An Introduction to Waldorf Education
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 our 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 be 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 ran through the whole an 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 an 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
disregards 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 understanding 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 undertake this when
the opportunity is afforded.
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