Waldorf News

The Sword, the Pen, and the Arrow: Transforming Discipline through Disciplines

The Middle School aged student is at a time of crossroads, leaving the relative peace of childhood and encountering the first bewildering gusts of the high-school whirlwinds ahead. The body is a cycloned chemistry lab, and the emotions as random as they are unpredictable. Often the heaviness of adolescence weighs on the body and on the fragile teenage psyche as well. Communication can be a major challenge for the adolescent. Disciplinary words from well-meaning parents do not always fall on receptive ears.

Jaimen McMillan, master fencer and founder of Spacial Dynamics®, and Katie Moran, certified archery instructor and experienced movement education teacher, are on a mission to introduce children aged 11 to 14 not to discipline, but to disciplines. McMillan and Moran are teaming up this July at the Spacial Dynamics Institute in upstate New York to offer middle-schoolers a weeklong summer program that interfaces the disciplines of fencing, archery, and writing. Youth need real disciplines from which they can discover, learn, and internalize real life lessons. Fencing and Archery are ancient arts that are perfectly suited to give youth a wholesome introduction to discipline. Both of these activities allow the participant to experience “in-deed” that an adherence to form gives freedom. Age-old, tried and proven methods are not chains that bind but are keys to new possibilities. Adolescents will persist in, and painstakingly practice, such exacting parameters of performance because they simultaneously give results and insight.

Outer expression of the inner world of a teenager often vacillates randomly between hapless, flailing arguments and sullen, stony silence. When verbal communication is challenging, there is a third tool that a young person can wield: The Pen. Writing can become an instrument for the soul. The pen can be handled like a blade—with flourish, flurries, and finesse. One can use a pen like an archer’s bow, targeting a thought with precision, power, and poignancy. The pen can become even mightier than the sword—and as true as an arrow.

The romance of these three disciplines—fencing, archery, and writing—can carry the youth through the necessary soreness of the muscles, frustration of the psyche, and the distractions of the whirling mind. Youth will embrace discipline if it is brought with and through mastery. Haphazardness willingly makes way for the enhanced accuracy and the effectiveness of proper mechanics.  The disciplines themselves become the masters that educate. Through focused attention, the adolescent is initiated into the veracities that can only be encountered when one finally “gets it right”. The arrow does not lie. The sword gives honest, direct feedback. Written words sing when they ring true.

Mastery is the reward of the committed. In today’s culture of instant gratification, youth are crying out to be met, face-to-face, by something real and substantive. Instead, they are offered virtual reality, which gives them virtually nothing.  A movement discipline is an activity that, if accurately followed, leads pupils to themselves and to universal principles as well. With a discipline, something is true simply because it works. In these hand-oriented arts, goal-orientedness, word-smithing, and social interaction pave the pathways to sovereignty, inventiveness, and independence.

In this summer’s residential program, young participants will bridge the artificial division between athletics and academics. The youth will learn the dynamics that unite these three arts by having direct experiences of the shared principles that unite them. The same processes that flow from mastering the sword and the arrow will be transposed into fluency with the pen. Academic literacy will flow forth into poetry in motion. These dynamic principles will echo in enlivened space: the clang of the sword, the resonance of the well-chosen word, and the whisper of a truthful arrow.

This is not just a program for middle-schoolers. In this interactive model, teachers will be able to learn these rare skills themselves. Before the youth arrive, McMillan, Moran, and qualified support staff will introduce teacher-participants to the techniques, goals, and methods. Two days later, they will learn by assisting in the instruction of the middle schoolers. The teacher-participants will be able to receive certification to offer introductory fencing and archery classes to adolescents in educational and recreational settings.

The Sword, the Pen and the Arrow is not solely for the talented but for all who want to learn to take aim at their own goals. Whatever your vision, it is worth fighting for: draw your sword. Whatever your goal, dare to aim for it: draw your arrow. Whatever moves you, give it your word: draw your letters. Each discipline speaks the same universal language: mastery.

For more information about the Sword, the Pen and the Arrow,
Youth program – bit.ly/1thTNRS
Adult program – bit.ly/1zl3nGe
Visit spacialdynamics.com spacialdynamics.com and facebook.com/SwordPenArrow.

Photos courtesy of the Spacial Dynamics® Institute.