Twenty Articles From
The Newspaper:
The Threefold Social Order
The Pedagogical Basis of the Waldorf School
The
aims Emil Molt is trying to realize
through the Waldorf School are connected with quite definite views on
the social tasks of the present day and the near future. The spirit
in which the school should be conducted must proceed from these views.
It is a school attached to an industrial undertaking. The peculiar place
modern industry has taken in the evolution of social life in actual
practice sets its stamp upon the modern social movement. Parents who
entrust their children to this school are bound to expect that the children
shall be educated and prepared for the practical work of life in a way
that takes due account of this movement. This makes it necessary, in
founding the school, to begin from educational principles that have
their roots in the requirements of modern life. Children must be educated
and instructed in such a way that their lives fulfill demands everyone
can support, no matter from which of the inherited social classes
one might come. What is demanded of people by the actualities of modern
life must find its reflection in the organization of this school.
What is to be the ruling spirit in this life must be aroused in
the children by education and instruction.
It would
be fatal if the educational views upon which the Waldorf School is founded
were dominated by a spirit out of touch with life. Today, such a spirit
may all too easily arise because people have come to feel the full part
played in the recent destruction of civilization by our absorption in
a materialistic mode of life and thought during the last few decades.
This feeling makes them desire to introduce an idealistic way of thinking
into the management of public affairs. Anyone who turns his attention
to developing educational life and the system of instruction will
desire to see such a way of thinking realized there especially. It is
an attitude of mind that reveals much good will. It goes without saying
that this good will should be fully appreciated. If used properly, it
can provide valuable service when gathering manpower for a social undertaking
requiring new foundations. Yet it is necessary in this case to point
out how the best intentions must fail if they set to work without fully
regarding those first conditions that are based on practical insight.
This, then, is one of the requirements to be considered when the founding
of any institution- such as the Waldorf School is intended. Idealism
must work in the spirit of its curriculum and methodology; but it must
be an idealism that has the power to awaken in young, growing human
beings the forces and faculties they will need in later life to be equipped
for work in modern society and to obtain for themselves an adequate
living.
The pedagogy
and instructional methodology will he able to fulfill this requirement
only through a genuine knowledge of the developing human being. Insightful
people are today calling for some form of education and instruction
directed not merely to the cultivation of one-sided knowledge, but also
to abilities; education directed not merely to the cultivation of intellectual
faculties, but also to the strengthening of the will. The soundness
of this idea is unquestionable; but it is impossible to develop the
will (and that healthiness of feeling on which it rests) unless one
develops the insights that awaken the energetic impulses of will and
feeling. A mistake often made presently in this respect is not that
people instill too many concepts into young minds, but that the kind
of concepts they cultivate are devoid of all driving life force. Anyone
who believes one can cultivate the will without cultivating the concepts
that give it life is suffering from a delusion. It is the business of
contemporary educators to see this point clearly; but this clear vision
can only proceed from a living understanding of the whole human
being.
It is
now planned that the Waldorf School will be a primary school in which
the educational goals and curriculum are founded upon each teacher's
living insight into the nature of the whole human being, so
far as this is possible under present conditions. Children will, of
course, have to be advanced far enough in the different school grades
to satisfy the standards imposed by the current views. Within this framework,
however, the pedagogical ideals and curriculum will assume a form that
arises out of this knowledge of the human being and of actual life.
The primary
school is entrusted with the child at a period of its life when the
soul is undergoing a very important transformation. From birth to about
the sixth or seventh year, the human being naturally gives himself up
to everything immediately surrounding him in the human environment,
and thus, through the imitative instinct, gives form to his own nascent
powers. From this period on, the child's soul becomes open to take in
consciously what the educator and teacher gives, which affects the child
as a result of the teacher's natural authority. The authority is taken
for granted by the child from a dim feeling that in the teacher there
is something that should exist in himself, too. One cannot be an educator
or teacher unless one adopts out of full insight a stance toward
the child that takes account in the most comprehensive sense of this
metamorphosis of the urge to imitate into an ability to assimilate upon
the basis of a natural relationship of authority. The modern world view,
based as it is upon natural law, does not approach these fact of human
development in full consciousness. To observe them with the necessary
attention, one must have a sense of life's subtlest manifestations in
the human being. This kind of sense must run through the whole art of
education; it must shape the curriculum; it must live in the spirit
uniting teacher and pupil. In educating, what the teacher does can depend
only slightly on anything he gets from a general, abstract pedagogy:
it must rather be newly born every moment from a live understanding
of the young human being he or she is teaching. One may, of course,
object that this lively kind of education and instruction breaks down
in large classes. This objection is no doubt justified in a limited
sense. Taken beyond those limits, however, the objection merely shows
that the person who makes it proceeds from abstract educational norms,
for a really living art of education based on a genuine knowledge of
the human being carries with it a power that rouses the interest of
every single pupil so that there is no need for direct “individual”
work in order to keep his attention on the subject. One can put forth
the essence of one's teaching in such a form that each pupil assimilates
it in his own individual way. This requires simply that whatever the
teacher does should be sufficiently alive. If anyone has a genuine sense
for human nature, the developing human being becomes for him such an
intense, living riddle that the very attempt to solve it awakens the
pupil's living interest empathetically. Such empathy is more valuable
than individual work, which may all too easily cripple the child's own
initiative. It might indeed be asserted — again, within limitations
— that large classes led by teachers who are imbued with the life
that comes from genuine knowledge of the human being, will achieve better
results than small classes led by teachers who proceed from standard
educational theories and have no chance to put this life into their
work.
Not so
outwardly marked as the transformation the soul undergoes in the sixth
or seventh year, but no less important for the art of educating, is
a change that a penetrating study of the human being shows to take place
around the end of the ninth year. At this time, the sense of self assumes
a form that awakens in the child a relationship to nature and to the
world about him such that one can now talk to him more about the connections
between things and processes themselves, whereas previously he was interested
almost exclusively in things and processes only in relationship
to man. Facts of this kind in a human being's development ought to be
most carefully observed by the educator. For if one introduces into
the child's world of concepts and feelings what coincides just at that
period of life with the direction taken by his own developing powers,
one then gives such added vigor to the growth of the whole person that
it remains a source of strength throughout life. If in any period of
life one works against the grain of these developing powers, one weakens
the individual.
Knowledge of the special needs of each life period provides a
basis for drawing up a suitable curriculum. This knowledge also can
be a basis for dealing with instructional subjects in successive periods.
By the end of the ninth year, one must have brought the child to a certain
level in all that has come into human life through the growth of civilization.
Thus while the first school years are properly spent on teaching the
child to write and read, the teaching must be done in a manner that
permits the essential character of this phase of development to be served.
If one teaches things in a way that makes a one-sided claim on the child's
intellect and the merely abstract acquisition of skills, then the development
of the native will and sensibilities is checked; while if the child
learns in a manner that calls upon its whole being, he or she develops
all around. Drawing in a childish fashion, or even a primitive
kind of painting, brings out the whole human being's interest in what
he is doing. Therefore one should let writing grow out of drawing. One
can begin with figures in which the pupil's own childish artistic sense
comes into play; from these evolve the letters of the alphabet. Beginning
with an activity that, being artistic, draws out the whole human being,
one should develop writing, which tends toward the intellectual. And
one must let reading, which concentrates the attention strongly within
the realm of the intellect, arise out of writing.
When people
recognize how much is to be gained for the intellect from this early
artistic education of the child, they will be willing to allow art its
proper place in the primary school education. The arts of music, painting
and sculpting will be given a proper place in the scheme of instruction.
This artistic element and physical exercise will be brought into a suitable
combination. Gymnastics and action games will be developed as expressions
of sentiments called forth by something in the nature of music or recitation.
Eurythmic movement—movement with a meaning — will replace
those motions based merely on the anatomy and physiology of the physical
body. People will discover how great a power resides in an artistic
manner of instruction for the development of will and feeling. However,
to teach or instruct in this way and obtain valuable results can be
done only by teachers who have an insight into the human being sufficiently
keen to perceive clearly the connection between the methods they are
employing and the developmental forces that manifest themselves in any
particular period of life. The real teacher, the real educator, is not
one who has studied educational theory as a science of the management
of children, but one in whom the pedagogue has been awakened
by awareness of human nature.
Of prime importance for the cultivation of the child's feeling-life
is that the child develops its relationship to the world in a way such
as that which develops when we incline toward fantasy. If the educator
is not himself a fantast, then the child is not in danger of becoming
one when the teacher conjures forth the realms of plants and animals,
of the sky and the stars in the soul of the child in fairy-tale fashion.
Visual
aids are undoubtedly justified within certain limits; but when a materialistic
conviction leads people to try to extend this form of teaching to every
conceivable thing, they forget there are other powers in the human being
which must be developed, and which cannot be addressed through the medium
of visual observation. For instance, there is the acquisition of certain
things purely through memory that is connected to the developmental
forces at work between the sixth or seventh and the fourteenth year
of life. It is this property of human nature upon which the teaching
of arithmetic should be based. Indeed, arithmetic can be used to cultivate
the faculty of memory. If one dis-regards this fact, one may perhaps
be tempted (especially when teaching arithmetic) to commit the educational
blunder of teaching with visual aids what should be taught as a memory
exercise.
One may
fall into the same mistake by trying all too anxiously to make the child
understand everything one tells him. The will that prompts
one to do so is undoubtedly good, but does not duly estimate what it
means when, later in life, we revive within our soul something that
we acquired simply through memory when younger and now find, in our
mature years, that we have come to understand it on our own. Here, no
doubt, any fear of the pupil's not taking an active interest in a lesson
learned by memory alone will have to be relieved by the teacher's lively
way of giving it. If the teacher engages his or her whole being in teaching,
then he may safely bring the child things for which the full under-standing
will come when joyfully remembered in later life. There is something
that constantly refreshes and strengthens the inner substance of life
in this recollection. If the teacher assists such a strengthening, he
will give the child a priceless treasure to take along on life's road.
In this way, too, the teacher will avoid the visual aid's degenerating
into the banality that occurs when a lesson is overly adapted to the
child's understanding. Banalities may be calculated to arouse the child's
own activity, but such fruits lose their flavor with the end of childhood.
The flame enkindled in the child from the living fire of the teacher
in matters that still lie, in a way, beyond his “understanding,”
remains an active, awakening force throughout the child's life.
If, at the end of the ninth year, one begins to choose descriptions
of natural history from the plant and animal world, treating them in
a way that the natural forms and processes lead to an understanding
of the human form and the phenomena of human life, then one can help
release the forces that at this age are struggling to be born out of
the depths of human nature. It is consistent with the character of the
child's sense of self at this age to see the qualities that nature divides
among manifold species of the plant and animal kingdoms as united
into one harmonious whole at the summit of the natural world in the
human being.
Around the twelfth year, another turning point in the child's development
occurs. He becomes ripe for the development of the faculties that
lead him in a wholesome way to the comprehension of things that must
be considered without any reference to the human being: the mineral
kingdom, the physical world, meteorological phenomena, and so on.
The best
way to lead then from such exercises, which are based entirely on the
natural human instinct of activity without reference to practical ends,
to others that shall be a sort of education for actual work, will follow
from knowledge of the character of the successive periods of life. What
has been said here with reference to particular parts of the curriculum
may be extended to everything that should be taught to the pupil up
to his fifteenth year.
There
need be no fear of the elementary schools releasing pupils in a state
of soul and body unfit for practical life if their principles of education
and instructions are allowed to proceed, as described, from the inner
development of the human being. For human life itself is shaped by this
inner development; and one can enter upon life in no better way than
when, through the development of our own inner capacities, we can join
with what others before us, from similar inner human capacities, have
embodied in the evolution of the civilized world. It is true that to
bring the two into harmony — the development of the pupil and
the development of the civilized world — will require a body of
teachers who do not shut themselves up in an educational routine with
strictly professional interests, but rather take an active interest
in the whole range of life. Such a body of teachers will discover how
to awaken in the upcoming generation a sense of the inner, spiritual
substance of life and also an understanding of life's practicalities.
If instruction is carried on this way, the young human being at the
age of fourteen or fifteen will not lack comprehension of important
things in agriculture and industry, commerce and travel, which help
to make up the collective life of mankind. He will have acquired a
knowledge of things and a practical skill that will enable him to feel
at home in the life which receives him into its stream.
If
the Waldorf School is to achieve the aims its founder has in view,
it must be built on educational principles and methods of the kind here
described. It will then be able to give the kind of education that allows
the pupil's body to develop healthily and according to its needs, because
the soul (of which this body is the expression) is allowed to grow in
a way consistent with the forces of its development. Before its opening,
some preparatory work was attempted with the teachers so that the school
might be able to work toward the proposed aim. Those concerned with
the management of the school believe that in pursuing this aim
they bring something into educational life in accordance with modern
social thinking. They feel the responsibility inevitably connected
with any such attempt; but they think that, in contemporary social demands,
it is a duty to under-take this when the opportunity is afforded.
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