THE TEACHER AS ARTIST IN EDUCATION
The importance for the educator of knowing man as a whole is seen
particularly clearly when we observe the development of boys and girls
between their eleventh and twelfth years. Usually only what we might
call the grosser changes are observed, the grosser metamorphoses of
human nature, and we have no eye for the finer changes. Hence we
believe we can benefit the child simply by thinking: what bodily
movements should the child make to become physically strong P But if
we want to make the child's body strong, capable and free from
cramping repressions we must reach the body during childhood by way of
the soul and spirit.
Between the 11th and 12th year a very great change takes place in the
human being. The rhythmic system — breathing system and system of
blood circulation — is dominant between the change of teeth and
puberty. When the child is nearly ten years old the beat and rhythm of
the blood circulation and breathing system begin to develop and pass
into the muscular system. The muscles become saturate with blood and
the blood pulses through the muscles in intimate response to man's
inner nature — to his own heart. So that between his 9th and 11th
years the human being builds up his own rhythmic system in the way
which corresponds to its inner disposition. When the 11th or 12th year
is reached, then what is within the rhythmic system and muscular
system passes over into the bone system, into the whole skeleton. Up
to the 11th year the bone system is entirely embedded in the muscular
system. It conforms to the muscular system. Between the 11th and 12th
years the skeleton adapts itself to the outer world. A mechanic and
dynamic which is independent of the human being passes into the
skeleton. We must accustom ourselves to treating the skeleton as
though it were an entirely objective thing, not concerned with man.
If you observe children under eleven years old you will see that all
their movements still come out of their inner being. If you observe
children of over 12 years old you will see from the way they step how
they are trying to find their balance, how they are inwardly adapting
themselves to the leverage and balance, to the mechanical nature of
the skeletal system. This means: Between the 11th and 12th year the
soul and spirit nature reaches as far as the bone-.system. Before this
the soul and spirit nature is much more inward. And only now that he
has taken hold on that remotest part of his humanity, the bone-system,
does man's adaptation to the outer world become complete. Only now is
man a true child of the world, only now must he live with the mechanic
and dynamic of the world, only now does he experience what is called
Causality in life. Before his 11th year a human being has in reality
no understanding of cause and effect. He hears the words used. We
think he under-stands them. But he does not, because he is controlling
his bone system from out of his muscular system. Later, after the 12th
year, the bone system, which is adjusting itself to the outer world,
dominates the muscular system, and through it, influences spirit and
soul. And in consequence man now gets an understanding of cause and
effect based on inner experience, — an understanding of force,
and of his own experience of the perpendicular, the horizontal, etc.
For this reason, you see, when we teach the child mineralogy, physics,
chemistry, mechanics before his 11th year in too intellectual a way we
harm his development, for he cannot as yet have a corresponding
experience of the mechanical and dynamical within his whole being.
Neither, before his 11th year can he inwardly participate in thy
causal connections in history.
Now this enlightens us as to how we should treat the soul in children,
before the bone system has awakened. While the child still dwells in
his muscular system, through the intermediary of his blood system, he
can inwardly experience biography; he can always participate when we
bring before him some definite historical picture which can please or
displease him, and with which he can feel sympathy or antipathy. Or
when we give him a picture of the earth in the manner I described
yesterday. He can grasp in picture everything that belongs to the
plant kingdom, because his muscular system is plastic, is inwardly
mobile. Or if we show him what I said of the animal kingdom, and how
it dwells in man — the child can go along with it because his
muscular system is soft. But if before his 11th year we teach the
child the principle of the lever or of the steam engine he can
experience nothing of it inwardly because as yet he has no dynamic or
mechanic in his own body, in his physical nature. When we begin
physics, mechanics and dynamics at the right time with the child,
namely about his 11th or 12th year, what we present to him in thought
goes into his head and it is met by what comes from his inner being,
— the experience the child has of his own bone-system. And what
we say to the child unites with the impulse and experience which comes
from the child's body. Thus there arises, not an abstract,
intellectual understanding, but a psychic understanding, an
understanding in the soul. And it is this we must aim at.
But what of the teacher who has to make this endeavour? What must he
be like? Suppose for example, a teacher knows from his anatomy
and physiology that “the muscle is in that place, the bones here;
the nerve cells look like this”: — it is all very fine, put
it is intellectual; all this leaves the child out of account, the
child is, as it were, impermeable to our vision. The child is like
black coal, untransparent. We know what muscles and nerves are there;
we know all that. But we do not know how the circulation system plays
into the blood system, into the bone-system. To know that, our
conception of the build of a human being, of man's inner configuration
must be that of an artist. And the teacher must be in a position to
experience the child artistically, to see him as an artist would.
Everything within the child must be inwardly mobile to him.
Now, the philosopher will come and say: “Well, if a thing is to
be known it must be logical.” Quite right, but logical after the
manner of a work of art, which can be an inner artistic representation
of the world we have before us. We must accept such an inward artistic
conceiving — we must not dogmatise: The world shall only be
conceived logically. All the teacher's ideas and feelings must be go
mobile that he can realise: If I give the child ideas of dynamics and
mechanics before his 11th year they clog his brain, they congest, and
make the brain hard, so that it develops migraine in the latter years
of youth, and later still will harden; — if I give the child
separate historical pictures or stories before his 11th year, if I
give him pictures of the plant kingdom which shows the plants in
connection with the country-side where they grow, these ideas go into
his brain, but they go in by way of the rest of his nervous system
into his whole body. They unite with the whole body, with the soft
muscular system. I build up lovingly what is at work within the child.
The teacher now sees into the child, what to one who only knows
anatomy and physiology is opaque black coal now becomes transparent.
The teacher sees everything, sees what goes on in the rows of children
facing him at their desks, what goes on in the single child. He does
not need to cogitate and have recourse to some didactic rule or other,
the child himself shows him what needs to be done with it. The child
leans back in his chair when something has been done which is
unsuitable to him; he becomes inattentive. When you do something right
for the child he becomes lively.
Nevertheless one will sometimes have great trouble in controlling the
children's liveliness. You will succeed in controlling it if you
possess a thing not sufficiently appreciated in this connection,
namely humour. The teacher must bring humour into the class
room as he enters the door. Some-times children can be very naughty. A
teacher in the Waldorf School found a class of older children,
children over 12 years old, suddenly become inattentive to the lesson
and begin writing to one another under their desks. Now a teacher
without humour might get cross at this, mightn't he? There would be a
great scene. But what did our Waldorf School teacher do? He went along
with the children, and explained to them the nature of — the
postal service. And the children saw that he understood them. He
entered right into this matter of their mutual correspondence. They
felt slightly ashamed, and order was restored.
The fact is, no art of any kind can be mastered without humour,
especially the art of dealing with human beings. This means that part
of the art of education is the elimination of ill-humour and crossness
from the teachers, and the development of friendliness and a love full
of humour and fantasy for the children, so that the children may not
see portrayed in their teacher the very thing he is forbidding them to
be. On no account must it happen in a class that when a child breaks
out in anger the teacher says: I will beat this anger out of you! That
is a most terrible thing! And he seizes the inkpot and hurls it to the
ground where it smashes. This is not a way to remove anger from a
child. Only when you show the child that his anger is a mere object,
that for you it hardly exists, it is a thing to be treated with
humour, then only will you be acting educationally.
Up till now I have been describing how the human being is to be
understood in general by the teacher or educator. But man is not only
something in general. And even if we can enter into the human being in
such detail that the very activity of the muscular system before the
11th year is transparent to us, and that of the bone system after the
11th year, there will yet remain something else — a thing of
extraordinary vitality where education is an art — namely the
human individuality. Every child is a different being, and what I have
hitherto described only constitutes the very first step in the
artistic comprehension and knowledge of the child.
We must be able to enter more and more into what is personal and
individual. We are helped provisionally by the fact that the children
we have to educate are differentiated according to temperaments. A
true understanding of temperaments has, from the very first, held a
most important place in the education I am here describing, the
education practised at the Waldorf School.
Let us take to begin with the melancholic child; a particular
human type. What is he like? He appears externally a quiet, withdrawn
child. But these outward characteristics are not much help to us. We
only begin to comprehend the child with a disposition to melancholy
when we realise that the melancholic child is most powerfully affected
by its purely bodily, physical nature; when we know that the
melancholy is due to an intense depositing of salt in the organism.
This causes the child of melancholic temperament to feel weighed down
in his physical organism. For a melancholic child to raise a leg or an
arm is quite a different matter than for another child. There are
hindrances, impediments to this raising of the leg or arm. A feeling
of weight opposes the intention of the soul. Thus it gradually comes
about that the child of melancholic disposition turns inward and does
not take to the outside world with any pleasure, because his body
obtrudes upon his attention, because he is so much concerned with his
own body. We only gain the right approach to a melancholic child when
we know how his soul which would soar, and his spirit which would
range are burdened by bodily deposits continuously secreted by the
glands, which permeate his other bodily movements and encumber his
body. We can only help him when we rightly understand this encroaching
heaviness of the body which takes the attention prisoner.
It is often said: Well, a melancholic child broods inwardly, he is
quiet and moves little. And so one purposely urges him to take in
lively ideas. One seeks to heal a thing by its opposite. One's
treatment of the melancholic is to try and enliven him by telling him
all sorts of amusing things. This is a completely false method. We can
never reach the melancholic child in this way.
We must be able, through our sympathy and sympathetic comprehension of
his bodily gravity, to approach the child m the mood which is his own.
Thus we must give him, not lively and, comical ideas, but serious
ideas like those which he produces himself. We must give him many
things which are in harmony with the tone of his own weighted
organism.
Further, in an education such as this, we must have patience; the
effect is not seen from one day to the next, but it takes years. And
the way it works is that when the child is given from outside what he
has within himself he arouses in himself healing powers of resistance.
If we bring him something quite alien, if we bring comic things to a
serious child — he will remain indifferent to the comic things.
But if we confront him outwardly with his own sorrow and trouble and
care he perceives from this outward meeting what he has in himself.
And this calls out the inner action, the opposite. And we heal
pedagogically by following in modern form the ancient golden rule: Not
only can like be known by like, like can be treated and healed by
like.
Now when we consider the child of a more phlegmatic temperament
we must realise: this child of more phlegmatic temperament dwells less
in his physical body and more in what I have called, in my
descriptions here, the etheric body, a more volatile body. He dwells
in his etheric body. It may seem a strange thing to say about the
phlegmatic child that he dwells in his etheric body, but so it is. The
etheric body prevents the processes of man's organic functions, his
digestion, and growth, from coming into his head. It is not in the
power of the phlegmatic child to get ideas of what is going on in his
body. His head becomes inactive. His body becomes ever more and more
active by virtue of the volatile element which tends to scatter his
functions abroad in the world. A phlegmatic child is entirely given up
to the world. He is absorbed into the world. He lives very little in
himself hence he meets what we try to do with him with a certain
indifference. We cannot reach the child because immediate access to
him must be through the' senses. The principle senses are in the head.
The phlegmatic child can make little use of his head. The rest of his
organism functions through interplay with the outer world.
Once again, as in the case of the melancholic child, we can only reach
the phlegmatic child when we can turn ourselves into phlegmatics of
some sort at his side, when we can transpose ourselves, as artists,
into his phlegmatic mood. Then the child has at his side what he is in
himself, and in good time what he has beside him seems too boring.
Even the phlegmatic finds it too boring to have a phlegmatic for a
teacher at his side! And if we have patience we shall presently see
how something lights up in the phlegmatic child if we give him ideas
steeped in phlegma, and tell him phlegmatically of indifferent events.
Now the sanguine child is particularly difficult to handle. The
sanguine child is one in whom the activity of the rhythmic system
predominates in a marked degree. The rhythmic system, which is the
dominant factor between the change of teeth and puberty, exercises too
great a dominion over the sanguine child. Hence the sanguine child
always wants to hasten from impression to impression. His blood
circulation is hampered if the impressions do not change quickly. He
feels inwardly cramped if impressions do not quickly pass and give way
to others. So we can say: The sanguine child feels an inner
constriction when he has to attend long to anything; he feels he
cannot dwell on it, he turns away to quite other thoughts. It is hard
to hold him.
Once more the treatment of the sanguine child is similar to that of
the others: one must not try to heal the sanguine child by forcing him
to dwell a long time on one impression, one must do the opposite. Meet
the sanguine nature, change impressions vigorously and see to it that
the child has to take in impression after impression in rapid
succession. Once again, a reaction will be called into play. And this
cannot fail to take the form of antipathy to the hurrying impressions,
for the system of circulation here dominates entirely. With the result
that the child himself is slowed down.
The choleric child has to be treated in yet a different way.
The characteristic of the choleric child is that he is a stage behind
the normal in his development. This may seem strange. Let us take an
illustration. A normal child of 8 or 9 of any type moves his limbs
quickly or slowly in response to outer impressions. But compare the 8
or 9-year old child with a child of 3 or 4 years. The 3- or 4-year old
child still trips and dances through life, he controls his movements
far less. He still retains something of the baby within him. A baby
does not control its movements at all, it kicks — its mental
powers are not developed. But if tiny babies all had a vigorous mental
development you would find them all to be cholerics. Kicking babies
— and the healthier they are the more they kick — kicking
babies are all choleric. A choleric child comes from a body made
restless by choler.
Now the choleric child still retains something of the rompings and
ragings of a tiny baby. Hence the baby lives on in the choleric child
of 8 or 9, the choleric boy or girl. This is the reason the child is
choleric and we must treat the child by trying gradually to subdue the
“baby” within him.
In the doing of this, humour is essential. For when we confront a real
choleric of 8, 9, 10 years or even older, we shall affect nothing with
him by admonition. But if I get him to re-tell me a story I have told
him, which requires a show of great choler and much pantomime, so that
he feels the baby in himself, this will have
[For further descriptions of the alternation between sympathy
and antipathy in children and its place in education see Steiner's
educational writings passim.]
the effect little by little of calming this “tiny baby.” He
adapts it to the stage of his own mind. And when I act the choleric
towards the choleric child — naturally, of course, with humour
and complete self-control — the choleric child at my side will
grow calmer. When the teacher begins to dance — but please do not
misunderstand me — the raging of the child near him gradually
subsides. But one must avoid having either a red face or a long face
when dealing with a choleric child, one must enter into this inner
raging by means of artistic sensibility. You will see the child will
become quieter and quieter. This utterly subdues the inner raging.
But there must be nothing artificial in all this. If there is anything
forced or inartistic in what the teacher gives the child it will have
no result. The teacher must indeed have artist's blood in him so that
what he enacts in front of the child shall have verisimilitude and can
be accepted unquestioningly; otherwise it is a false thing in the
teacher, and that must not be. The teacher's relation to the child
must be absolutely true and genuine.
Now when we enter into the temperaments in this manner it helps us
also to keep a class in order, even quite a large one. The Waldorf
teacher studies the temperaments of the children confided to him. He
knows: I have melancholies, phlegmatics, sanguines and cholerics. He
places the melancholies together, unobtrusively, without its being
noticed of course. He knows he has them in this corner. Now he places
the cholerics together, he knows he has them in that corner; similarly
with the sanguinis and the phlegmatics. By means of this social
treatment those of like temperament rub each other's corners off
reciprocally. For example the melancholic becomes cheerful when he
sits among melancholies. As for the cholerics, they heal each other
thoroughly, for it is the very best thing to let the cholerics work
off their choler upon one another. If bruises are received, mutually
it has an exceedingly sobering effect. So that by a right social
treatment the — shall we say — hidden relationship between
man and man can be brought into a healthy solution.
And if we have enough sense of humour to send out a boy when he is
overwrought and in a rage — into the garden, and see to it that
he climbs trees and scrambles about until he is colossally tired,
— when he comes in again he will have worked off his choleric
temper on himself and in company with nature. When he has worked off
what is in him by overcoming obstacles, he will come back to us, after
a little while, calmed down.
Now the point is, you see, to come by way of the temperaments into
ever closer and closer touch with the individuality of the child, his
personality. To-day many people say you must educate individually.
Yes, but first you must discover the individual. First you must know
man; next you must know the melancholic — Actually the
melancholic is never a pure melancholic, the temperaments are always
mixed. One temperament is dominant — But only when you rightly
understand the temperament can you find your way to the individuality.
Now this shows you indeed that the art of education is a thing that
must be learned intimately. People to-day do not start criticising a
clock — at least I have not heard it — they do not set up to
criticise the works of a clock. Why? Because they do not understand
it, they do not know the inner working of a clock. Thus you seldom
hear criticism of the working of a clock in ordinary conversation. But
criticism of education — you hear it on all hands. And frequently
it is as though people were to talk of the works of a clock of which
they haven't the slightest inkling. But people do not believe that
education must be intimately learned, and that it is not enough to say
in the abstract: we must educate the individuality. We must erst be
able to find the individuality by going intimately through a knowledge
of man and a knowledge of the different dispositions and temperaments.
Then gradually we shall draw near to what is entirely individual in
man. And this must become a principle of life, particularly for the
artist teacher or educator.
Everything depends upon the contact between teacher and child being
permeated by an artistic element. This will bring it about that much
that a teacher has to do at any moment with an individual child comes
to him intuitively, almost instinctively. Let us take a concrete
illustration for the sake of clarity. Suppose we find difficulty in
educating a certain child because all the images we bring to him, the
impressions we seek to arouse, the ideas we would impart, set up so
strong a circulation in his head system and cause such a disturbance
to his nervous system that what we give him cannot escape from the
head into the rest of his organism. The physical organism of his head
becomes in a way partially melancholic. The child finds it difficult
to lead over what he sees, feels or otherwise experiences, from his
head to the rest of his organism. What is learned gets stuck, as it
were, in the head. It cannot penetrate down into the rest of the
organism. An artist in educating will instinctively keep such a thing
in view in all his specifically artistic work with the child. If I
have such a child I shall use colours and paint with him in quite a
different way than with other children. Because it is of such
importance, special attention is given to the element of colour in the
Waldorf School from the very beginning. I have already explained the
principle of the painting; but within' the painting lesson one can
treat each child individually. We have an opportunity of working
individually with the child because he has to do everything himself.
Now suppose I have by me such a child as I described. I am taking the
painting lesson. If there is the right artistic contact between
teacher and child — under my guidance this child will produce
quite a different painting from another child.
I will draw you roughly on the black-board what should come on the
paper painted on by the child whose ideas are stuck in his head.
Something of this sort should arise:
Click image for large view
Here a spot of this colour (yellow), then further on a spot of some
such colour as this (orange), for we have to keep in mind the harmony
of colours. Next comes a transition (violet), the transition may be
further differentiated, and in order to make an outer limit the whole
may be enclosed with blue. This is what we shall get on the paper of a
child whose ideas are congested in his head.
Now suppose I have another child whose ideas, far from sticking in his
head, sift through his head as through a sieve; where everything goes
into the body, and the child grasps nothing because his head is like a
sieve — it has holes, it lets things through. It sifts everything
down. One must be able to feel that in the case of this child the
circulation system of the other part of the organism wants to suck
everything into itself.
Then instinctively, intuitively, it will occur to one to get the child
to do something quite different. In the case of such a child you will
get something of this sort on the painting paper; You will observe how
much less the colours go into curves, or rounded forms; rather you
will find the colours tend to be drawn out, painting is approximating
to drawing, we get loops which are proper to drawing. You will also
notice that the colours are not much differentiated; here (in the
first drawing) they are strongly differentiated: here in this one they
are very little differentiated.
Click image for large view
If one carries this out with real colours — and not with the
nauseating substance of chalk, which cannot give an idea of the whole
thing — then through the experience of pure colour in the one
case, and of more formed colour in the other, one will be able to work
back upon the characteristics of the child which I described.
Similarly when you go into the gymnasium with a boy or girl whose
ideas stick in his head and will not come out of it, your aim will be
different from that with which yon would go into it with a child whose
head is like a sieve, who lets everything through into the rest of his
body and into the circulation of the rest of his body. You take both
kinds of children into the gymnasium with you. You get the one kind,
— whose heads are like a sieve, where everything falls through
— to alternate their gymnastic exercises with recitation or
singing. The other gymnastic — group — those whose ideas are
stuck fast in their heads — should be got to do their movements
as far as possible in silence. Thus you make a bridge between bodily
training and psychic characteristics from out the very nature of the
child himself. A child which has stockish ideas must be got to do
gymnastics differently from the child whose ideas go through his head
like a sieve.
Such a thing as this shows how enormously important it is to compose
the education as a whole. It is a horrible thing when first the
teacher instructs the children in class and then they are sent off to
the gymnasium — and the gymnastic teacher knows nothing of what
has gone on in class and follows his own scheme in the gymnastic
lesson. The gymnastic lesson must follow absolutely and entirely upon
what one has experienced with the children in class. So that actually
in the Waldorf School the endeavour has been as far as possible to
entrust to one teacher even supplementary lessons in the lower
classes, and certainly everything which concerns the general
development of the human being.
This makes very great demands upon the staff, especially where art
teaching is concerned; it demands, also, the most willing and loving
devotion. But in no other way can we attain a wholesome, healing human
development.
Now, in the following lectures I shall show you on the one hand
certain plastic, painted figures made in the studio at Dornach, so as
to acquaint you better with Eurhythmy — that art of movement which
is so intimately connected with the whole of man. The figures bring
out the colours and forms of eurhythmy and something of its inner
nature. On the other hand I shall speak to-morrow upon the painting
and other artistic work done by the younger and older children in the
Waldorf School.
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