T H E
C H I L D ' S C H A N G I N G C O N S C I O U S N E S S
Lecture Four
DORNACH, APRIL 18, 1923
In our previous meetings I have tried to direct you into
what we understand as knowledge of the human being. Some of
what is still missing will surely find its way into our further
considerations during this conference. I have also told you
that this knowledge of the human being is not the kind that
will lead to theories, but one that can become human instinct,
ensouled and spiritual instinct that, when translated into
actions, can lead to living educational principles and
practice. Of course, you must realize that in giving lectures
of this kind, it is only possible to point the way, in the form
of indications, to what such knowledge of the human being can
do for the furtherance of practical teaching. But just because
our primary goal is toward practical application, I can give
only broad outlines, something that is very unpopular these
days. Few people are sufficiently aware that anything expressed
in words can, at best, be only a hint, a mere indication of
what is far more complex and multifarious in actual life.
If
we remember that young children are essentially ensouled sense
organs, entirely given over in a bodily-religious way to what
comes toward them from the surrounding world, we shall see to
it that, until the change of teeth, everything within their
vicinity is suitable to be received through their senses,
thereafter to be worked on inwardly. Most of all, we have to be
aware that whenever the child perceives with the senses, at the
same time the child also absorbs the inherent moral element of
what is perceived through the soul and spirit. This means that
at the approach of the change of teeth, we have already set the
scene for the most important impulses of later life, and that
when the child enters school, we are no longer faced with a
blank page but with one already full of content.
And
now that we are moving more toward the practical aspects of
education, we have to consider that between the change of teeth
and puberty nothing entirely original can be initiated in the
child. Instead, it is the teacher's task to recognize the
impulses already implanted during the first seven years. They
have to direct these impulses toward what is likely to be
demanded of the pupils in their later lives. This is why it is
of such importance for teachers to be able to perceive what is
stirring within their pupils; for there is more here than meets
the eye in these life-stirrings when children enter school.
Teachers must not simply decide what they are going to do, or
which method is right or wrong. It is far more important for
them to recognize what is inwardly stirring and moving in these
children — in order to guide and develop them
further.
Naturally, this is bound to raise a question, which we have
thus far been unable to answer in the Waldorf school since it
has not yet become practical to open a kindergarten. The work
entailed in bringing up and educating children from birth until
the change of teeth is certainly most important. But since in
the Waldorf school we are already facing great difficulties in
coping with the demands involved in teaching children of
official school age, we cannot possibly think of opening a
kindergarten, because every year we also have to open a new
class for our oldest pupils.
[The first kindergarten in the
Waldorf School was opened a short time later under Steiner's
direction.] So far we have started with an eight-year course in
the Waldorf school. At present we could not possibly entertain
the idea of also opening a kindergarten, or something similar,
as a preparatory step for our first grade. People who take a
somewhat lighthearted view of these things may be of the
opinion that the only thing needed is to begin with a nursery
or kindergarten, and the rest will surely follow. But things
are not that simple. A fully comprehensive, yet detailed
program is needed that covers both the pedagogical and
practical aspects of teaching in a nursery class. To devote
oneself to such a task is impossible as long as a new class has
to be added every year.
The
seriousness and responsibility involved in the so-called
movements for school reform is recognized by far too few
people. To unprofessional, although well-meaning persons, it
seems enough to voice demands, which are easy enough to make.
In our day, when everybody is so clever — I am not being
sarcastic, I am quite serious — nothing is easier than to
formulate demands. All that is needed in our society, which is
simply bursting with cleverness, is for eleven or twelve people
— even three or four would be brainy enough — to
come together to work out a perfect program for school reform,
listing their requirements in order of priority. I have no
doubt that such theoretical demands would be highly impressive.
These programs, compiled in the abstract today in many places,
are very cleverly conceived. Because people have become so
intellectual, they excel in achievements of an external and
abstract kind.
But
if one judges these matters out of real life experience and not
intellectually, the situation is not unlike one where a number
of people have come together to discuss and decide what the
performance of an efficient stove should be. Obviously they
would come up with a whole list of “categorical
imperatives,” such as that the stove must be capable of
heating the room adequately, it must not emit smoke, and so on.
But, though the various points made may be convincing enough,
knowledge of them alone would hardly result in the necessary
know-how to light it, keep it going, and control its heat. To
be able to do this one has to learn other things as well. In
any case, depending on the location of the room, the condition
of the chimney and possibly on other factors as well, it may
not even be possible to fulfill the conditions so competently
set forth.
But
this is how most of the programs for school reform are arrived
at today — more or less in an equally abstract manner as
the requirements for the hypothetical stove. This is the reason
why one cannot contravene them, for they no doubt contain much
that is correct. But to cope with the practical needs of an
existing school is something very different from making demands
that, ideally speaking, are justified. Here one does not have
to deal with how things ought to be, but with a number of
actual pupils. Here one has to deal — allow me to mention
it, for it is all part of school life — with a definite
number of teachers of varying gifts and abilities. All this has
to be reckoned with. There is no problem in planning a program
for school reform in the abstract. But the concrete reality is
that only a certain number of gifted teachers are available and
it may not even be possible for them to fulfill the
demands agreed upon in theory.
This fundamental difference between life as it is and an
intellectual approach to it is something our present society is
no longer able to appreciate. Because it has become so
accustomed to an intellectual interpretation of life, it can no
longer perceive this quality, least of all where it is most
patently present. Anyone who is aware of the great difference
between theory and practice will detect the worst excesses of
impractical theories in our present business life. In reality
the structure of today's business life has become as
theoretical as can be. Those in control grasp power with robust
hands. They use their elbows and often brutally push through
their theoretical policies. This goes on until the business is
ruined. In the economic sphere it is possible to proceed
intellectually. But in a situation where one meets life in the
raw, such as in a school (where it is not simply a case of
helping oneself, but where existing impulses have to be worked
on) even the most beautiful theories are of little use unless
they offer the possibility of working pragmatically and out of
a truly individual knowledge of what the human being is. This
is the reason why teachers whose heads are full of pedagogical
theories are usually least fit for practical classroom
situations. More capable by far are those who still teach out
of a certain instinct, teachers who, out of their natural love
for children, are able to recognize and to meet them. But today
it is no longer possible to rely on instinct, unless it is
backed by spiritual knowledge. Modern life has become too
complex for such a way of life, which would be possible only
under more primitive conditions, under conditions almost
bordering on the level of animal life.
All
this has to be considered if one wishes to see what is being
presented here in the right light, as a really practical form
of pedagogy. Generally speaking, education has followed in the
footsteps of our modern civilization, which has gradually
become more and more materialistic. A symptom of this is the
frequent use of mechanical methods in preference to organic
methods, and this just during the early years of childhood up
to the change of teeth, which is the most impressionable and
important time of life. We must not lose sight of the fact that
up to the second dentition the child lives by imitation. The
serious side of life, with all its demands in daily work, is
re-enacted in deep earnestness by the child in its play, as I
mentioned yesterday. The difference between a child's play and
an adult's work is that an adult's contribution to society is
governed by a sense of purpose and has to fit into outer
demands, whereas the child wants to be active simply out of an
inborn and natural impulse. Play activity streams outward from
within. Adult work takes the opposite direction, namely inwards
from the periphery. The significant and most important task for
grade school consists in just this gradual progression from
play to work. And if one is able to answer in practical terms
the great question of how a child's play can gradually be
transformed into work, one has solved the fundamental problem
during those middle years from seven to fourteen.
In
their play, children mirror what happens around them; they want
to imitate. But because the key to childhood has been lost
through inadequate knowledge of the human being, all kinds of
artificial play activities for children of kindergarten age
have been intellectually contrived by adults. Since children
want to imitate the work of the adults, special games have been
invented for their benefit, such as “Lay the Little
Sticks,” or whatever else these things are called. These
artificial activities actually deflect the child's inner forces
from flowing out of the organism as a living stream that finds
a natural outlet in the child's desire to imitate those who are
older. Through all kinds of mechanical manipulations children
are encouraged to do things not at all suitable to their age.
Particularly during the nineteenth century, programs for
preschool education were determined that entailed activities a
child should not really do; for the entire life of a preschool
class revolves around the children adapting to the few people
in charge, who should behave naturally so that the children
feel stimulated to imitate whatever their teachers do.
It
is unnecessary for preschool staff to go from one child to
another and show each one what to do. Children do not yet want
to follow given instructions. All they want is to copy what the
adult does, so the task of a kindergarten teacher is to adjust
the work taken from daily life so that it becomes suitable for
the children's play activities. There is no need to devise
occupations like those adults meet in life — except under
special circumstances — such as work that requires
specialized skills. For example, children of preschool age are
told to make parallel cuts in strips of paper and then to push
multi-colored paper strips through the slits so that a woven
colored pattern finally emerges. This kind of mechanical
process in a kindergarten actually prevents children from
engaging in normal or congenial activities. It would be better
to give them some very simple sewing or embroidery to do.
Whatever a young child is told to do should not be artificially
contrived by adults who are comfortable in our intellectual
culture, but should arise from the tasks of ordinary life. The
whole point of a preschool is to give young children the
opportunity to imitate life in a simple and wholesome way.
This adjustment to adult life is an immensely important
pedagogical task until kindergarten age, with all its
purposefulness, so that what is done there will satisfy the
child's natural and inborn need for activity. To contrive
little stick games or design paper weaving cards is simple
enough. It is a tremendously important and necessary task to
whittle down our complicated forms of life, such as a child
does when, for example, a little boy plays with a spade or some
other tool, or when a girl plays with a doll; in this way
children transform adult occupations into child's play,
including the more complicated activities of the adult world.
It is time-consuming work for which hardly any previous
“spade-work” has thus far been done. One needs to
recognize that in children's imitation, in all their
sense-directed activities, moral and spiritual forces are
working — artistic impulses that allow the child to
respond in an entirely individual way.
Give a child a handkerchief or a piece of cloth, knot it so
that a head appears above and two legs below, and you have made
a doll or a kind of clown. With a few ink stains you can give
it eyes, nose, and mouth, or even better, allow the child to do
it, and with such a doll, you will see a healthy child have
great joy. Now the child can add many other features belonging
to a doll, through imagination and imitation within the soul.
It is far better if you make a doll out of a linen rag than if
you give the child one of those perfect dolls, possibly with
highly colored cheeks and smartly dressed, a doll that even
closes its eyes when put down horizontally, and so on. What are
you doing if you give the child such a doll? You are preventing
the unfolding of the child's own soul activity. Every time a
completely finished object catches its eye, the child has to
suppress an innate desire for soul activity, the unfolding of a
wonderfully delicate, awakening fantasy. You thus separate
children from life, because you hold them back from their own
inner activity. So much for the child until the change of
teeth.
When children enter school, we are very likely to meet a
certain inner opposition, mainly toward reading and writing, as
mentioned yesterday. Try to see the situation through a child's
eyes. There stands a man. He has black or blond hair. He has a
forehead, nose, eyes. He has legs. He walks, and he holds
something in his hands. He says something. He has his own
thought-life. This is father. And now the child is supposed to
accept that this sign, FATHER represents an actual father.
There is not the slightest reason why a child should do so.
Children bring formative forces with them, forces eager to flow
out of the organism. Previously, these forces were instrumental
in effecting the wonderful formation of the brain with its
attendant nervous system. They accomplished the wonderful
formation of the second teeth. One should become modest and ask
how one could possibly create, out of one's own resources,
these second teeth on the basis of the first baby teeth; what
sublime powers of wisdom, of which we are totally unaware, work
in all these forces! The child was entirely surrendered to this
unconscious wisdom weaving through the formative forces.
Children live in space and time, and now, suddenly, they are
supposed to make sense of everything that is imposed on them by
learning to read and write.
It
is not proper to lead children directly into the final stages
of our advanced culture. We must lead them in harmony with what
wants to flow from their own being. The right way of
introducing the child to reading and writing is to allow the
formative forces — which up to its seventh year have been
working upon the physical organization and which now are being
released for outer soul activities — to become actively
engaged.
For
example, instead of presenting the child directly with letters
or even complete words, you draw something looking like
this:
In
this way, by appealing to the formative forces in its soul, you
will find that now the child can remember something that has
actual meaning, something already grasped by the child's
formative forces. Such a child will tell you, “That is a
mouth.” And now you can ask it to say,
“Mmmouth.” Then you ask it to leave out the end
part of the word, gradually getting the child to pronounce
“Mmm.” Next you can say, “Let us paint what
you have just said.” We have left something out,
therefore this is what we paint:
And
now let us make it even simpler:
It
has become the letter M.
Or
we might draw something looking like this.
The
child will say, “Fish.” The teacher responds,
“Let's make this fish simpler.” Again one will ask
the child to sound only the first letter, in this way obtaining
the letter F. And so, from these pictures, we lead to
abstract letter forms.
There is no need to go back into history to show how
contemporary writing evolved from ancient pictography. For our
pedagogical purposes it is really unnecessary to delve into the
history of civilization. All we have to do is find our way
— helped along by wings of fantasy — into this
method, and then, no matter what language we speak, choose some
characteristic words that we then transform into pictures and
finally derive the actual letters from them. In this way we
work together with what the child wants inwardly during and
immediately after the change of teeth. From this you will
understand that, after having introduced writing by drawing a
painting and by painting a drawing (it is good for children to
use color immediately because they live in color, as everyone
who deals with them knows), one can then progress to reading.
This is because the entire human being is active in writing.
The hand is needed, and the whole body has to adapt itself
— even if only to a slight degree; the entire person is
involved. Writing, when evolved through painting-drawing, is
still more concrete than reading. When reading — well,
one just sits, one has already become like a timid mouse,
because only the head has to work. Reading has already become
abstract. It should be evolved by degrees as part of the whole
process.
But
if one adopts this method in order to work harmoniously with
human nature, it can become extraordinarily difficult to
withstand modern prejudices. Naturally, pupils will learn to
read a little later than expected today, and if they have to
change schools they appear less capable than the other students
in their new class. Yet, is it really justified that we cater
to the views of a materialistic culture with its demands
concerning what an eight-year-old child should know? The real
point is that it may not be beneficial at all for such a child
to learn to read too early. By doing so, something is being
blocked for life. If children learn to read too early, they are
led prematurely into abstractions. If reading were taught a
little later, countless potential sclerotics could lead happier
lives. Such hardening of the entire human organism — to
give it a simpler name — manifests in the most diverse
forms of sclerosis later in life, and can be traced back to a
faulty method of introducing reading to a child. Of course,
such symptoms can result from many other causes as well, but
the point is that the effects of soul and spirit on a person's
physical constitution are enhanced hygienically if the teaching
at school is attuned to human nature. If you know how to form
your lessons properly, you will be able to give your students
the best foundation for health. And you can be sure that, if
the methods of modern educational systems were healthier, far
fewer men would be walking around with bald heads!
People with a materialistic outlook give too little attention
to the mutual interaction between the soul-spiritual nature and
the physical body. Again and again I want to point out that the
tragedy of the current materialistic attitude is that it no
longer understands the material processes — which it
observes only externally — and that it no longer
recognizes how a moral element enters the physical. Already the
way the human being is treated — one could almost say
mistreated — by our natural science is likely to
lead to misconceptions about what a human being is. You need
only think of the usual kinds of illustrations found in
contemporary textbooks on physiology or anatomy, where you see
pictures of the skeleton, the nervous system, and the blood
circulation. The way these are drawn is very suggestive,
implying that they are a true representation of reality. And
yet, they do not convey the actual facts at all — or at
best, only ten percent of them, because ninety percent of the
human body consists of liquid substances that constantly flow
and, consequently, cannot be drawn in fixed outlines. Now you
may say, “Physiologists know that!” True, but this
knowledge remains within the circle of physiologists. It does
not enter society as a whole, particularly because of the
strongly suggestive influence of these illustrations.
People are even less aware of something else. Not only does
solid matter make up the smallest portion of our physical body,
while the largest part by far is liquid, but we are also
creatures of air every moment of our lives. One moment the air
around us is inside us, and in the next, the air within our
body is outside again. We are part of the surrounding air that
is constantly fluctuating within us. And what about the
conditions of warmth? In reality we have to discriminate
between our solid, liquid, gaseous, and warmth organizations.
These distinctions could be extended further, but for now we
will stop here.
It
will become evident that meaningless and erroneous ideas are
maintained about these matters when we consider the following:
If these illustrations of the skeleton, the nervous system, and
so on, really represented the true situation — always
implying that the human being is a solid organism — if
this were really the whole truth, then it would be little
wonder if the moral element, the life of the soul, could not
penetrate this solid bone matter or this apparently rigid blood
circulation. The physical and moral life would require separate
existences. But if you include the liquid, gaseous, and warmth
organizations in your picture of the individual, then you have
a fine agent, a refined entity — for example, in the
varying states of warmth — that allows the existing moral
constitution to extend also into the physical processes of
warmth. If your picture is based on reality, you will come to
find this unity between what has physical nature and what has
moral nature. This is what you have to remember when working
with the growing human being. It is essential to have this
awareness.
And
so it is very important for us to look at the totality of the
human being and find our way, unimpeded by generally accepted
physiological-psychological attitudes. It will enable us to
know how to treat the child who will otherwise develop inner
opposition toward what must be learned. It should be our aim to
allow our young students to grow gradually and naturally into
their subjects, because then they will also love what they have
to learn. But this will happen only if their inner forces
become involved fully in these new activities.
The
most damaging effects, just during the age of seven to nine,
are caused by one-sided illusions, by fixed ideas about how
certain things should be taught. For example, the nineteenth
century — but this was already prepared for in the
eighteenth century — was tremendously proud of the new
phonetic method of teaching reading that superseded the old
method of making words by adding single letters — a
method that was again replaced by the whole-word method. And
because today people are too embarrassed to openly respect old
ways, one will hardly find anyone prepared to defend the old
spelling method. According to present opinion, such a person
would be considered an old crank, because enthusiasm about an
old-fashioned spelling method is simply not appropriate. The
phonetic and the whole-word method carry the day. One feels
very proud of the phonetic method, teaching the child to
develop a feeling for the quality of sounds. No longer do young
pupils learn to identify separate letters, such as P,
N, or R; they are taught to pronounce the letters
as they sound in a word.
There is nothing wrong with that. The whole-word method is also
good, and it sometimes even begins by analyzing a complete
sentence, from which the teacher progresses to separate words
and then to single sounds. It is bad, however, when these
things become fads. The ideas that underlie all three methods
are good — there is no denying that each has its merits.
But what is it that makes this so? Imagine that you know a
person only from a photograph showing a front view. The picture
will have created a certain image within you of that person.
Now imagine that another picture falls into your hands, and
someone tells you that this is the same person. The second
picture shows a side view and creates such a different
impression that you may be convinced that it could not be the
same person. Yet in reality both photographs show the same
individual, but from different angles. And this is how it
always is in life: everything has to be considered from
different angles. It is easy to fall in love with one's own
particular perspective because it appears to be so convincing.
And so one might, with good reasons, defend the spelling
method, the phonetic method, or the whole-word method to the
extent that anyone else with an opposite opinion could not
refute one's arguments. Yet even the best of reasons may prove
to be only one-sided. In real life, everything has to be
considered from the most varied angles.
If
the letter forms have been gained through painting drawings and
drawing paintings, and if one has gone on to a kind of phonetic
or whole-word method — which is now appropriate because
it leads the child to an appreciation of a wholeness, and
prevents it from becoming too fixed in details — if all
this has been done, there is still something else that has been
overlooked in our materialistic climate. It is this: the single
sound, by itself, the separate M or P, this also
represents a reality. And it is important to see that, when a
sound is part of a word, it has already entered the external
world, already passed into the material and physical world.
What we have in our soul are the sounds as such, and these
depend largely on our soul nature. When we pronounce letters,
such as the letter M, for example, we actually say
“em.” Ancient Greeks did not do this; they
pronounced it “mu.” In other words, they
pronounced the auxiliary vowel after the consonant,
whereas we put it before the consonant. In Middle Europe
today, we make the sound of a letter by proceeding from the
vowel to the consonant, but in ancient Greece only the reverse
path was taken.
[In several European languages the vowel sound
added to a consonantal letter is pronounced either before or
after the consonant (that is, em, but dee). It is
conceivable that here the stenographer may have omitted the
word “often,” and the text may have read “In
Middle Europe today we often make the sound of a letter
by proceeding from the vowel to the consonant ...”
— TRANS.]
This indicates the underlying soul condition of
the people concerned.
Here we have a significant and important phenomenon. If you
look at language, not just from an external or utilitarian
perspective (since language today has become primarily a way of
transmitting thoughts or messages, and words are hardly more
than symbols of outer things), and if you return to the soul
element living in the word — living in language as a
whole — you will find the way back to the true nature of
the so-called sound; every sound with a quality of the
consonant has an entirely different character from a vowel
sound.
As
you know, there are many different theories explaining the
origin of language. (This is a situation similar to photographs
taken from different angles.) Among others, there is the
so-called bow-wow theory, which represents the view that
words imitate sounds that come from different beings or
objects. According to this theory, when people first began to
speak, they imitated characteristic external sounds. For
example, they heard a dog barking, “bow-wow.” If
they wanted to express a similar soul mood they produced a
similar sound. No one can refute such an idea. On the contrary,
there are many valid reasons to support the bow-wow theory. As
long as one argues only from this particular premise, it is
indisputable. But life does not consist of proofs and
refutations; life is full of living movement, transformation,
living metamorphosis. What is correct in one particular
situation can be wrong in another, and vice versa. Life has to
be comprehended in all its mobility.
As
you may know, there is another theory, called the ding-dong
theory, whose adherents strongly oppose the bow-wow theory.
According to this second theory, the origin of language is
explained in the following way: When a bell is struck, the
ensuing sound is caused by the specific constitution of its
metal. A similar mutual relationship between object and sound
is also ascribed to human speech. The ding-dong theory
represents more of a feeling into the materiality of things,
rather than an imitation of external sounds.
Again, this theory is really correct in certain respects. Much
could be said for either of these theories. In reality,
however, language did not arise exclusively according to the
ding-dong theory nor the bow-wow theory, although both theories
have elements of truth. Many other related factors would also
have to be considered, but each theory, in isolation, gives
only a onesided perspective. There are many instances in our
language that exemplify the ding-dong theory, and many others
where sound represents an imitation, as in
“bow-wow,” or in the “moo” of lowing
cattle. The fact is, both theories are correct, and many others
as well. What is important is to get hold of life as it
actually is; and if one does this, one will find that the
bow-wow theory is more related to vowels, and the ding-dong
theory related more to consonants. Again, not entirely,
however; such a statement would also be one-sided, because
eventually one will see that the consonants are formed as a
kind of reflection of events or shapes in our environment, as I
have indicated already in the little book
The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity.
[Rudolf Steiner,
The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity,
Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1992.] Thus the letter
F is formed as a likeness of the fish, M as a
likeness of the mouth, or L like leaping, and so on.
To
a certain extent, the origin of the consonants could be
explained by the ding-dong theory, except that it would have to
be worked out in finer detail. The vowels, on the other hand,
are a way of expressing and revealing a person's inner nature.
The forms of the letters that express vowel sounds do not
imitate external things at all, but express human feelings of
sympathy and antipathy. Feelings of joy or curiosity are
expressed, therefore, by the sound EE; amazement or
wonder; “I am astonished!” is expressed by
AH; A
[as in path] expresses “I want
to get rid of something that irritates me.” U
[as
in you] expresses “I am frightened.”
I
[as in kind] conveys “I like
you.”
Vowels reveal directly feelings of sympathy and antipathy. Far
from being the result of imitation, they enable human beings to
communicate likes and dislikes. When hearing a dog's
threatening bark, human beings — if their feelings are
like those of the dog — adapt their own experiences to
the bow-wow sound of the dog, and so on. Vocalizing
leads outward from within, whereas forming consonants
represents a movement inward from outside. Consonants reproduce
outer things. Simply by making these sounds, one is copying
outer nature. You can confirm this for yourselves if you go
into further detail.
Since all of this applies only to sounds rather than words,
however, you can appreciate that, when using the analytic
method, one is actually going from the whole word to the
original soul condition. In general, we must always try to
recognize what the child at each stage is requesting inwardly;
then we can proceed in freedom — just as a good
photographer does when asking clients to look in many different
directions in order to capture their personalities while taking
their pictures (and thereby making these sessions so tedious!).
Similarly, a complete view is essential if one wants to
comprehend the human being in depth.
With the whole-word method one gains only the physical aspect.
With the phonetic method one approaches the soul realm. And
— no matter how absurd this may sound — with the
spelling method one actually enters the realm of the soul.
Today this last method is, of course, seen as a form of idiocy;
without a doubt, however, it is more closely related to the
soul than the other methods. It must not be applied directly,
but needs to be introduced with a certain pedagogical skill and
artistry that avoids an overly one-sided exercise in
conventional pronunciation of the letters. Instead, the child
will gain some experience of how letters came about, and this
is something that can live within the formative forces,
something real for the child. This is the core of the matter.
And if young pupils have been taught in this way they will be
able to read in due time — perhaps a few months after the
ninth year. It doesn't really matter if they cannot read
earlier, because they have learned it naturally and in a
wholesome way. Depending on the various children's responses,
this stage may occur a little earlier or later.
The
ninth year marks the beginning of a smaller life cycle —
the larger ones have already been spoken of several times. They
are: from birth to the change of teeth; from the change of
teeth to puberty; and from then into the twenties. These days,
however, by the time young people have reached their twenties,
one no longer dares speak to them of another developmental
phase, which will peak after the age of twenty-one. This would
be considered a pure insult! At that age they feel fully mature
— they already publish their own articles in newspapers
and magazines. And so one has to exercise great discretion in
speaking about life's later stages of development. But it is
important for the educator to know about the larger life
periods and also about the smaller ones contained in them.
Between the ninth and the tenth years, but closer to the ninth,
one of the smaller periods begins, when a child gradually
awakens to the difference between self and the surrounding
world. Only then does a child become aware of being a separate
I. All teaching before this stage should therefore make the
child feel at one with the surroundings.
The
most peculiar ideas have been expressed to explain this
phenomenon. For example, you may have heard people say,
“When a young child gets hurt by running into a corner,
the reaction is to hit the corner.” An intellectual
interpretation of this phenomenon would be that one hits back
only if one has consciously received a hurt or an injury
consciously inflicted. And this is how the child's response in
hitting a table or other object is explained. This kind of
definition always tempts one to quote the Greek example of a
definition of the human being — that is, a human being is
a living creature who has two legs but no feathers. As far as
definitions go, this is actually correct. It leads us back into
the times of ancient Greece. I won't go into details to show
that present definitions in physics are often not much better,
because there children are also taught frequently that a human
being is a creature that walks on two legs and has no feathers.
A boy who was a bit brighter than the rest thought about this
definition. He caught a cockerel, plucked its feathers, and
took it to school. He presented the plucked bird, saying,
“This is a human being! It is a creature that walks on
two legs and has no feathers.” Well, definitions may have
their uses, but they are almost always one-sided.
The
important thing is to find one's way into life as it really is
— something I have to repeat time and again. The point is
that before the ninth year a child does not yet distinguish
between self and surroundings. Therefore one cannot say that a
little child, when hitting the table that caused it pain,
imagines the table to be a living thing. It would never occur
to a child to think so. This so-called animism, the bestowal of
a soul on an inanimate object — an idea that has already
crept into our history of civilization — is something
that simply does not exist. The fantastic theories of some of
our erudite scholars, who believe they have discovered that
human beings endow inanimate objects with a soul, are truly
astonishing. Whole mythologies have been explained away in
light of this theory. It strikes one that people who spread
such ideas have never met a primitive person. For example, it
would never occur to a simple peasant who has remained
untouched by our sophisticated ways of life to endow natural
phenomena with a soul quality. Concepts such as
ensouling or animation of dead objects simply do
not exist for the child. The child feels alive, and
consequently everything around the child must also be alive.
But even such a primitive idea does not enter children's dim
and dreamy consciousness. This is why, when teaching pupils
under nine, you must not let the children's environment and all
that it contains appear as something separate from them. You
must allow plants to come to life — indeed, everything
must live and speak to children, because they do not yet
distinguish between themselves and the world as a whole.
It
is obvious from this that, before the ninth year, you cannot
reach children with any kind of intellectual descriptions.
Everything has to be transformed into pictures, into fresh and
living pictures. As soon as you go on to a more direct
description, you will not achieve anything during the eighth to
ninth year. This approach becomes possible only later. One has
to find the way into each specific life period. Until the ninth
year children only understand a pictorial presentation.
Anything else bypasses them, just as sound bypasses the eye.
But between the ninth and tenth years, as children gradually
become more aware of their own identity, you can begin to
present more factual descriptions of plants. However, it is not
yet possible to describe anything that belongs to the mineral
kingdom, because the children's newly evolving capacity to
differentiate between self and world is not yet strong enough
to allow them to comprehend the significant difference between
what is inherently alive and what belongs to the dead mineral
world. Children at this stage can only appreciate the
difference between themselves and a plant. Thereafter you can
gradually progress to a description of animals. But again this
has to be done so that the introduction to the animal world
remains real for the child.
Today there is an established form of botany, and along with
that a tendency to introduce this subject just as it is in the
lower grades. This is done out of a kind of laziness, but it
really is an appalling thing to present the botany of adults to
younger classes. What is this botany of ours in actuality? It
is made up of a systematic classification of plants, arranged
according to certain accepted principles. First come the
fungi, then algae, ranunculaceae, and so
on — one family placed neatly next to another. But if
such a branch of science (which itself may be quite acceptable)
is taught to young children in schools, it is almost like
arranging different kinds of hairs, plucked from a human body,
and classifying them systematically according to where they
grew — behind the ears, on the head, on the legs, and so
on. Following this method, you might manage to build up a very
impressive system, but it would not help you understand the
true nature of hair. And because it seems almost too obvious,
one might easily neglect to relate the various types of hair to
the human being as an entity. The plant world does not have its
own separate existence either, because it is part of Earth. You
may think that you know the laburnum from what you find
about it in a botany book. I have no objections to its
botanical classification. But to understand why its blossoms
are yellow, you have to see it on a sunny slope, and you have
to include in your observation the various layers of soil from
which it grows. Only then can you realize that its yellow color
is connected with the colors of the soil from which it grows!
But in this situation you look at this plant as you would look
at hair growing out of a human body. Earth and plants —
as far as the child knows them already — remain one. You
must not teach adult botany in the lower grades, and this means
you cannot describe a plant without, at the same time, also
talking about the Sun shining on it, about climatic conditions
and the configuration of the soil — in a manner
appropriate to the age of the child, of course.
To
teach botany as this is done in demonstrations — taking
isolated plants, one next to another, violates the child's
nature. Even in demonstrations everything depends on the choice
of object to be studied. The child has an instinctive feeling
for what is living and for what is truly real. If you bring
something dead, you wound what is alive in the child, you
attack a child's sense of truth and reality. But these days
there is little awareness of the subtle differences in these
qualities. Imagine contemporary philosophers pondering the
concept of being, of existence. It would make very little
difference to them whether they chose a crystal or a blossom as
an object of contemplation, because both of them are.
One can place them both on a table, and both things
exist. But this is not the truth at all! In regard to
their being, they are not homogeneous. You can pick up the rock
crystal again after three years; it is by the power of
its own existence. But the blossom is not as it appears at all.
A blossom, taken by itself, is a falsehood in nature. In order
to assign existence or being to the blossom, one has to
describe the entire plant. By itself, the blossom is an
abstraction in the world of matter. This is not true of the
rock crystal. But people today have lost the sense for such
differentiations within the reality of things.
Children, however, still have this feeling by instinct. If you
bring something to children that is not a whole, they
experience a strange feeling, which can follow them into later
life. Otherwise Tagore would not have described the sinister
impression that the amputated leg had on him in his childhood.
A human leg in itself does not represent reality, it has
nothing to do with reality. For a leg is only a leg as long as
it is part of a whole organism. If cut off, it ceases to be a
leg.
Such things have to become flesh and blood again so that, by
progressing from the whole to the parts, we comprehend reality.
It can happen all too easily that we treat a separate part in a
completely wrong way if we isolate it. In the case of botany in
the lower grades, therefore, we must start with the Earth as a
whole and look at the plants as if they were the hair growing
out of it.
With regard to the animal world, children cannot relate
properly to the animal at all if you follow the common method
of classification. Since animal study is introduced only in the
tenth or eleventh year, you can then expect a little more from
the children. But to teach the study of animals according to
the usual classification has little real meaning for students
of that age, even if this method is scientifically justified.
The reality is that the entire animal kingdom represents a
human being that is spread out. Take a lion, for example; there
you see a onesided development of the chest organization. Take
the elephant; here the entire organization is oriented toward a
lengthening of the upper lip. In the case of the giraffe, the
entire organization strives toward a longer neck. If you can
thus see a one-sided development of a human organic system in
each animal, and survey the entire animal kingdom all the way
down to the insect (one could go even further, down to the
“geological” animals, though Terebratulida
are not really geological animals any more) then you will
realize that the entire animal kingdom is a “human
being,” spread out like an opened fan, and the human
physical organization makes up the entire animal kingdom,
folded together like a closed fan. This is how one can bring
the mutual relationship between the human being and the animal
into proper perspective. Putting all this into such few words
is making it into an abstraction, of course. You will have to
transform it into living substance until you can describe each
animal-form in terms of a one-sided development of a specific
human organic system. If you can find the necessary strength to
give your pupils a lively description of animals in this sense,
you will soon see how they respond. For this is what they want
to hear.
And
so the plants are linked to the Earth as if they were the hair
of the Earth. The animal is linked to the human being and seen
as a one-sided development of various human organic systems. It
is as if human arms or legs — and in other instances, the
human nose or trunk, and so on — had grown into separate
existences in order to live as animals on Earth. This is how
pupils can understand the animal-forms. It will enable the
teacher to form lessons that are attuned to what lives in the
growing human being, in the children themselves.
A question is asked concerning religious instruction.
RUDOLF STEINER: A misunderstanding
has arisen from my
preliminary remarks about child development and religious
impulses. So far nothing has been said in my lectures about
religious instruction itself, because I began to talk only
today about the practical application of the Waldorf way of
teaching. I told you that there is a kind of
physical-religious relationship (I called it
bodily-religious) between children and their
environment. Furthermore, I said that what young children
exercised — simply because of their organism —
entered the sphere of thinking only after puberty, after
approximately the fourteenth or fifteenth year. What manifests
at first in a physicalspiritual way, continues in a hidden
existence, and re-emerges in the thinking realm in
approximately the fifteenth year; I compared that with an
underground stream surfacing again on lower ground. For an
adult, religion is closely linked to the thinking sphere. If
teaching, however, is to be in line with the child's natural
development, what will emerge later must already be carefully
prepared for during an earlier stage. And thus the question
arises: Bearing these laws of human development in mind, how
should the religion lessons be planned for the students between
the ages of six and fourteen? This is one of the questions that
will be addressed in coming lectures.
In
anticipation, however, I would like to say that we must be
clear that the religious element is simply inborn in the child,
that it is part of the child's being. This is revealed
particularly clearly through the child's religious orientation
until the change of teeth, as I have already described it. What
has eventually become religion in our general civilization
— taken in an adult sense — belongs naturally to
the world of ideas, or at least depends on ideation for its
substance, which, true enough, lives primarily in the adult's
feeling realm. Only after the fourteenth year is the adolescent
mature enough to appreciate the ideal quality and substance of
religion. For the class teacher (grades one through eight) the
important question thus arises: How should we arrange our
religion lessons? Or, more precisely: What part of the child
must we appeal to through religion lessons during the time
between the seventh and fourteenth years?
During the first life period, until the change of teeth, we
directly affect the child's physical organization through an
educational influence. After puberty, fundamentally speaking,
we work on the powers of judgment and on the adolescent's
mental imagery. During the intervening years we work upon the
child's feeling life. This is why we should lead the child into
this period with a pictorial approach, because pictures work
directly in soul life (Gem¼t).
[Gem¼t is virtually untranslatable. Rudolf
Steiner said “this Gem¼t lives in
the center of soul life.” A dictionary defines it as
“heart, soul, or mind.” But these must be
considered as one rather than as three separate things. Thus,
one can read Gem¼t as “soul,”
that is, heart and mind together.] The powers of mental imagery
mature only gradually, and they have to be prepared well before
their proper time. What we now have to do in religion lessons
is appeal, above all, to the children's soul life, as I will
describe it in regard to other subjects tomorrow. The question
is: How do we do it?
We
work on the children's soul life by allowing them to
experience feelings of sympathy and antipathy. This means that
we act properly by developing the kind of sympathies and
antipathies between the seventh and fourteenth years that will
lead finally to proper judgments in the religious sphere. And
so we avoid Thou shalt or Thou shalt not
attitudes in our religion lessons, because it has little value
for teaching a child of this age. Instead we arrange lessons so
that feelings of sympathy are induced for what the child is
meant to do. We do not explain our real aims to children. Using
the pictorial element as medium, we present children with what
fills them with feelings of sympathy in a heightened sense, as
well as in a religious sense. Likewise, we try to induce
feelings of antipathy toward what they are not meant to do.
In
this way, on the strength of feelings of right or wrong, and
always through the pictorial element, we try to direct the
young students gradually from the divine-spiritual in nature,
through the divine-spiritual in the human being, toward having
children make the divine-spiritual their own. This has to all
reach the child through the life of soul, however, certainly
until eighth grade. We must avoid a dogmatic approach and
setting up moral commandments. We must do all we can to prepare
the child's soul for what should develop later on as the adult
faculty of forming sound judgments. In this way we will do far
more for the child's future religious orientation than by
presenting religious commandments or fixed articles of faith at
an age when children are not yet ready for them. By clothing
our subject in images, thus preparing the ground for what in
later life will emerge as religious judgment, we prepare our
students for the possibility of comprehending through their own
spirituality what they are meant to grasp as their own
innermost being — that is, their religious orientation.
Through appealing to the children's soul-life in religion
lessons — that is, by presenting our subject pictorially
rather than through articles of faith or in the form of moral
commandments — we grant them the freedom to find their
own religious orientation later in life. It is extremely
important for young people, from puberty right into their
twenties, to have the opportunity to lift, by their own
strength, what they first received through their soul life
— given with a certain breadth from many perspectives
— into conscious individual judgments. It will enable
them to find their own way to the divine world.
It
makes all the difference whether children, during the age of
authority, are brought up in a particular religious belief, or
whether, by witnessing the teacher's underlying religious
attitude, they are enabled “to pull themselves up like a
plant on its tendrils,” and thus develop their own
morality later in life. Having first found pleasure or
displeasure in what was finally condensed into an attitude of
Thou shalt or Thou shalt not, and having learned
to recognize, through a pictorial contemplation of nature, how
the human soul becomes free through an inner picture of a
divine-spiritual weaving in nature and in history, a new stage
is reached where young people's own images and ideas can be
formed. In this way the possibility is given of receiving
religious education out of the center of life itself. It is
something that becomes possible only after puberty has been
reached.
The
point is that future stages have to be prepared for properly
— that is, based on the correct insight into human
nature. In my lectures I have used the comparison of the river
that disappears underground and resurfaces at a lower level.
During the first seven years the children have an inborn
religious attitude. This now enters the depths of their souls,
becoming part of them, and does not resurface in the form of
thinking until the arrival of puberty. During the second life
period we must work into the depths of the students' souls
through what is revealed to our individual insights. In this
way we prepare them to grow into religious adults. We impede
this process if we do not offer our students the possibility to
find their own religious orientation later on. In every human
being there is an individual orientation toward religion,
which, after the fifteenth year, has to be gradually won. Our
task is to prepare the ground so that this can happen properly.
That is why, at this age, we have to treat the religion lessons
just as we do the lessons in the other subjects. They must all
work on the child's soul through the power of imagery; the
child's soul life has to be stimulated. It is possible to
introduce a religious element into every subject, even into
math lessons. Anyone who has some knowledge of Waldorf teaching
will know that this statement is true. A Christian element
pervades every subject, even mathematics. This fundamental
religious current flows through all of education.
Because of prevailing circumstances, however, we have felt it
necessary to come to the following arrangement regarding
religious instruction. I would like to point out once more that
Waldorf schools are not ideological but pedagogical schools,
where the basic demand is that our teaching methods be in
harmony with the child's nature. Thus we neither wish nor
intend to teach our students to become anthroposophists. We
have chosen anthroposophy to be the foundation simply because
we believe that a true method of teaching can flow from it. Our
Catholic students are taught by visiting Catholic priests, and
our Protestant students by visiting Protestant ministers.
Waldorf students, whose parents are free-thinkers, and who
otherwise would not receive any religious instruction at all,
are given religion lessons by our own teachers. The surprising
fact has emerged, however, that nearly all of our Waldorf
students now attend the religion lessons presented by Waldorf
teachers. They have all flocked to the so-called
“free” religion lessons, lessons that, in their own
way, comprise what permeates all of our teaching.
[Free,
as used here means “nonsectarian.”]
These free religion lessons have certainly caused us a great
deal of concern. Our relationship to the school is very unusual
regarding these lessons. We consider all the other subjects as
necessary and intrinsic to our education from the point of view
of the principles and methods resulting from anthroposophical
research. But, regarding the free religion lessons, we feel
that we are on the same footing as the visiting Catholic or
Protestant teachers. In this sense, Waldorf teachers who give
religion lessons are also “outsiders.” We do not
want to have an ideological or confessional school, not even in
an anthroposophical sense. Nevertheless, anthroposophical
methods have proven to be very fertile ground for just these
free religion lessons, in which we do not teach anthroposophy,
but in which we build up and form according to the methods
already characterized.
Many objections have been raised against these free religion
lessons, not least because so many children have changed over
from the denominational to the free religion lessons. This has
brought many other difficulties with it, for, despite our
shortage of teachers, we had to find among our existing staff
one new religion teacher after another. It is hardly our fault
if pupils desert their denominational religion lessons because
they wish to join the free religion lessons. The obvious reason
is that the visiting religion teachers do not apply Waldorf
methods, and the right methods are always the decisive factor,
in religious instruction as well.
A further question is asked about religious lessons.
RUDOLF STEINER: The characteristic
mark of Waldorf education
should be that all educational questions and problems are
considered only from the pedagogical angle, and religion
lessons are no exception. The Reverend Mr. X would certainly
acknowledge that the two directions mentioned, namely the
possibility of replacing religion lessons by moral instruction
on the one hand, and that of denominational schools on the
other, have been raised from very different viewpoints. The
suggestion of replacing religious instruction with lessons in
moral conduct is usually presented by those who want to
eliminate religion altogether, and who maintain the opinion
that religion has become more or less superfluous. On the other
hand, a tendency toward religious dogma can easily cause a
longing for denominational schools. Neither of these are
pedagogical points of view.
In
order to link them a little more precisely to the aspect of
teaching method, I would like to ask: What constitutes the
pedagogical point of view? Surely it is the assumption that a
human being is not yet complete during the stage of childhood
or youth — something very obvious. A child has to grow
gradually into a full human individual, which will be achieved
only during the course of life. This implies that all potential
and dormant faculties in the child should be educated —
and here we have the pedagogical point of view in its most
abstract form.
If
someone who represents the purely pedagogical outlook that
results from insight into human nature were to now declare that
a child comes into the world with an inborn kinship to the
religious element, and that during the first seven years the
child's corporeality is steeped in religion, only to hear a
call for replacing religion lessons by lessons in ethics, it
must strike such a person as if those who hold such an idea
would be unwilling to exercise a human limb, say a leg, because
they had concluded that the human being needs to be trained in
every respect except in the use of legs! To call for the
exclusion of an essential part of the human being can only stem
from a fanatical attitude, but never from a real pedagogy.
Insofar as only pedagogical principles are being defended and
pedagogical impulses scrutinized here, the necessity of
religious teaching certainly follows from the pedagogical point
of view. This is why we have established the free religion
lessons for those children who, according to the regulations of
the school authorities, would otherwise have been deprived of
religious instruction, as already stated. Through this
arrangement, and because all the children belonging to this
category are attending the free religion lessons, there is no
student in the Waldorf school who does not have religious
instruction. This procedure has made it possible for us to
bring back the religious life into the entire school.
To
speak of the proper cultivation of the religious life at
school, and to counter the effects of the so-called
“religion-free enlightenment,” by appealing to the
inborn religious disposition in the young, may be the best way
forward to a religious renewal. I consider it a certain success
for the Waldorf school to have brought religion to the children
of religious dissidents. The Catholic and Protestant children
would have received religious instruction in any case, but it
really was not at all easy to find the appropriate form that
would enable us to open this subject to all our children. It
was strived for only from the pedagogical point of view.
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