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S E V E N Camphill in America: Mental Handicap and a New Social Impulse Let us look at the human being as a living picture, as the teacher in the Waldorf school learns to do. This is what teachers and coworkers in the schools and villages for the mentally handicapped, also based on Rudolf Steiner's indications, learn to do. In America, the work with the handicapped is done primarily in the Camphill centers. Camphill is neither the first nor the only setting for the handicapped based on Steiner's pioneering, but it is the primary instrument so far in this country. Camphill is an international movement, founded in 1940 by Karl Kb'nig, M.D. (1902—1966). Its name derives from its first home, Camphill House, near Aberdeen, Scotland. There the movement started, when Dr. Konig and a group of young associates from Vienna left their homes to begin a new life in a place offered to them as sanctuary from Nazism. The decision to take on a work with the handicapped was made partly because of the striking similarity in the life situations of the handicapped children and the homeless doctors, artists, and teachers who came, sometimes in great secrecy and danger, from Central Europe. Both groups were estranged from the normal flow of social life, both wounded, and in need of healing. Both, for quite different reasons, were in some special way prepared by destiny to receive a new social vision and to work together to build a new culture. Unfortunately, the refugee company had no sooner landed in Britain than the men were interned as enemy aliens. The women pressed on without them as best they could in the chosen work, until the men returned. In "The Camphill Movement," Dr. Kb'nig describes the genesis of the Camphill impulse thus: 121 There was, from the beginning on, a task which we had set before us: Curative Education . Some of us were trained in this work and the rest were willing to grow into it. We felt it as a special kind of mission to bring this work about. We had learned from Rudolf Steiner a new understanding for the handicapped child and we had seen this work in several homes and schools on the Continent and in Great Britain. To add another place to those already existing, was our first goal. At the same time, we dimly felt that the handicapped children, at that time, were in a position similar to our own. They were refugees from a society which did not want to accept them as part of their community. We were political, these children social refugees . The symbiosis between them and us seemed to work very well. Already the first children, who were given into our care, felt quite at home with us and we had no difficulties in accepting them fully and wholeheartedly in our midst. They gave to us the work which we wanted to do; they provided us with the conviction that we fulfilled a necessary task and were not superfluous and useless members of this country. Through the children, we were enabled to earn our livelihood and not be dependent on public help and charity. The most important fact was, however, that these children demanded of us a special way of life. It was not only up to us to educate and train them; it was they, also, through the simple fact of their special existence, who asked of us a set of qualities which we had to develop. They asked for patience, equanimity and compassion . They asked for an understanding of their ways of peculiar behaviour. Every day was, for us, a new trial in humanity and self-education. It was a tremendous opportunity which had been given into our hands. At the same time, we had to learn to care for the grounds and the garden, to look after the house, to do the cooking and all the other domestic work as we, from the very beginning, had decided not to employ any staff or servant but to do all the work with our own hands. We used this work as one of the means of Curative Education and the children, in so far as they could manage, helped in every domestic task. Our own children became part of the whole house-community and, in this way, the supposed barriers between mentally defective and ordinary children were completely abolished. It was, to many of us, a revelation...

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