KHUJAND, July 6, 2009, Asia-Plus — The Khujand prosecutor’s office ruled on July 2 that the only Waldorf school in Tajikistan, located in the city of Khujand, be closed down, Asia-Plus has learned from the Khujand education department head Mirzoahmad Ahmadzoda.
According to him, the school administration is given ten days to transfer its 18 teachers and 213 pupils to other schools of Khujand. “The prosecutor’s office ruling followed the results of the last attestation carried out in October 2008,” said Ahmadzoda, “Inspection by the attestation commission recorded numerous shortcomings in the school’s activities, and therefore, the school failed to get license for continuing its functioning.”
Ahmadzoda said that the school did not have school’s charter, technical certificate and resolutions from Khujand’s center for sanitary and epidemiological supervision and firefighting service. “Besides, according to the commission resolution, the school does not have computer classes and teachers without proper education teach related subjects and the knowledge level of the school students is poor,” said the Khujand, education official, “The school administration had enough time to remove the recorded shortcomings.”
In the meantime, teachers with the school and school student parents do not agree with the decision to shut down the school. According to them, the commission’s resolution is preconceived.
“There are school in the province that are placed in trailers and the level of knowledge of their students is much worse; however, they have licenses,” the said.
Waldorf education is a pedagogy based upon the educational philosophy of the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy. Learning is interdisciplinary, integrating practical, artistic and conceptual elements. The Waldorf approach emphasizes the role of the imagination, developing thinking that includes a creative as well as an analytic component. The overarching goals of this educational approach are to provide young people the basis on which to develop into free, moral and integrated individuals, and to help every child fulfill his or her unique destiny, the existence of which anthroposophy posits. Schools and teachers are given considerable freedom to define curricula within collegial structures.
The first Waldorf school was founded in 1919; there are now about 1000 independent Waldorf schools and 1400 independent Waldorf kindergartens located in approximately sixty countries throughout the world, making up one of the world”s largest independent educational systems. There are also Waldorf-based public and Charter schools, homeschooling environments, and schools for special education, and Waldorf methods have been adopted by numerous educators teaching in other state and private schools.
The first classes working on the Waldorf system were set up in Tajikistan seven years ago, on the basis of school # 13 in Khujand. In 2004, an education complex, kindergarten-school, functioning on the basis of the Waldorf methods was established in Khujand.
Such schools currently also function in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.
