The Rudolf Steiner Archive

44. The Educational objectives of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart

[ 1 ] Those who prepare for the profession of teacher in today's educational institutions take many good principles about education and the art of teaching with them into their lives. And the good will to apply these principles is undoubtedly present in many of those to whom this task falls. Nevertheless, there is a widespread lack of satisfaction in this area of life. New or seemingly new objectives are constantly appearing; and institutions are being founded which are supposed to take better account of the demands of human nature and social life than those which have emerged from the general civilization of modern mankind. It would be unwise not to recognize that for more than a century the science of education and teaching has had the noblest personalities, borne by high idealism, as its nurturers. What has been incorporated into history by them represents a rich treasure of pedagogical wisdom and inspiring instructions for the educator's will, which the prospective teacher can absorb.

[ 2 ] It can hardly be denied that for every deficiency that can be found in the field of education and teaching, leading ideas can be found in the leading great educators of the past, which could be remedied by following them. The dissatisfaction cannot lie in the lack of a carefully cultivated educational science; nor can it be due to a lack of good will on the part of those who are active in educating and teaching. But it is not unjustified. The experiences of life prove this to every unbiased person.

[ 3 ] Those involved in the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart were imbued with such sentiments. Emil Molt, the founder of this school, and the writer of this article, who was allowed to give direction to the type of education and teaching, and who may continue to participate in the continuation of this direction: they want to solve a pedagogical and a social task with this school.

[ 4 ] In the attempt to solve the pedagogical task, it is important to recognize the reason why the good educational principles that exist do not lead to satisfactory results to such a large extent. - It is generally recognized, for example, that the developing individuality of the child must be observed in order to obtain the guiding ideas in teaching and education. This point of view is put forward as a correct one in all keys.

[ 5 ] But today there are major obstacles to adopting this point of view. In order to come into its own in true practice, it requires a knowledge of the soul that truly unlocks the essence of man. The world view that dominates contemporary spiritual education does not lead to this. This world view only believes that it has a secure foundation if it can establish universally valid laws. Laws that can be expressed in fixed terms and then applied to individual cases. One becomes accustomed to striving for such laws when one acquires one's professional training in the educational institutions of the present. Those trained for the profession of educator are also accustomed to thinking in terms of such laws. But the human soul being resists cognition if one wants to grasp it through such laws. Only nature yields to these laws. If one wants to see through the essence of the soul, one must penetrate the lawful with artistic creative power in cognition. The cognizer must become an artistic observer if he wants to grasp the soul. It has been lectured that such cognition is not true cognition, for it involves personal experience in the apprehension of things. No matter how many logical prejudices such lecturing may have in its favor, it has the fact against it that without the participation of the inner personal, the creative grasping, the spiritual cannot be recognized. We shy away from this involvement because we believe that it necessarily leads us into the personal arbitrariness of judgment. Certainly, one enters into this arbitrariness if one does not acquire inner objectivity through careful self-education.

[ 6 ] This, however, indicates the path taken by those who accept a true knowledge of the spirit in addition to the knowledge of nature that is justified in its field. And it is up to this to unlock the essence of the soul. It must support a genuine art of education and teaching. For it leads to a knowledge of man that has such moving, living ideas in it that the educator can translate them into a practical view of the child's individuality. And only those who are able to do this can give practical meaning to the demand to educate and teach according to the individuality of the child.

[ 7 ] In our time, with its intellectualism and love of abstraction, people will try to refute what has been said here with objections such as: it is self-evident that general ideas about the nature of man, which have also been gained from contemporary education, should be individualized for the individual case.

[ 8 ] However, in order to individualize correctly, so as to be able to lead the particular individuality of the child educationally, it is necessary to have acquired in a particular spiritual knowledge an eye for that which cannot be brought under a general law as an individual case, but whose law must first be grasped by looking at this case. The knowledge of the spirit meant here does not, following the example of the knowledge of nature, lead to the conception of general ideas in order to apply them to individual cases, but it educates man to a constitution of soul which experiences the individual case in its independence. - This spiritual science follows how the human being develops in childhood and adolescence. It shows how the child's nature from birth to the change of teeth is such that it develops from the instinct of imitation. What the child sees, hears etc. arouses in him the instinct to do the same. How this drive develops is investigated in detail by spiritual science. For this investigation, methods are needed which, at every point, lead the child from merely thinking in terms of laws to artistic contemplation. For what stimulates the child to imitate and the way in which it imitates can only be observed in this way. - In the period of the change of teeth a complete change takes place in the child's experience. The urge arises to do or think what another person, who is perceived by the child as an authority, does or thinks if he or she describes this action or thought as correct. Before this age, imitation takes place in order to make one's own being an imitation of the environment; on entering this age, imitation is not mere, but the foreign being is taken into one's own being with a certain degree of awareness. However, the instinct to imitate remains alongside the other instinct to follow authority until around the age of nine. If one proceeds from the manifestations of these two main instincts for the two successive childhood ages, the gaze falls on other revelations of the child's nature. One gets to know the living-plastic development of human childhood.

[ 9 ] Whoever makes his observations in this field from the mode of conception which is the correct one for natural things, indeed also for man as a natural being, will fail to grasp what is actually significant. However, those who adopt the appropriate mode of observation for this area will sharpen their soul's eye for the individuality of the child's being. For him, the child does not become a "single case" that he judges according to a general principle, but rather a very individual puzzle that he seeks to solve.

[ 10 ] One might argue that such a contemplative approach to the individual child is not possible in a school class with a large number of pupils. However, without wanting to speak out in favor of large numbers of pupils in the classes, it must be said that a teacher with a knowledge of the soul, as is meant here, will find it easier to deal with many pupils than another without a real knowledge of the soul. For this knowledge of the soul will reveal itself in the demeanor of the teacher's whole personality; it will characterize every word he says, everything he does; and the children will become inwardly active under his guidance. He will not have to force each individual to be active, because his general attitude will have an effect on the individual child.

[ 11 ] The curriculum and teaching method are appropriately derived from the knowledge of child development. If one understands how the instinct to imitate and the impulse to submit to authority interact in children in the first years of primary school, one knows how, for example, writing lessons should be designed for these years. If it is based on intellectuality, one works against the forces that manifest themselves through the instinct of imitation; if one starts from a kind of drawing that is gradually transferred to writing, one develops what is striving to develop. In this way, the curriculum can be derived entirely from the nature of the child's development. And only a curriculum that is developed in this way works in the direction of human development. It makes man strong; any other stunts his powers. And this atrophy has an effect on the whole of life.

[ 12 ] It is only possible to apply a principle of education such as the necessity of observing the individuality of a child's nature through a knowledge of the soul of the kind described above.

[ 13 ] A pedagogy that wants to apply in practice what is theoretically advocated by many as good principles must be based on a true spiritual science. Otherwise it will only be able to work through the few pedagogues who instinctively develop their practice through fortunate natural dispositions. The pedagogical and didactic educational and teaching practice of the Waldorf school should be fertilized by a true spiritual-scientific knowledge of the human being. I set myself the task of stimulating the teachers in this direction with a course in spiritual-scientific pedagogy and didactics, which I held for them before the school opened.

[ 14 ] This describes - albeit only sketchily - the educational task for which a first attempt at a solution was made with this school. In the Waldorf School, Emil Molt also created an institution that meets a contemporary social demand. First of all, it is the elementary school for the children of those working in the Waldorf-Astoria factory in Stuttgart. In addition to these children, there are also children from other social classes, so that the character of a unified elementary school is fully preserved. That is all that can initially be done by an individual. In a comprehensive sense, an important social task for the future can only be solved with the school when the overall social institutions integrate all schooling in such a way that it will be permeated by the spirit that is brought to bear in the Waldorf school to the extent that it is possible under the present conditions.

[ 15 ] The above explanations show that all pedagogical art must be built on a knowledge of the soul that is closely linked to the personality of the teacher. This personality must be able to express itself freely in its pedagogical work. This is only possible if the entire administration of the school system is autonomous. If the practicing teacher only has to deal with practicing teachers in relation to the administration. A non-performing teacher is a foreign body in the school administration, just like a non-artistic teacher who would be responsible for setting the direction for artistic teachers. The nature of the pedagogical art demands that teachers divide themselves between educating and teaching and the administration of the school system. In this way, the overall spirit, which is formed from the spiritual attitude of all individual teachers united in a teaching and educational community, will fully prevail in the administration. And only that which results from the knowledge of the soul will be valid in this community.

[ 16 ] Such a community is only possible in the tripartite social organism, which has a free spiritual life alongside a democratically oriented state life and an independent economic life. (On the nature of this tripartite structure, see the articles in the previous issues of "Soziale Zukunft"). A spiritual life that receives its directives from the political administration or from the powers of economic life cannot nurture a school in its bosom whose impulses emanate entirely from the teaching staff itself. But a free school will place people in life who can develop their full power in the state and in the economy, because this power is developed in them.

[ 17 ] Whoever does not subscribe to the opinion that impersonal relations of production or the like shape people, but recognizes from actual reality how people create social order, will also understand the importance of a school that is not built on party or other views, but on that which is brought to the human community from the depths of the world's being by the new generations constantly entering it. To recognize and develop this, however, is only possible for a view of the soul as it has been attempted to characterize here. From this point of view, the profound social significance of a pedagogical practice based on spiritual science appears.

[ 18 ] Much of this pedagogical practice will have to be judged differently than is currently done by educators. To point out only one thing in this direction, it should be mentioned that in the Waldorf School a kind of eurythmy has been placed alongside ordinary gymnastics as having equal status. This eurythmy is a visible language. Through it the human limbs are moved, the whole human being and groups of human beings are induced to make movements which express a soul content in the same way as spoken language or music. The whole human being is moved by the soul. If today gymnastics, which can only have a direct effect on the strengthening of the body and at most an indirect effect on the moral strengthening of the human being, is prejudicially overestimated because it focuses one-sidedly on the physical, a later time will recognize how the soulful art of movement of eurythmy brings the initiative of the will to unfold at the same time as the physical. It grasps the human being as a whole in body, soul and spirit.

[ 19 ] Those who do not allow the present crisis of European civilization to pass them by in a kind of slumber of the soul, but experience it fully, cannot see its origins merely in misguided external institutions that need improvement, but must seek them deep within human thinking, feeling and will. Then, however, he will also recognize, among the ways to improve our social life, that of educating the coming generation. And it will not completely ignore an attempt to search for means in the art of education by which good principles and a good will can also be put into practice. The Waldorf School is not a "reform school" like so many others which are founded because one believes one knows where the faults of this or that kind of education and teaching lie; rather it has arisen from the thought that the best principles and the best will in this field can only become effective when the educator and teacher is a connoisseur of human nature. One cannot be this without also developing a lively interest in the whole social life of mankind. The mind that is open to the essence of humanity also accepts all the suffering and joy of humanity as its own experience. Through a teacher who is a connoisseur of the soul, a connoisseur of humanity, the whole of social life has an effect on the generation striving into life. People will emerge from his school who can place themselves powerfully in life.