I am writing this with a 15-year-old daughter who has known no other education but a Steiner one. Our home is in Spotswood, and it was through a group of friends that we stumbled upon the Little Lorikeets Steiner playgroup in Yarraville when Daisy was two years old. Later we did the trip over the bridge to Albert Park for two years to the Steiner kindergarten, Children’s Garden. 

Next, we caught the train for seven years to the Steiner stream at Collingwood College. For the last three years Daisy has been at Sophia Mundi and the somewhat crazy travel from the western suburbs continue. Yet all this travel, while exhausting, has been deeply intentional.

Our journey is an unfolding one where, utterly ignorant of all things Steiner when we began, intuition alone has been our guide to keep going forward with this pedagogy. On the way we have found our family’s values recalibrated again and again to the extraordinary goodness, wisdom and depth of understanding of the human condition that is the Steiner education. As parents we have been taught by Daisy’s teachers as much as Daisy has been taught. Trusting the light of this education, we were supported in our convictions to simplify our home, reduce technology, plant gardens. We embraced the philosophy of the arts as a spiritual threshold, offering a relationship with transcendence, an experience of God. 

People often ask us for the evidence of the fruit of a Steiner education. In our own extended family, we have battled with doubt and cynicism for taking an alternative education path. But now we simply point to Daisy. There is something so beautiful about Steiner educated young folk. No child is free from struggle or suffering, but the wisdom of the Steiner education holds them until they can hold themselves. 

Daisy is growing deep roots. These roots include compassion, an ethical mindset, a freedom of expression and a love for this earth. Her own unique destiny will unfold in time. Inner quietness, self-reflection, and an opening to the mystery of goodness, is what we increasingly witness in her and in her class peers. 

Very beautifully, our journey isn’t over.

- Sally Nansen