The art of education
On 20 and 21 September the St Petersburg Centre for the Art of Education celebrated its 25th anniversary with prominent guests.
The Waldorf movement in Russia began in the 1990s, when teachers from European Waldorf institutions came to share their experiences in various cities. Today, the Waldorf movement in Russia boasts twenty schools and over twenty smaller school initiatives. This means that out of the 100 years of Waldorf Education we have been actively involved for 25!
We started with fifteen pupils in our centre for the art of education. From this original class 1 a full school has grown with 160 students attending classes 1 to 11 – with an optional class 12. In addition, we now have a kindergarten and a parent-and-child group, and we offer training programmes, lectures for parents, workshops for children and adults, guest seminars for eurythmy therapy and eurythmy, and occasional teacher training seminars.
One of the special guests at our celebration was Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor, who said that his children attended a Waldorf School. Other visitors included graduates, teachers and educators, lecturers of the Waldorf Teacher Seminar in the 1990s and Marion Fischbach, our founder and former mentor, who represented the Hanns Voiht Foundation that provided funding for our school building. We were particularly pleased to see former students and their children and parents.
A special gift was presented by all the pupils from class 2 upwards who, under the direction of their eurythmy teacher Olga Gerassimova, performed the Russian folktale The Magic Swan Geese.
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