F O R E W O R D
Early in 1919 Rudolf Steiner was
asked by the director of the
Waldorf Astoria Tobacco Company in Stuttgart, Germany, to give
lectures to the factory workers on the question of what new
social impulses are necessary in the modern world. Responding
to the lectures, the factory workers requested of Rudolf
Steiner that he further help them in developing an education
for their own children based on the knowledge of the human
being and of society that he had opened up for them. By the end
of April, that same spring, the decision had been made to
establish a new school for the workers' children, the first
Waldorf School.
Today, the Waldorf school movement, as it
is still known (or the Rudolf Steiner school movement, as it is
also called), is one of the largest, and perhaps the fastest
growing, independent school movements in the world. In 1984
there were over 300 schools worldwide, throughout Europe, in
the United States, Canada, South America, South Africa,
Australia, and New Zealand. By 1995, the seventy-fifth
anniversary of the Waldorf movement, there were over 600
schools in almost forty countries. Based on a comprehensive and
integrated understanding of the human being, a detailed account
of child development, and with a curriculum and teaching
practice that seek the unity of intellectual, emotional, and
ethical development at every point, Waldorf education deserves
the attention of everyone concerned with education and the
human future.
This book is a transcript of eight lectures
plus an introduction to a eurythmy performance, taken
originally in shorthand, given by Rudolf Steiner in April,
1923, at Dornach, Switzerland, to a group of Waldorf teachers
and others from several European countries — he especially
mentions the Czech representatives — who at this early
stage had also become interested in Waldorf education. The
reader today can readily sense the quality of active engagement
that runs through these lectures as Rudolf Steiner explores the
basic principles of Waldorf education, and at the same time, as
required, confronts specific problems that arose in those early
beginnings of the movement when the first school was not yet
five years old. The reader is also carried immediately into a
rich discussion of issues of central concern for education
today. Perhaps the most helpful contribution this foreword can
make to the reader is simply to underscore some of these
issues.
Rudolf Steiner's holistic understanding of
the human being underlies all of Waldorf education. To be sure,
nearly every educational reform movement in the modern world
claims to be concerned with “the education of the whole
child,” and in this way Waldorf education is no
exception. In Waldorf education, however, this claim does not
remain a generality. Rather, the many dimensions of the human
being — physical, emotional, and intellectual, as well as the
distinctive characteristics and myriad interrelationships of
these dimensions —
are presented with great care and
precision. Further, their actual, concrete implications for the
curriculum, the classroom, and the larger society are developed
in detail and in a variety of ways.
In talking about the whole human being,
Rudolf Steiner frequently employs the traditional terminology
of body, soul, and spirit. Despite its venerable tradition,
this terminology may, for many modern readers, strike a strange
note at first, especially for most modern educators. And yet,
those same readers will just as likely have no trouble at all
with the original Greek term for “soul,”
psyche,
which has acquired a firm and familiar place in the modern
vocabulary just as its more recent equivalent,
soul, has
become somewhat strange and unfamiliar. And
“psychosomatic” is the au courant expression
for a sophisticated awareness of the mind-body relationship and
its interaction —
a term that is, however, seldom spelled
out, and that often covers more than it reveals. The attentive
reader will find that Rudolf Steiner makes use of traditional
terminology in a precise, truly nontraditional way to explore
and delineate essential dimensions and functions of the human
being, which the fashionable Greek of psyche and
psychosomatic tend to generalize and blur, and which much modern
educational literature ignores altogether. At the very least
the reader is well-advised to work with the traditional
terminology and test whether or not it is indeed being used
with precision and with real efficacy.
Rudolf Steiner does not, however, limit
himself by any means to traditional terminology. Many readers
will immediately find themselves on familiar ground with
Steiner's detailed account of child development. And they may
recognize that many aspects of Steiner's description have been
subsequently confirmed, and in certain areas filled out, by
educational and developmental psychologists working
independently of him (Gesell and Piaget come to mind). Readers
may also notice some important differences that, together with
obvious areas of overlap, invite more dialogue between Waldorf
educators and non-Waldorf educators than has yet occurred.
Likewise, the crucial importance that Steiner attributed to the
early, preschool years — particularly as it
relates to an individual's entire life — has since become a
commonplace of almost all developmental psychology. No one,
however, has explored the educational implications of these
early years with the fullness and care for actual curriculum
and classroom practice that marks Steiner's work. One example
in these lectures is the care he gives to describing the
educational and developmental importance of the child's
learning to stand and walk, to speak, and to think
— all on
its own — and the unfolding implications that he indicates these
early achievements have for the whole of an individual's
life.
Central to Steiner's account of child
development is that the child comes to know the world in ways
that are specific to the physical age and development of the
child, and which serve as an essential foundation for other
ways of knowing that follow. The primary way, Steiner points
out, by which the very young, pre-school age child comes to
know the world and others is through physical, sensory
activity. This is an immediate, participative way of knowing by
which the child through physical activity, and above all,
through imitation, emulation, and play first comes to know and
to make the world its own.
There are many interesting potential points
of contact between Steiner's description of the child's
participative, imitative knowing, and the independent
investigations accomplished since his death by others
unacquainted with either Steiner's more general work or Waldorf
education; these points of contact also offer the promise of a
fruitful exchange between Waldorf education and others. For
example, the importance, stressed by Steiner, of play,
imitation, and activity as being the foundation for all
subsequent knowing, even that of formal analytic cognition,
which comes into its own with adolescence, has been explored in
great detail by many developmental psychologists. Kurt Fischer,
for instance, writes, “All cognition starts with action
...the higher-level cognition of childhood and adulthood derive
directly from these sensorimotor actions....” And Piaget,
early in his work wrote, “At this most imitative stage,
the child mimics with his whole being, identifying himself with
his model.” Many years before, in the lectures reprinted
here, and with the actual implications for education much more
at the center of his concern, Rudolf Steiner, in a stunning
expression, said that “the young child, in a certain
sense, really is just one great sense organ,” imitating
and absorbing its whole environment.
The kind of deep knowing Steiner describes
here seems akin to the kind of knowing that the philosopher of
science Michael Polanyi described later in terms of
“tacit knowing”: a knowing-by-doing, a knowing that
exists primarily in what psychologist Lawrence Kubie, and others, have called the
“pre-conscious.”
Moreover, Steiner's conception expressed in
these lectures of the young child as “a sense
organ” in which will forces are at work connects directly
with all those investigators in the field of phenomenology for
whom intentionality, or will, is central to all experience,
including perception. As Steiner also emphasizes, this early
participative knowing of the child encompasses the moral and
the religious, because it involves participation with the
environment, with other people, and with one's own experience
in being. It is a kind of knowing that involves the being of
the knower, and it is the essential foundation for what Philip
Phenix has called, “learning to live well as
persons.” It is a genuine knowing, which, as both Polanyi
and Steiner stress, is always presupposed by more abstract,
intellectual knowing. Indeed, Rudolf Steiner's description of
the child's first experience of mathematics provides a vivid
illustration of this crucially important point. Steiner
indicates how the young child has first a lived, but
pre-conscious experience of mathematics in its own early
physical movements, an experience Steiner nicely describes as
“bodily geometry,” a lived experience which then
becomes the basis for the eventual development of abstract,
mathematical conceptual thinking later on. It becomes clear how
the full development of this pre-conscious, tacit knowing,
grounded in lived experience is essential to the emergence of
truly powerful and insightful abstract conceptuality in later
years.
More than any others who have dealt with
it, Rudolf Steiner developed in considerable detail the
implications of the young child's participative, tacit knowing
(to use Polanyi's term for education). Positively, it means
that the educator's primary task for the pre-school child is to
provide an environment and people worthy of imitation by, and
interaction with, the child. Negatively, it means that every
attempt to teach young children analytical, conceptual
thinking — the wide-spread efforts to teach reading, calculating,
and computer skills at an ever earlier age — is premature, and a
destructive intrusion that threatens the full development of
the tacit knowing so necessary for truly powerful, creative,
and self-confident thinking in later life. Although the
dominant tendency in modern education is to continue to
“hot house” young children to acquire adult reading
and calculating skills, some important educators, like David
Elkind, are beginning to point out, as Waldorf schools have
always done, how destructive this is to the child's eventual
educational growth and even physical health.
In the primary school years, Rudolf Steiner
points out, the child enters a new stage when the feeling life
becomes dominant. The child lives in feelings, and these now
become the child's primary way of knowing the world
— through
the feeling, pictorial, rich image-making capacities that the
rhythmic, feeling life makes possible. One can say, perhaps,
that while the intelligence of the pre-school child first
awakens in the physical life of the child, the intelligence of
the child in primary school now awakens mainly in the life of
feelings. Steiner explicitly identified these years when the
imagination emerges as central between the child's change of
teeth and puberty. A few educators have apparently begun to
recognize that the change of teeth may, indeed, be an important
signal that the child is entering upon a new level of
development. It is, Steiner said, a signal that the child's
forces, previously involved in physical growth, now become
available in a new way for imaginative thinking, and,
therefore, need to be nourished and cultivated
imaginatively.
It is here that we see the importance of
the image in all thinking. Whenever we want to explain,
understand, or integrate our experience, we must have recourse
to our images. Our images give us our world, and the kind and
quality of our world depends on the kind and quality of the
images through which we approach and understand it. During the
school years when the child lives and knows the world through
an imaginative, feeling life, a powerful image-making capacity
is either developed or not. It is this vital picture-making
capacity that gives life and insight to logical and conceptual
thinking. The primary task of education in the primary school
years is, therefore, to educate and nourish the imaging powers
of the child, and to lead him or her into the development of
strong, flexible, and insightful conceptual capacities, which
only developed imagination makes possible.
Here the moral dimension in knowing and
education appears in yet another way. We are responsible for
the kind of images we bring to bear on the world, and the ways
we do it. And we are responsible for the care we take in
helping children to develop their own strong image-making
capacities. Much in modern American education, with its nearly
exclusive emphasis on utilitarian, problem-solving skills,
neglects entirely the development of the child's imagination.
At the same time —
through television, movies, literalistic
picture books, and detailed toys, all of which leave nothing to
the child's own imaginative powers — the children are
made increasingly vulnerable to having their minds and feelings
filled with readymade, supplied images — other people's
images, often of the most banal, even violent and obsessive
kind.
Steiner stresses, therefore, the importance
of an education during the primary school years that is
thoroughly artistic in nature. In these lectures he explicitly
criticizes any one-sided emphasis on emotional development that
ignores the importance of intellectual development. He also
criticizes as nonsense notions that all learning should be
play. (In this he transcends the current split between the
partisans of so-called cognitive education and affective
education.) Rather than emphasizing artistic as opposed to
intellectual subjects, his chief concern is to bring together
intellect, emotion, and the tacit knowing of will activity in
an integral unity. Every subject, especially including
mathematics and science, therefore, is to be presented in an
imaginative, artistic way that speaks to and nourishes the
child's own imagination. In the education sought in Waldorf
schools, sound, tone, stories, poetry, music, movement,
handwork, painting and colors, and direct acquaintance with
living nature and other people permeate the pedagogy and the
curriculum of these primary school years.
It is just such an artistic education in
this fullest sense that leads to strong conceptual powers in
the adolescent and adult years. Other people, such as the
philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and John
MacMurray, have recognized the centrality of the imaging,
feeling life of the primary school child, and have urged that
an artistic sensitivity and approach characterize all teaching
during these years. Even John Dewey, in one of his more recent
books, Art as
Experience, and in some later
essays, speaks of art as the primary model for all knowing, and
of the importance of conceiving of “education as an
art.” In these writings Dewey saw how essential an
artistic education is to all thinking. Dewey wrote: “...
the production of a work of genuine art probably demands more
intelligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes
on among those who pride themselves on being
intellectuals.” But Dewey never developed the educational
implications of his own recognition of the centrality of the
artistic-imaginative experience, and American education
— although
it has been enamored with Dewey's other, narrower stress on
problem-solving skills — has totally ignored
his later emphasis on artistic imagination and education as an
art. Only now are there signs, as in the work of Elliot Eisner
that some educators are beginning to recognize how essential an
artistic, imaginative approach in education is. Here, once
again, Waldorf education, with its seventy-five years of
experience, can make an essential contribution to the current
educational dialogue. At a time when increasing numbers of
Americans are concerned that our schools do everything
necessary to develop genuinely self-confident and creative
thinking, the importance of the attention given in Waldorf
education to the deepest sources of imagination, creativity,
and self-confidence becomes more and more apparent.
Perhaps two other elements in these
lectures, which speak directly to current American educational
concerns, should be briefly discussed. One has to do with the
demand of many parents and public figures today that new
attention be given in American schools to religious and moral
education, and what is often called “teaching
values.” In these lectures Rudolf Steiner stresses the
importance of thinking about religious and moral education in a
way very different from what is customary. At certain points in
these lectures the reader will note that Rudolf Steiner and the
first Waldorf schools had to grapple with difficult, specific
problems posed by the current legal requirements in Germany
regarding religious instruction. Even in the discussion of
these specific issues, it is clear that Rudolf Steiner rejects
any form of indoctrination or empty teaching of abstract
religious concepts. Rather, he emphasizes the importance of the
teacher. The child brings into life in its earliest years a
natural gratitude for being — what Steiner
suggestively terms a kind of natural “bodily
religion.” And the religious-ethical task of the teacher
is to respond in kind —
to make available to the child an
environment of things, people, and attitudes worthy of the
child's grateful imitation; “the task of the teachers is
through their actions and general behavior” to create a
trustworthy reality for the children to live in.
As the imaginative life flowers in the
primary school child, the fundamental ethical-religious
education is again to be sought in providing the children with
an experience of beauty, fairness, a reverence for life, and a
life-giving attitude and conduct on the part of the teacher.
The truly ethical and religious dimensions of education have
nothing to do with indoctrination, the teaching of empty
concepts, “thou-shalt” attitudes, but with the
actual experience of gratitude, love, wonder, a devoted
interest in one's life tasks and conduct, and a recognition of
the worth of the developing individual. Instead of concerning
ourselves so much with teaching the children moral concepts,
writes Steiner, “we should strive towards a knowledge of
how we, as teachers and educators, should conduct
ourselves.”
And this points to another current concern
within American education; namely, the need to recognize the
essential importance of the person and being of the teacher
(and the parent) in education. Many recent calls for reform in
American education have pointed to the low standing of the
teacher in our culture, and the necessity of rectifying this.
In these lectures, as elsewhere, Rudolf Steiner has much of
crucial importance to say. In this regard, his discussion of
the complex, and necessary relationships between the child's
experience of genuine authority (not authoritarianism) and the
development of freedom and capacity for self-determination in
later life is especially pertinent to current educational
concerns.
It should, perhaps, also be noted in
concluding that in these lectures Rudolf Steiner was speaking
to people who had at least an acquaintance with the view of the
human being, on which his lectures were based. Occasionally,
therefore, the word anthroposophy appears
without explanation, and the reader who is meeting Rudolf
Steiner and Waldorf education for the first time may have
difficulty understanding what is meant. Anthroposophy was the
term Rudolf Steiner used to characterize the approach to
understanding the whole human being as body, soul, and spirit;
while at first foreign to the modern eye, a moment's reflection
will show that the term is no more difficult than the more
familiar word, anthropology, except
that, instead of the Greek word, logos —
or “wisdom” — sophie
is joined with the Greek word for
“human being” — or
anthropos. Elsewhere, Steiner expressed his hope that
anthroposophy would not be understood in a wooden and literal
translation, but that it should be taken to mean “a
recognition of our essential humanity.” The ground of
Waldorf education is precisely this recognition of the
essential human being. Central to Waldorf education is the
conviction that each pupil, each person, is an individual,
evolving self of infinite worth — a human spirit, for
the essence of spirit, Steiner insisted, is to be found in the
mystery of the individual self. As the English Waldorf educator
John Davy once observed, this is not a fashionable view in a
skeptical age, but it is one that carries a natural affinity
with all who care about the education and evolving humanity of
our children.
This foreword has attempted only to touch
on some of the riches to be found in these lectures. Yet, this
lecture cycle itself is far from an exhaustive account of
Waldorf education. For those who want to explore further, the
following lecture cycles by Rudolf Steiner are especially
recommended as introductions to Waldorf education:
The Education of the Child and Early
Lectures on Education;
The Spirit of the Waldorf
School; and The Kingdom of Childhood. Steiner delivered other lecture series on education
that require a deeper familiarity with Waldorf education and anthroposophy. [See pp. 210-211 for a more
comprehensive list of titles.] Introductions to Waldorf
education by others are also especially recommended: Mary
Caroline Richards, “The Public School and the Education
of the Whole Person” contained in Opening Our Moral Eye; A. C. Harwood, The
Recovery of Man in Childhood: A Study in the Educational Work
of Rudolf Steiner; Majorie
Spock, Teaching as a Lively
Art; and Frans Carlgren,
Education Towards
Freedom. Useful introductory
articles will also be found in “An Introduction to
Waldorf Education,” Teachers College Record, vol. 81 (Spring 1980): 322-370.
DOUGLAS
SLOAN
Teachers College,
Columbia University
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