have the chance to design a bumper sticker for your Prius, your Zippy Prius that you've had for a long time and is still holding up. Well, shout out to Toyota. What does your see? This is the real life aspect of this podcast. Phones ring, cats meow and people send text messages, but what does your bumper sticker say to the world about what you find important in the world?
Speaker 2:Be grateful, be willing to work hard, be willing to learn, be compassionate. It's a very long bumper sticker.
Speaker 1:That's a great place to end today's conversation. Mom, I want to thank you. This has been a great journey through history and a great way to kick off season two of the podcast. So thank you for your time today.
Speaker 2:Thank you, my dear son.
Speaker 1:Good, she didn't even refer to me in the third person. Thank you for listening to the superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchial for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day. Thank you.