Exhibition - Flipbook - Seite 17
Foundations
Life with the children was experienced as the central social challenge
and this meant that human relationships among the staff would have to
provide the greatest possible human and spiritual security for the children. Finally, in the endeavour to recover and to live according to spiritual
values, the challenge of Christianity as put forward by Rudolf Steiner to
people of today was a strong formative force.
All this gave rise to what has become a way of life, still in many respects
tentative, rudimentary, unbaked, but an attempt to live according to
spiritual laws and the recognition of the individuality in child and fellow
man as a manifestation of the divine. The festivals, the many greater and
lesser forms of life, the mode of administration and the economical
management peculiar to the Camphill Movement were moulded and
laboured upon in the first years at Camphill.
Among the staff of the Camphill Schools there are many younger people.
This makes it possible that in spite of twenty-five years of existence,
Camphill has not grown «old». It still feels that it has a lot to learn, that
it must make a great effort to remain in the front ranks of the armies
that have fought and still must fight for the handicapped child, because
each new decade brings with it new challenges, new dangers and new
insight, and the standing of the handicapped child in the world of today
– tomorrow – must ever be newly assessed and seen.
Thomas Weihs, 1943
St. John’s Festival, 1953
By 1950 there were 250 children and youngsters being looked
after in the five schools estates, living together with more than
100 co-workers and their children.
Cooking, Camphill House 1948
Riding at
Camphill House, 1950