The aims Emil Molt [founder of the
first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919- Ed.] is trying to
realize through the Waldorf School are connected with quite definite
views on the social tasks of the present day and the near future. The
spirit in which the school should be conducted must proceed from these
views. It is a school attached to an industrial undertaking [Molt�s
�Waldorf-Astoria� cigarette factory-Ed.]. The peculiar place modern
industry has taken in the evolution of social life in actual practice
sets its stamp upon the modern social movement. Parents who entrust
their children to this school are bound to expect that the children
shall be educated and prepared for the practical work of life in a way
that takes due account of this movement. This makes it necessary, in
founding the school, to begin from educational principles that have
their roots in the requirements of modern life. Children must be
educated and instructed in such a way that their lives fulfill demands
everyone can support, no matter from which of the inherited social
classes one might come. What is demanded of people by the actualities of
modern life must find its reflection in the organization of this school.
What is to be the ruling spirit in this life must be aroused in the
children by education and instruction.
It would be fatal if the educational views upon which
the Waldorf School is founded were dominated by a spirit out of touch
with life. Today, such a spirit may all too easily arise because people
have come to feel the full part played in the recent destruction of
civilization [the First World War-Ed.] by our absorption in a
materialistic mode of life and thought during the last few decades. This
feeling makes them desire to introduce an idealistic way of thinking
into the management of public affairs. Anyone who turns his attention to
developing educational life and the system of instruction will desire to
see such a way of thinking realized there especially. It is an attitude
of mind that reveals much good will. It goes without saying that this
good will should be fully appreciated. If used properly, it can provide
valuable service when gathering human potential for a social undertaking
requiring new foundations. Yet it is necessary in this case to point our
how the best intentions must fail if they set to work without fully
regarding those first conditions that are based on practical
insight.
This, then, is one of the requirements to be considered
when the founding of any institution such as the Waldorf School is
intended. Idealism must work in the spirit of its curriculum and
methodology; but it must be an idealism that has the power to awaken in
young, growing human beings the forces and faculties they will need in
later life to be equipped for work in modern society and to obtain for
themselves an adequate living.
The pedagogy and instructional methodology will be able
to fulfill this requirement only through a genuine knowledge of the
developing human being. Insightful people are today calling for some
form of education and instruction directed not merely to the cultivation
of one-sided knowledge, but also to abilities; education directed not
merely to the cultivation of intellectual faculties, but also to the
strengthening of the will. The soundness of this idea is unquestionable;
but it is impossible to develop the will (and that healthiness of
feeling on which it rests) unless one develops the insights that awaken
the energetic impulses of will and feeling. A mistake often made
presently in this respect is not that people instill too many concepts
into young minds, but that the kind of concepts they cultivate are
devoid of all driving life force. Anyone who believes one can cultivate
the will without cultivating the concepts that give it life is suffering
from a delusion. It is the business of contemporary educators to see
this point clearly; but this clear vision can only proceed from a living
understanding of the whole human being.
It is now planned that the Waldorf School will be a
primary school in which the educational goals and curriculum are founded
upon each teacher's living insight into the nature of the whole
human being, so far as this is possible under present conditions.
Children will, of course, have to be advanced far enough in the
different school grades to satisfy the standards imposed by current
views. Within this framework, however, the pedagogical ideals and
curriculum will assume a form that arises out of this knowledge of the
human being and of actual life.
The primary school is entrusted with the child at a
period of its life when the soul is undergoing a very important
transformation. From birth to about the sixth or seventh year, the human
being naturally gives himself up to everything immediately surrounding
him in the human environment, and thus, through the imitative instinct,
gives form to his own nascent powers. From this period on, the child's
soul becomes open to take in consciously what the educator gives, which
affects the child as a result of the teacher's natural authority. The
authority is taken for granted by the child from a dim feeling that in
the teacher there is something that should exist in himself, too. One
cannot be a teacher unless one adopts out of full insight a
stance toward the child that takes account in the most comprehensive
sense of this metamorphosis of the urge to imitate into an ability to
assimilate upon the basis of a natural relationship of authority. The
modern worldview, based as it is upon natural law, does not approach
these facts of human development in full consciousness. To observe them
with the necessary attention, one must have a sense of life's subtlest
manifestations in the human being. This kind of sense must run through
the whole of education; it must shape the curriculum; it must live in
the spirit uniting teacher and pupil.
In educating, what the teacher does can depend only
slightly on anything he gets from a general, abstract pedagogy: it must
rather be newly born every moment from a live understanding of the young
human being he or she is teaching. One may, of course, object that this
lively kind of education and instruction breaks down in large classes.
This objection is no doubt justified in a limited sense. Taken beyond
those limits, however, the objection merely shows that the person who
makes it proceeds from abstract educational norms, for a really living
kind of education based on a genuine knowledge of the human being
carries with it a power that rouses the interest of every single pupil
so that there is no need for direct �individual� work in order to keep
his attention on the subject. One can put forth the essence of one's
teaching in such a form that each pupil assimilates it in his own
individual way. This requires simply that whatever the teacher does
should be sufficiently alive. If one has a genuine sense for human
nature, the developing human being becomes for him such an intense,
living riddle that the very attempt to solve it awakens the pupil's
living interest empathetically. Such empathy is more valuable than
individual work, which may all too easily cripple the child's own
initiative. It might indeed be asserted � again, within limitations �
that large classes led by teachers who are imbued with the life that
comes from genuine knowledge of the human being, will achieve better
results than small classes led by teachers who proceed from standard
educational theories and have no chance to put this life into their
work.
Not so outwardly marked as the transformation the soul
undergoes in the sixth or seventh year, but no less important for the
art of educating, is a change that a penetrating study of the human
being shows to take place around the end of the ninth year. At this
time, the sense of self assumes a form that awakens in the child a
relationship to nature and to the world about him such that one can now
talk to him more about the connections between things and processes
themselves, whereas previously he was interested almost exclusively in
things and processes only in relationship to humanity. Facts of this
kind in a human being's development ought to be most carefully observed
by the educator. For if one introduces into the child's world of
concepts and feelings what coincides just at that period of life with
the direction taken by his own developing powers, one then gives such
added vigor to the growth of the whole person that it remains a source
of strength throughout life. If in any period of life one works against
the grain of these developing powers, one weakens the individual.
Knowledge of the special needs of each life period
provides a basis for drawing up a suitable curriculum. This knowledge
can also be a basis for dealing with instructional subjects in
successive periods. By the end of the ninth year, one must have brought
the child to a certain level in all that has come into human life
through the growth of civilization. Thus while the first school years
are properly spent on teaching the child to write and read, the teaching
must be done in a manner that permits the essential character of this
phase of development to be served. If one teaches things in a way that
makes a one-sided claim on the child's intellect and the merely abstract
acquisition of skills, then the development of the native will and
sensibilities is checked; while if the child learns in a manner that
calls upon its whole being, he or she develops multifacetedly. Drawing
in a childish fashion, or even a primitive kind of painting, brings out
the whole human being's interest in what he is doing. Therefore one
should let writing grow out of drawing. One can begin with figures in
which the pupil's own childish artistic sense comes into play; from
these evolve the letters of the alphabet. Beginning with an activity
that, being artistic, draws out the whole human being, one should
develop writing, which tends toward the intellectual. And one must let
reading, which concentrates the attention strongly within the realm of
the intellect, arise out of writing.
When people recognize how much is to be gained for the
intellect from this early artistic education of the child, they will be
willing to allow art its proper place in the primary school education.
The arts of music, painting and sculpting will be given a proper place
in the scheme of instruction. This artistic element and physical
exercise will be brought into a suitable combination. Gymnastics and
action games will be developed as expressions of sentiments called forth
by something in the nature of music or recitation. Eurythmic movement �
movement with a meaning � will replace those motions based merely on the
anatomy and physiology of the physical body. People will discover how
great a power resides in an artistic manner of instruction for the
development of will and feeling. However, to teach in this way and
obtain valuable results can be done only by teachers who have an insight
into the human being sufficiently keen to perceive clearly the
connection between the methods they are employing and the developmental
forces that manifest themselves in any particular period of life. The
real teacher, the real educator, is not one who has merely studied
educational theory as a science of the management of children, but one
in whom the pedagogue has been awakened by awareness of human
nature.
Of prime importance for the cultivation of the child's
feeling-life is that the child develops its relationship to the world in
a way such as that which develops when we incline toward fantasy. If the
educator is not himself a fantast, then the child is not in danger of
becoming one when the teacher conjures forth the realms of plants and
animals, of the sky and the stars in the soul of the child in fairy-tale
fashion.
Visual aids are undoubtedly justified within certain
limits; but when a materialistic conviction leads people to try to
extend this form of teaching to every conceivable thing, they forget
that there are other powers in the human being which must be developed,
and which cannot be addressed through the medium of visual observation.
For instance, there is the acquisition of certain things purely through
memory that is connected to the developmental forces at work between the
sixth or seventh and the fourteenth year of life. It is this property of
human nature upon which the teaching of arithmetic should be based.
Indeed, arithmetic can be used to cultivate the faculty of memory. If
one disregards this fact, one may perhaps be tempted (especially when
teaching arithmetic) to commit the educational blunder of teaching with
visual aids what should be taught as a memory exercise.
One may fall into the same mistake by trying all too
anxiously to make the child understand everything one tells him.
The will that prompts one to do so is undoubtedly good, but does not
duly estimate what it means when, later in life, we revive within our
soul something that we acquired simply through memory when younger and
now find, in our mature years, that we have come to understand it on our
own. Here, no doubt, any fear of the pupil's not taking an active
interest in a lesson learned by memory alone will have to be relieved by
the teacher's lively way of giving it. If the teacher engages his or her
whole being in teaching, then he or she may safely bring the child
things for which the full understanding will come when joyfully
remembered in later life. There is something that constantly refreshes
and strengthens the inner substance of life in this recollection. If the
teacher assists such a strengthening, he will give the child a priceless
treasure to take along on life's road. In this way, too, the teacher
will avoid the visual aid's degenerating into the banality that occurs
when a lesson is overly adapted to the child's understanding. Banalities
may be calculated to arouse the child's own activity, but such fruits
lose their flavor with the end of childhood. The flame enkindled in the
child from the living fire of the teacher in matters that still lie, in
a way, beyond his �understanding,� remains an active, awakening force
throughout the child's life.
If, at the end of the ninth year, one begins to choose
descriptions of natural history from the plant and animal world,
treating them in a way that the natural forms and processes lead to an
understanding of the human form and the phenomena of human life, then
one can help release the forces that at this age are struggling to be
born out of the depths of human nature. It is consistent with the
character of the child's sense of self at this age to see the qualities
that nature divides among manifold species of the plant and animal
kingdoms as united into one harmonious whole at the summit of the
natural world in the human being.
Around the twelfth year, another turning point in the
child's development occurs. He becomes ripe for the development of the
faculties that lead him in a wholesome way to the comprehension of
things that must be considered without reference to the human being: the
mineral kingdom, the physical world, meteorological phenomena, and so
on.
The best way to lead, then, from such exercises, which
are based entirely on the natural human instinct of activity without
reference to practical ends, to others that shall be a sort of education
for actual work, will follow from knowledge of the character of the
successive periods of life. What has been said here with reference to
particular parts of the curriculum may be extended to everything that
should be taught to the pupil up to his fifteenth year.
There need be no fear of the elementary schools
releasing pupils in a state of mind and body unfit for practical life if
their principles of education are allowed to proceed, as described, from
the inner development of the human being. For human life itself
is shaped by this inner development; and one can enter upon life in no
better way than when, through the development of our own inner
capacities, we can join with what others before us, from similar inner
human capacities, have embodied in the evolution of the civilized world.
It is true that to bring the two into harmony � the development of the
pupil and the development of the civilized world � will require a body
of teachers who do not shut themselves up in an educational routine with
strictly professional interests, but rather take an active interest in
the whole range of life. Such a body of teachers will discover how to
awaken in the future generation a sense of the inner, spiritual
substance of life and also an understanding of life's practicalities. If
instruction is carried on this way, the young human being at the age of
fourteen or fifteen will not lack comprehension of important things in
agriculture and industry, commerce and travel, which help to make up the
collective life of humanity. He will have acquired knowledge of things
and a practical skill that will enable him to feel at home in the life
which receives him into its current.
If the Waldorf School is to achieve the aims its
founder has in view, it must be built on educational principles and
methods of the kind here described. It will then be able to provide the
kind of education that allows the pupil's body to develop healthily and
according to its needs, because the soul (of which this body is the
expression) is allowed to grow in a way consistent with the forces of
its development. Before its opening, some preparatory work was attempted
with the teachers so that the school might be able to work toward the
proposed aim. Those concerned with the direction of the school believe
that in pursuing this aim they bring something into educational life in
accordance with modern social thinking. They feel the responsibility
inevitably connected with any such attempt; but they think that, in
contemporary social demands, it is a duty to undertake this when the
opportunity is afforded.
