Foundations of Waldorf Education – serie

During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result. Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to form language has declined, but that we can still recover the seed of language, the penetration of sound by meaning. He also explains how consonants imitate outer phenomena, whereas vowels convey a more inner sense of events; he talks about the differentiation of language as it is influenced by geography; he speaks of the "folk soul" element and the possibility of "wordless thinking"; we hear about the capacity of language to transform us and of its importance to our spiritual lives. This is not just a course on language for those who love words but demonstrates ways to teach children. This little book will prove tremendously valuable to both educators and parents-in fact, to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of language and its significance for our lives.

This course on education contains some of the most remarkable and significant lectures ever given by Rudolf Steiner. Because these lectures were given to teachers, however, they have suffered the misconception that they are useful only to teachers. Any teacher who wants to teach in a way that encompasses the whole child certainly needs a functional understanding of what Steiner presents here, but these lectures will also greatly benefit parents, psychologists, counselors, or anyone else involved with developing children. Steiner gives his most concise and detailed account of human nature in these lectures, which are absolutely essential for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Steiner's spiritual science. Those who are willing to work through this work will discover here a new, powerful, convincing, and profoundly phenomenological "anthropology" of human spiritual psychology. In these lectures, Steiner laid out for the first time the principles that form the basis for renewing the art of teaching. It is the primary text for studying and understanding Waldorf education.

These seven intimate, aphoristic talks were presented to a small group on Steiner's final visit to England. Because they were given to "pioneers" dedicated to opening a new Waldorf school, these talks are often considered one of the best introductions to Waldorf education.Steiner shows the necessity for teachers to work on themselves first, in order to transform their own inherent gifts. He explains the need to use humor to keep their teaching lively and imaginative. Above all, he stresses the tremendous importance of doing everything in the knowledge that children are citizens of both the spiritual and the earthly worlds. And, throughout these lectures, he continually returns to the practical value of Waldorf education.These talks are filled with practical illustrations and revolve around certain themes-the need for observation in teachers; the dangers of stressing the intellect too early; children's need for teaching that is concrete and pictorial; the education of children's souls through wonder and reverence; the importance of first presenting the "whole," then the parts, to the children's imagination.Here is one of the best introductions to Waldorf education, straight from the man who started it all.

In these eight talks on education for adolescent-aged young people, Steiner addressed the teachers of the first Waldorf school two years after it was first opened. A high school was needed, and Steiner wanted to provide a foundation for study and a guide for teachers already familiar with his approach to the human being, child development, and education based on spiritual science. Steiner's education affirms the being of every child within the world of spirit. This approach works within the context of the child's gradual entry into earthly life, aided by spiritual forces, and children's need for an education that cooperates with those forces. Some of Steiner's remarks may be controversial, but unbiased study will lead to an appreciation of the profound thought and wisdom behind what is presented here.

For two weeks, prior to the opening of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Rudolf Steiner intensively prepared the individuals he had chosen to become the first Waldorf teachers. At 9:00 a.m. he gave the course now translated as Foundations of Human Experience; at 11:00 a.m., Practical Advice to Teachers; and then, after lunch, from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., he held the informal "discussions" published in this book. The tone is spontaneous and relaxed. Steiner does not prescribe specific methods but introduces topics and situations, giving guidelines and allocating practical assignments that are taken up and discussed in the next session. In this way, the discussions are filled with insights and indications in many different areas of teaching - history, geography, botany, zoology, form drawing, mathematics. Speech exercises are included. This edition also includes, for the first time in English, three very important lectures on the curriculum given on the day before the school opened. These fifteen discussions constitute an essential part of the basic training material for Waldorf teachers.

These talks were given in 1923-three and a half years after the founding of the first Waldorf school-to an audience of Swiss school teachers, most of whom have little knowledge of anthroposophy. This is the context of these lectures, among Steiner's most accessible on education.A teacher who attended the lectures wrote in the Berne School Paper: Every morning, as we listened anew to Dr. Steiner, we felt we had come closer to him and understood better what he had to say and how he had to say it. Daily, we newcomers gathered, asking ourselves, "Why are more of our colleagues not here? It is untrue that anthroposophy limits a person, develops blinkers, or avoids real life.... For step-by-step Dr. Steiner shows its application to life ... illuminating the details, disclosing their connection with profound questions of life and existence." I came to the conference to stimulate my school work. I found benefit in abundance. But also, I unexpectedly received a greater richness for heart and soul-and, from this in turn shall stream richness for my classes. In other words, these lectures are ideal for anyone first approaching Waldorf education. Using language that any teacher or parent can understand, Steiner goes into the essentials of his educational philosophy, providing many examples and anecdotes to convey his meaning. In this way, against the background of the developing child, he allows the curriculum and the method of teaching to emerge as the commonsense conclusion of practical experience.

These dazzling, radical lectures were given one month before the opening of the first Waldorf School-following two years of intense preoccupation with the social situation in Germany as World War I ended and society sought to rebuild itself.Well aware of the dangerous tendencies present in modern culture that undermine a true social life-such as psychic torpor and boredom, universal mechanization, and a growing cynicism-Steiner recognized that any solution must address not only economic and legal issues but also that of a free spiritual life.Steiner also saw the need to properly nurture in children the virtues of imitation, reverence, and love at the appropriate stages of development in order to create mature adults who are inwardly prepared to fulfill the demands of a truly healthy society-adults who are able to assume the responsibilities of freedom, equality, and brotherhood.Relating these themes to an understanding of the human as a threefold being of thought, feeling, and volition, and against the background of historical forces at work in human consciousness, Steiner lays the ground for a profound revolution in the ways we think about education.Also included here are three lectures on the social basis of education, a lecture to public school teachers, and a lecture to the workers of the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Company, after which they asked him to form a school for their children.

These five talks were given during an educational conference in 1924. They are the last public lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Germany. According to one member of his audience, "Seventeen hundred people listened to him; the prolonged applause from this great crowd at the end of every lecture was deeply moving, while at the end of the last lecture the applause became an ovation that seemed as if it would never end." This kind of adoration was the result not only of who Steiner was as an individual but of what he accomplished as well. People had already begun to realize the potential and the promise for the future that Waldorf education held out to the children of the world. The Essentials of Education, together with its companion book, The Roots of Education, present a remarkable synthesis of what Waldorf education is and what it can become. The Waldorf "experiment" had matured for five years since 1919, when Steiner helped to establish the first Waldorf school. He had guided that school from its beginning, observing very closely all that happened. As a result, he was able to distill and present the essentials of Waldorf education with elegance as well as with the urgency he felt for the coming times.

As early as 1884, while tutoring a boy with special needs, Steiner began a lifelong interest in applying spiritual knowledge to the practical aspects of life. Steiner originally published the essay at the core of this book in 1907. It represents his earliest ideas on education, in which he lays out the soul spiritual processes of human development, describing the need to understand how the being of a child develops through successive "births," beginning with the physical body's entry into earthly life, and culminating in the emergence of the I-being with adulthood.

These five lectures on Waldorf education were given as a course during Easter week in Bern in 1924. Although they were delivered more than seventy years ago, they are remarkably contemporary. Every word still resonates with passion and dedication to the human adventure. "We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades. . . . there is no escaping this chaos unless we can find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human beings may find a way to progress and to further the evolution of civilization out of the spirit itself."When he gave these lectures, Rudolf Steiner had only eleven months left to live. The first Waldorf School had been founded five years before and the intervening period had seen Steiner active in every aspect of school life. Now, in a sense, it was time to bring the ripe fruit of this work before the public.Together with its companion course The Essentials of Education (given three days before), The Roots of Education provides a stimulating synthesis of the Waldorf approach. Teachers, parents, and anyone interested in education will find here the fundamental characteristics of the process of a new art of education.

"Now the time has actually arrived when ... we have a subconscious glimmering of the impossibility of the modern approach to nature and some sense that things have to change." - Rudolf SteinerRudolf Steiner's course on light, which includes explorations of color, sound, mass, electricity and magnetism, presages the dawn of a new world view in the natural sciences that will stand our notion of the physical world on its head.This "first course" in natural science, given to the teachers of the new Stuttgart Waldorf School as an inspiration for developing the physics curriculum, is based on Goethe's phenomenological approach to the study of nature. Acknowledging that modern physicists had come to regard Goethe's ideas on physics as a "kind of nonsense," Steiner contrasts the traditional scientific approach, which treats phenomena as evidence of "natural laws," with Goethean science, which rejects the idea of an abstract law behind natural phenomena and instead seeks to be a "rational description of nature." Steiner then corrects the mechanistic reductionism practiced by scientific positivists, emphasizing instead the validity of human experience and pointing toward a revolution in scientific paradigms that would reclaim ground for the subject-the human being-in the study of nature.

In this fine introduction to Waldorf education, written out of a series of lectures given in 1924, Steiner provides one of the most comprehensive introductions to his pedagogical philosophy, psychology, and practice. Steiner begins by describing the union of science, art, religion and morality, which was the aim of all his work and underlies his concept of education. Against this background, many of the lectures describe a new developmental psychology. On this basis, having established how children's consciousness develops, Steiner discusses how different subjects should be presented so that individuals can grow and flourish inwardly. Only if the child absorbs the right subject in the right way at the right time can the inner freedom so necessary for life in the modern world become second nature.

The important lectures in this volume were given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, Switzerland, to leading educators, including many from England. As a result, he was invited to Oxford, England, to expand on some of the themes presented in these lectures. Steiner begins by placing Anthroposophy as the foundation for understanding the principles behind Waldorf education. In the talks that follow, he describes an education based on the human being as a continually developing being of body, soul, and spirit. Out of this perspective, Waldorf education depends on the teacher's ability to observe and respond to each stage of a child's development. Steiner shows how Waldorf education emphasizes the efficient use of children's inner energies, and how children can be nurtured through their natural stages of development by giving them just what they need at the right time - an approach that he refers to in these talks as "soul economy." The topics on education include: health and illness, children from before the seventh year through adolescence, physical education, esthetic education, and religious and moral education. These detailed and accessible lectures give parents and teachers the keys to a much-needed renewal of education for our children and their future.