Waldorf Matters ..... Human Biology and Waldorf Education
Mr Alex Murrell is Subject Guardian for Science at Elmfield, in addition to teaching Mathematics and being the Class 11 Guardian. In our weekly blog about key aspects of Steiner Waldorf education, Alex shares his thoughts on the teaching of Human Biology.
The greater the scientist, the more he or she is impressed with his ignorance of reality…. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he reaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder. Alan Watts
I have been teaching Human Biology to Class Ten and each of the organ systems we have looked at have their own marvellous complexities. Each of our kidneys has a million of these fine tubes called Nephrons woven intricately around by blood capillaries so that our blood can be refreshed and its water content regulated .
Nephron from a Human Kidney
The passages to our lungs divide and branch like an enormous oak tree leading to alveoli and there are more of these than leaves on the tree. This is where the gases oxygen and carbon dioxide are exchanged, keeping us alive from minute to minute.
Group of Alveoli in the Lungs
A trillion red blood cells, through the heart’s flowing rhythms, carry the life-sustaining oxygen to every one of our cells. These carriers live for about four months and as a consequence our bones have to create new red blood cells at the staggering rate of 150 million every minute. Such is the level of regeneration required to live within a human form!
Red Blood Cells Under the Microscope.
It would be too simple to say the heart pumps the blood. When we run, the form and movement of the heart become one with the dynamics of the flow itself.
The task of many organ systems in the body is something called homeostasis which means the maintenance of the stable inner environment of the body in order that all the activities of life may continue.
As the COP 26 conference has been going on I went “off topic” for a few minutes and was impressed how some of the class were immediately ready to share their own views on this major contemporary issue and event. I suggested to the class that as human beings are now responsible for maintaining our outer environment perhaps we could learn from the systems that maintain our environment within. The biological idea of homeostasis is exactly analogous to the idea of sustainability, and we have in the past few decades become increasingly aware of the living nature of the whole earth .
“The highest to which a person can attain is wonder, and if the prime phenomena makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit.”
The Earth as seen from the Moon