The land and property

  The biggest problem is the land and property. The landlord only owned the school building but not the land. The landlord leased the land from the local government for forty years to build a holiday resort ten years ago.  We finally bought the buildings from the owner and lease the land from the village government. The lease is 35 years. But, the city government can take the land away anytime if there is rezoning take place.  They will pay us with compensation and we will have to move. Otherwise, we will stay there till 35 years and renew the contract after that.  It is not very ideal but it is what we can manage to have the school because the price of the land where we are is 20 million US dollars now.

The lack of Funding

 Everyone in our school worked without salary since we built the school. We only started to pay our teachers and staff from September 2005. It is really the minimum. We still have a hard time to cover the operating fee. And there is a great need to expend the buildings so that we can meet the requirement of the laws.  Our school is not regally operated as an elementary school because we do not have adequate space. We are under kind of protection by our friend who works in the government office.  Once the grade school building and sport field are built we will grant the license.   

Legal and Political problem

The government does not support private schools financially at all. Many private schools are business orientate schools. The government even collects tax from them if they do not register the school as not for profit school. We register our school as not for profit and not for credit school, which mean we do not pay tax and do not get credit to provide children elementary schooling. Because of this, many parents do not feel secure the quality or our school. Anyhow, we are working hard to get the full credit to provide children elementary schooling. Otherwise, we will crash into the current laws if we continually give children full day course without accreditation of elementary schooling. We can do this because the head of the education department visited our school and protect us from the troublesome laws. But, we are putting him in the difficult situation if anyone sues us for any reason.

The local police have noticed that there isn’t any small school and kindergarten alike us that there are so many foreigners working visiting to our school. We do need to register our foreign visitor with local police and the them where whey are living, how long they will stay and what is the nature of visiting. They watch us very closely. The chief officer has warned us that do not let any foreigner stay in our school overnight for he doesn’t want to be accused if anything goes wrong. Otherwise, he will turn the watching job to the secret police. He also questions about the source of our funds. We do not let them know where our funds come from. People are easily forgetting that we are still under the shadow of the communist for the appearance of China is totally capitalism. We are silently doing what we can, but we are very much aware where the board lines are.

The need of training for the teachers

Once we had more adults than the children. In fact, we do not have enough trained teachers. There aren’t any trained Chinese teachers out there to hire. We have to train our own teacher. Many of them are in the process of training. We invite experienced teachers from the West to give courses in our school and send teachers to the training courses in Thailand. Some teachers are also working in the school as assistants. We had also set up a three years part time teacher-training program and the year’s part time kindergarten training program.  The six weeks are not enough for our teachers. In the meantime, our teachers work full time, it is too much for them to take too. Waldorf education has been widely accepted by Chinese parents, now the question is how we will bring it out to the people. What we are doing will be the example of whole China since we are the first school in China.  How do we show the quality of waldorf education is our urgent need?

Working with the parents

The ideal of Waldorf education has been appreciated. But, there are few who really trust us and share the vision that we are carrying with us. They show tremendous courage by sending their children to us. The extremely examination oriented education system in China makes our parents really worry about their children getting enough academic study in our kindergarten or school. This is the most common and difficult issue for us. On one hand, we have to hold our vision and believe strongly the basic principles of Waldorf education. On the other hand, we need to find a way to help our parents out. Yet, we can’t compromise and go too far away from Waldorf ideals. We worked as the way that we are playing Taiji with Yinyan principle, which is keeping both in balance. It needs a great deal of time to practice.

Anthroposophical work is working out of trust worldwide. So do we, but it is a big challenge for us in China. You may know that trust has been broken down totally during the political mess during the cultural revolution thirty years ago, plus the country is heading to a crazy commercialization recently, making it worse. We must bring back trust to the people before we start our work.  We are gradually building trust between the parent and us and trust between children and parents. It is still a long way to go. You can’t imagine that a few parents call our teachers everyday. They wanted to check out how their children doing everyday in the kindergarten in detail. They want to know what we are feeding their children and how their children were eating and napping? Did they wash their hands before eating? They even designed a questionnaire for our teachers to fill every day. The demands that come from these parents and grandparents are really incredible.

Administration and Human relationship

 As the founders of school, Li zhang, Zewu and Harry are taking the major responsibility of the school. We are working out of our experiences in Anthroposophy communities and Waldorf schools and trying to practice three folding in our school administration work. We are working on consensus decision making with the colleges of teachers. We are keeping our financial report clear and open to the teachers, friends, parents and those who support our school. This is quite new for Chinese in China. We are working very hard to get people understanding why and how. We are working in the light of anthroposophy and we can feel the radiation of the light shine though each individual. They are happy and enjoy in their works in our school.

However, there is still a culture gap and misunderstanding in our work for we do not have experience of democracy in our culture before. Many people are perusing democracy one way or the other. At the first stage of our school development, the school was opening to whoever were interested building the school together. When we were trying to exercise some kind of democracy such as trying to reach a consensus agreement, it was impossible. It was a misunderstanding that democracy means sharing the decision making power instead of responsibility taking out of one’ s own will. It is easy to exercise the power on making decision together, but it is not easy to take responsibilities for some people. So, there are some people felt that they are left out from our works. They broke down the trust between us then cultivated some negative forces by spreading rumors around.

We spent a lot of time and energy to reconcile relationship in our school in September 2005. It is much better now.

In fact, the strength and the courage that we are carrying almost reach our limit. We believe that the light always comes with darkness so we do care about the human relationship through the insight of Anthroposophy and ancient Chinese philosophy. There is a great need to continually nurture us with spiritual light. This can bring our consciousness into our daily work.