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View Full Version : The Steiner community/The FOSS movement



djbsteart1
March 12th, 2008, 01:55 PM
After a long search through the forums I cannot find anything relating to Rudolf Steiner, I was very surprised by this as there are so many similarities between his ideas and what he has inspired in the World, and what the goals of Linux, but notably Ubuntu are.

Firstly, I guess I should say where my background on this matter comes from, I was born into a Steiner community as my mother worked in Garvald, a care home based on Steiner's philosophy, from age 4 to 6 I attended the ERSS Kindergarten, and then went on to spend 12 years in education there. The ERSS is the only Steiner school at present in Scotland that goes from kindergarten to class 12, the final year. During this time, I was living in Garvald West Linton, which was the first Garvald to be founded back in the 60's I think, this community also follows many of Steiner's philosophies.

I will now fail completely to give a brief summary of what Steiner stands for, but I will do my best, feel free to add/remove things that you feel should be.

Throughout the Steiner community there is a feeling of freedom, one of the main aims of the community is to allow someone to have the freedom to take the path that they wish. Also, things are treated far more individually, in Schools this translates as more one to one time, or in general community settings, each person has the full right to there own voice.
The other main idea in Steiner education is that the individual is treated as a whole, not just a piece of meat that is being turned into a accountant, engineering, biologist, teacher, or whatever. This leads to a far more rounded experience through the education leading to the child have experience in many fields of study out with the ones the she/he has specialised in. This is done through main lessons, where a subject is taught for around about one and a half hours each morning for about three weeks. This is taught to all students regardless of there choice in exams, the material is orientated so that it can be understood be all. For example, there may be 5 biology main lessons throughout the 12 years, his means that all students will leave with a good understanding of biology regardless if they sat an exam in it or not. This also allows for more interest and less mainstream subjects like projective geometry and technical drawing to appear in the syllabus.

I don't find it a very large stretch to see similarities with these values in the open source movement. For instance, the individuality that someone receives, can easily bee seen in Ubuntu, only last night I installed a base system, and although it have Ubuntu at its core, there is only what I want installed. Then we come to support, the support in the forums is far more personal than being treated like a chicken by someone you can't understand in a call centre in some country a 1000 miles away.
When using windows I knew how to browse the internet and do some word processing, but I never had the chance to learn anything else, the experience that you get through using Linux shows you how to do so many new things that you just wouldn't get exposed to in windows.

Also I feel that it is far easier to have a voice when using Linux, if I felt the need i could fork some code and make a distro called DonaldOS, but anything like that is just out of the question with closed source systems.

Then we come to educating as a whole/learning through doing, I can't even begin to describe the benifits of this, but i hope you can see that Ubuntu does it very well. Not only do you actually 'do' things when using Linux; command line and various other bits of editing due to complete control, but you also learn so much about things just by using the system, for instance I had no idea about the differences in KDE, Gnome, XFCE and all of the other DE's and I'm still learning, I'm learning more about various filesystems, more about the evolution of computers.

I feel I have gone on a little so there is my 2 cents about something that I hope you will find interesting. Discuss!

Donald

popch
March 12th, 2008, 04:14 PM
Altough I live quite near to Dornach I have not thought about this seeming relation between FOSS and Steiner.

However, once you mentioned it, I find it rather amusing to point out that the Ubuntu color theme with all those browns and softly hued colors could be perceived as somewhat related to Steiner's ideas.

djbsteart1
March 12th, 2008, 06:18 PM
Altough I live quite near to Dornach I have not thought about this seeming relation between FOSS and Steiner.

However, once you mentioned it, I find it rather amusing to point out that the Ubuntu color theme with all those browns and softly hued colors could be perceived as somewhat related to Steiner's ideas.

Forgetting that 'hippie' ideas and colour schemes, I find the similarities go deeper. But then again that could just be me. I had tried to avoid those things as they are just common but they are also true.

corney91
March 12th, 2008, 09:47 PM
We're learning about Steiner schools in our German lessons because the person we practice our speaking with was a student in one of them. I can't really give my opinion - I don't know enough about them yet ;)

But here's the obligitary Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner):)

djbsteart1
March 13th, 2008, 04:05 PM
We're learning about Steiner schools in our German lessons because the person we practice our speaking with was a student in one of them. I can't really give my opinion - I don't know enough about them yet ;)

But here's the obligitary Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner):)

Thanks for the link, Austrian philosophy is makes excellent light reading.

djbsteart1
March 14th, 2008, 12:58 PM
My Steinery friends are shocked that I would do such a thing as this, claiming that computers are not part of Steiners philosophy, this is true, but this isn't about computers, they then read it and agreed. Hypocrites.