Jack Petrash gave this TED talk a few years ago. Our Steiner community will have the opportunity to listen to him next Tuesday as part of our Community Education Program.

He recognized how our world is changing at a rapid and dramatic pace. How every decade brings technological advances and unforeseen social change. So, how can we prepare our children for a world we can’t envision? The best way to do that is to educate our children to develop three essential capacities: a capacity for vibrant and vigorous activity, a capacity for a sensitive and yet resilient emotional life, and a capacity for clear, focused, original, thinking.

When we teach children through a foundation of active self-initiated play and a solid framework of artistic experiences, we help them develop an essential ability, a capacity for dynamic, curious, and original thinking, a thinking that enables our children to ask the questions that are still waiting to be asked.

Mr. Petrash is the founder and director of the Nova Institute. He is an educator with over thirty years of classroom experience, and a teacher of teachers. He has written extensively on issues pertaining to innovative classroom instruction, and is the author of Understanding Waldorf Education: Teaching from the Inside Out. His parenting pieces have appeared in the Washington Post and on National Public Radio and he is also the author of Covering Home: Lessons on the Art of Fathering from the Game of Baseball and Navigating the Terrain of Childhood: A Guidebook for Meaningful Parenting and Heartfelt Discipline.