The Rudolf Steiner Archive

14. The Educational Basis of the Waldorf School

[ 1 ] The intentions that Emil Molt wants to realize through the Waldorf School are connected with very specific views on the social tasks of the present and the near future. The spirit in which this school is to be run must arise from these views. It is linked to an industrial enterprise. The way in which modern industry has placed itself in the development of human social life gives its character to the practice of the newer social movement. The parents who entrust their children to this school cannot but expect that these children will be educated and taught in a way that takes full account of this movement. This makes it necessary for the foundation of the school to be based on pedagogical principles that are rooted in the demands of contemporary life. Children should be brought up and taught to live a life that meets the requirements to which every person, regardless of which of the traditional social classes they belong to, can aspire. What the practice of contemporary life demands of man must be reflected in the facilities of this school. What is to act as the dominant spirit in this life must be stimulated in the children through education and teaching.

[ 2 ] It would be disastrous if a spirit alien to life prevailed in the basic pedagogical views on which the Waldorf school is to be built. Such a spirit emerges all too easily today where one develops a feeling for the part played in the disintegration of civilization by the absorption in a materialistic attitude to life and mindset during the last decades. Prompted by this feeling, one would like to introduce an idealistic attitude into the administration of public life. And those who turn their attention to the development of education and teaching will want to see this attitude realized there above all others. A great deal of good will is manifested in such a way of thinking. It goes without saying that this should be recognized. If it is exercised in the right way, it will be able to render valuable services when it comes to gathering human forces for a social enterprise for which new conditions must be created. - Nevertheless, it is precisely in such a case that it is necessary to point out how the best will must fail if it goes about realizing intentions without taking full account of the preconditions based on factual insight.

[ 3 ] This is one of the requirements that come into consideration today when establishing an institution such as the Waldorf School. Idealism must be at work in its pedagogical and methodological spirit; but an idealism that has the power to awaken in the growing human being the strengths and abilities that he will need in the further course of his life in order to be able to work for the present human community and to have a supportive life for himself.

[ 4 ] Pedagogy and school methodology will only be able to fulfill such a demand with real knowledge of the growing person. Insightful people today demand an education and teaching that does not focus on one-sided knowledge but on ability, not on the mere cultivation of intellectual abilities but on the training of the will. The correctness of this idea cannot be doubted. But one cannot educate the will and the healthy mind on which it is based if one does not develop the insights that awaken energetic impulses in the mind and will. A mistake that is often made in this direction in the present day is not that too much insight is brought into the growing human being, but that insights are cultivated that lack the impetus for life. He who believes that he can form the will without cultivating the insight that enlivens it is indulging in an illusion. - It is the task of contemporary pedagogy to see clearly on this point. This clear vision can only emerge from a vital knowledge of the whole human being.

[ 5 ] As it is provisionally conceived, the Waldorf school will be an elementary school that educates and teaches its pupils in such a way that the teaching aims and curriculum are based on the insight into the essence of the whole person that is alive in every teacher, insofar as this is already possible under present conditions. It is self-evident that the children in the individual school levels must be brought to the point where they can meet the requirements of today's views. Within this framework, however, teaching objectives and curricula should be designed in such a way that they result from the characterized knowledge of man and life.

[ 6 ] The child is entrusted to the elementary school at a stage of life in which the constitution of the soul is undergoing a significant transformation. In the period from birth to the sixth or seventh year of life, the human being is predisposed to devote himself to everything in his immediate human environment and to shape his own nascent powers out of his imitative instinct. From this time onwards, the soul becomes open to consciously accepting what the educator and teacher impose on the child on the basis of a self-evident authority. The child accepts the authority out of the dark feeling that something lives in the educator and teacher that should also live in him. One cannot be an educator or teacher without with full insight relating to the child in such a way that this transformation of the instinct of imitation into the ability to appropriate on the basis of a self-evident relationship of authority is taken into account in the most comprehensive sense. The view of life of modern mankind, which is based on a mere insight into nature, does not approach such facts of human development with full consciousness. Only those who have a sense for the subtlest expressions of life in the human being can pay the necessary attention to them. Such a sense must prevail in the art of education and teaching. It must shape the curriculum; it must live in the spirit that unites educator and pupil. What the educator does can only depend to a small extent on what is inspired in him by general norms of abstract pedagogy; rather, he must be born anew from a living knowledge of the developing human being at every moment of his work. Of course, it can be argued that such lively education and teaching fails in school classes with a large number of pupils. Within certain limits, this objection is certainly justified; however, anyone who raises it beyond these limits only proves that he is speaking from the point of view of an abstract standard pedagogy, for a living art of education and teaching based on true knowledge of human nature is imbued with a power that stimulates sympathy in the individual pupil, so that it is not necessary to keep him on task through direct, "individual" work. One can shape what one does in education and teaching in such a way that the pupil grasps it individually for himself in the process of assimilation. All that is necessary is that what the teacher does lives strongly enough. Those who have a sense of genuine knowledge of human nature will see the developing human being to such a high degree as a life puzzle to be solved by him that he awakens the co-living of the pupil in the attempted solution. And such co-living is more rewarding than individual work, which all too easily paralyzes the pupil in terms of genuine self-activity. Again, within certain limits, it can be said that larger school classes with teachers who are full of life inspired by true knowledge of human nature will achieve better results than small classes with teachers who, based on a standard pedagogy, are unable to develop such a life.

[ 7 ] Less pronounced, but equally significant for the art of education and teaching as the transformation of the soul's constitution in the sixth or seventh year of life, a penetrating knowledge of human nature takes place around the time of completion of the ninth year of life. There the ego-feeling takes on a form which gives the child such a relationship to nature and also to the other environment that one can speak to it more of the relationships of things and processes to one another, whereas previously it developed an interest almost exclusively in the relationships of things and processes to man. Such facts of human development should be very carefully observed by the educator and teacher. For if one introduces into the child's world of imagination and feeling what coincides with the direction of the forces of development at one stage of life, one strengthens the whole developing human being in such a way that the strengthening remains a source of strength throughout life. If one works against the developmental mechanism in one phase of life, one weakens the human being.

[ 8 ] The basis for an appropriate curriculum lies in recognizing the special requirements of the stages of life. However, this is also the other basis for the way in which the subject matter is dealt with in the successive stages of life. By the age of nine, the child will have reached a certain level in everything that has flowed into human life through cultural development. The first years of school will therefore rightly have to be used for teaching reading and writing; but this teaching will have to be organized in such a way that the essence of development finds its rightful place in this stage of life. If things are taught in such a way that the child's intellect and only an abstract acquisition of skills are utilized, then the nature of will and mind will atrophy. If, on the other hand, the child learns in such a way that his whole person participates in his activity, he will develop in an all-round way. In childish drawing, even in primitive painting, the whole person develops an interest in what he is doing. Writing should therefore be developed from drawing. Letters should be developed from forms that bring out the child's artistic sense. From an activity that draws the whole person to itself as artistic, one develops writing, which leads to the sensible-intellectual. And it is only from writing that reading emerges, which draws the attention strongly into the realm of the intellectual.

[ 9 ] If one realizes how strongly the intellectual can be drawn out of the child's artistic education, then one will be inclined to give art the appropriate position in the first elementary school lessons. The musical and also the visual arts will be properly included in the curriculum and the cultivation of physical exercises will be appropriately combined with the arts. Gymnastics and movement games will be used to express feelings that are stimulated by music or recitation. The eurhythmic, meaningful movement will take the place of that which is based solely on the anatomical and physiological aspects of the body. And one will find what a strong will- and pleasure-forming power lies in the artistic design of the lessons. However, only those teachers will be able to educate and teach in the manner indicated here who, through a penetrating knowledge of human nature, see through the connection that exists between their method and the developmental forces that manifest themselves in a particular stage of life. He is not a real teacher and educator who has acquired pedagogy as the science of treating children, but the one in whom the pedagogue has awakened through knowledge of human nature.

[ 10 ] It is important for the formation of the mind that the child develops its relationship to the world before the age of nine in such a way that the person is inclined to shape it in an imaginative way. If the educator himself is not a fantasist, he does not turn the child into a fantasist either, by allowing the world of plants, animals, air and stars to live in the child's mind in fairy-tale, fable-like and similar representations.

[ 11 ] If, from a materialistic point of view, one wants to extend the teaching of visualization, which is certainly justified within certain limits, to everything possible, one does not take into account that forces must also be developed in the human being which cannot be conveyed through visualization alone. Thus the purely memorial acquisition of certain things is connected with the powers of development from the sixth or seventh to the fourteenth year of life. And arithmetic lessons should be based on this characteristic of human nature. It can actually be used to cultivate the power of memory. If this is not taken into account, the descriptive element may be preferred to the memory-building element in arithmetic lessons in an uneducational way.

[ 12 ] The same mistake can be made if one anxiously strives at every opportunity to ensure that the child understands everything that is taught. This endeavor is certainly based on good will. But it does not reckon with what it means for man when, at a later age, he reawakens in his soul what he has acquired purely by memory in an earlier age, and now finds that, through the maturity he has attained, he now comes to understand from within himself. However, it will be necessary that the apathy of the pupil, which is feared when learning material is acquired by memory, is prevented by the lively nature of the teacher. If the teacher puts his whole being into his teaching activity, then he can also teach the child what the child will later experience with joy and full understanding. And in this refreshing re-experience there is always a strengthening of the purpose of life. If the teacher can work for such strengthening, then he gives the child an immeasurably great life-good on the path of existence. And in this way he will also avoid his "visual teaching" degenerating into banality through an excessive focus on the child's "understanding". This may take account of the child's self-activity; but its fruits have become unpalatable by the time the child reaches infancy; the awakening power which the teacher's living fire kindles in the child for things which in certain respects lie beyond his "understanding" remains effective throughout life.

[ 13 ] If one begins with descriptions of nature from the animal and plant world after the completed ninth year of life and holds them in such a way that the human form and the life phenomena of the human being become comprehensible from the forms and life processes of the non-human world, one can awaken those forces in the pupil that strive in this stage of life to be released from the depths of the human being. It corresponds to the character that the ego-feeling assumes in this epoch of life to view the animal and plant kingdoms in such a way that what is distributed in them in terms of characteristics and activities among many types of being is revealed in the human being as the summit of the living world as in a harmonious unity.

[ 14 ] At around the twelfth year of life, another turning point in human development occurs. The human being then becomes mature enough to develop those abilities through which he is brought to comprehend in a way that is favorable to him what must be understood entirely without relation to the human being: the mineral kingdom, the physical world of facts, weather phenomena and so on.

[ 15 ] How the cultivation of such exercises, which are formed entirely out of the nature of the human instinct for activity without regard to the aims of practical life, is to develop into others which are a kind of work instruction, is clear from the knowledge of the nature of the stages of life. What is indicated here for individual parts of the teaching material can be extended to everything that is to be given to the pupil up to the age of fifteen.

[ 16 ] There will be no need to fear that the pupil will leave the elementary school in a state of mind and body alien to external life if the principles of teaching and education are based on the internal development of the human being as described above. For human life is itself formed out of this inner development, and man will enter into this life in the best way when, through the development of his inherent dispositions, he finds together with that which, out of the like human dispositions, men before him have incorporated into the development of culture. However, in order to harmonize both, the development of the pupil and the external cultural development, a teaching staff is needed which does not close itself off with its interest in a specialized educational and teaching practice, but which places itself with full participation in the vastness of life. Such a teaching staff will find the opportunity to awaken in young people a sense for the spiritual content of life, but no less an understanding for the practical shaping of life. With such an approach to teaching, the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old will not be without understanding of the essentials of agriculture, industry, transportation and the life of mankind as a whole. The insights and skills he has acquired will enable him to feel oriented in the life that welcomes him. If the Waldorf school is to achieve the goals envisaged by its founder, it will have to be based on the pedagogy and methodology described here. In this way it will be able to provide teaching and education that allows the pupil's body to develop healthily according to its needs, because the soul, of which this body is an expression, is unfolded in the direction of its powers of development. Before the school was opened, an attempt was made to work with the teaching staff in such a way that the school could strive to achieve the goal described here. Those who are involved in the establishment of the school believe that this goal will bring into the pedagogical field of life what is appropriate to the social way of thinking of the present. They feel the responsibility which must be connected with such an attempt; but they believe that, in view of the social demands of the present, it is a duty to undertake such a thing if there is a possibility of doing so.