Building Healthy Community: Towards the Cultivation of Human Freedom

An open community lecture for parents and staff of Berkshire Waldorf School

Our patterns of thinking, our feelings and our will impulses are directly influenced by the community in which we grow. The foundations of both inner freedom and unfreedom are laid down through the course of childhood. With the rise of technology permeating extensively our outer lives, we are now being faced with its effects on our inner lives and its artificial influence over the development of thinking, feeling and will impulses. Technology is forming our community’s future and in doing so extending its persuasive influence into the inner capacities of its members.

We can choose to be ready as individuals, as parents, and as a collective community, with capacities—with the necessary inner strengths—to freely choose the way of life we determine to be supportive of the progression of humanity. We need to establish communities that are dedicated to human freedom; communities in which community health, child development and education, and social life are imbued with impulses supportive of the cultivation of individual freedom.