School is More than Just Imparting Knowledge: Educational and Personal Growth at the SEKEM School

Do you remember your first day at school, your first presentation or your first performance in front of the class and the entire school community?

It takes a lot of courage and self-confidence to stand up in front of other children and present what you have prepared yourself. But once you have done it, you go back to your chair in the class feeling strengthened and self-confident.

In the SEKEM school, more than 300 children have been able to experience this every year for over 30 years and keep growing from it. From the very beginning, it was important to SEKEM to encourage people – young and old – and to support them in their personal development. In the SEKEM school, there are many opportunities for the children to develop independently through artistic projects. For example, at this year’s Autumn Festival, the children and young people of the SEKEM School were able to present their skills together in the choir and orchestra on the big stage in front of the entire SEKEM community. The children’s facial expressions, which seemed somewhat tense with excitement, quickly turned into faces beaming with joy as the first notes rang out. Everyone in the audience could feel the positive energy that was released.

At this year’s Autumn Festival, the children of the SEKEM School presented their skills together in the choir and orchestra on the big stage in front of the entire SEKEM community.

We are convinced that it is precisely these moments that will help the children in their later lives! They have just as legitimate a place in a good school education as learning spelling and mathematical rules. Therefore, the SEKEM school has added some subjects and contents – based on Waldorf education – to the Egyptian curriculum.

40 years after the foundation of SEKEM, the SEKEM community developed vision goals for the coming 40 years. The focus is on carrying what has been learned so far into the whole country. In this way, the concept of the SEKEM school is also to be implemented in other schools in Egypt, so that even more children have the opportunity to develop academically and personally.

At SEKEM School children shall develop joy in learning and gain something for themselves in addition to the content.

To achieve this goal, for example, teachers from the region around SEKEM were invited to the SEKEM School, where they participated in training sessions together with their SEKEM colleagues. The focus was on different approaches how to structure lessons in a diversified way so that the children develop joy in learning and gain something for themselves in addition to the content.

For a country like Egypt, education is the key to progress: only by investing in people can a country develop further. So SEKEM, together with all its employees, friends and supporters, would like to play a part in giving the people of Egypt access to good school education, but also to good personal education.

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