The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. A Few Words About the Curriculum

[ 1 ] As you have probably noticed, the discussions so far differ not only in content from what is generally understood today as anthropology or similar fields, but also in the very nature of their approach. Anyone who does not wish to develop the sense I spoke of at the end of my last lecture will not immediately grasp how such an understanding of the human being—which I have, of course, been able to outline here only in various directions—comes about differently from the prevailing view today. It arises from the fact that one grasps, as it were, the entire developing human being—namely, the physical and the spiritual-psychic human being—in living motion. Through such a grasping of the living human being in motion, through such a placing of oneself within the human being, one generates within oneself a form of knowledge that is not dead, that is itself alive, and that is, above all, capable, on the one hand, of not remaining fixated on the outwardly material-physical, and, on the other hand, of not falling into illusions and fantasies. And so it is that what is set forth here can truly bear fruit only in direct application, because it reveals its distinctive character in direct application.

[ 2 ] I would like to mention here, in a sort of episodic way—as I have already pointed out—that an attempt has been made to put the way of thinking discussed here into practice in a truly pedagogically fruitful way at the Stuttgart Waldorf School. This Stuttgart Waldorf School came into being because Emil Molt, who manages a factory in Stuttgart, initially wanted to establish a school—one that would be based purely on principles of Spiritual Science pedagogy and didactics—for the children of his workers. This school has long since outgrown that framework, and one can say that this is the first attempt—though we are still in the first school year at the Stuttgart Waldorf School, and we have admitted children from all possible grades of the regular school; therefore, a compromise is necessary for the beginning—to shape such a school in terms of its educational goals and curriculum on the basis of Spiritual Science understanding of the human being. From this you will also see that what I actually mean here is not merely a matter of wanting to manage pedagogically by focusing on the individual, on the individual child, or by having small classes where one believes one can devote sufficient attention to each child. What is advocated here is intended to enable such a deep understanding of the teacher’s individuality that one can certainly succeed even in large classes when social circumstances place one before them; and this is because grasping the human being in living motion leads to the insight that the heart is not merely a pump that pumps blood through the organism, but rather reveals how the human being is inwardly alive, and how the circulation of bodily fluids and the beating of the heart are themselves a result of this aliveness. When one trains one’s mind to think in this way, certain powers within the teacher’s individuality become perceptive with regard to the child’s development. And this developing perception can truly lead to one gaining significant insight—even into a child from a very large class whom one has worked with for only a few months. If one trains one’s mind in this sense and thereby establishes a strong connection, that mind comes to look, as it were, clairvoyantly into the child’s individuality. So that is what matters. It is not so much a matter of knowing that the heart is not the cause of blood circulation but the result of it; no, what matters is that whoever develops within themselves the ability to create a mental image of the matter that runs counter to our present-day materialistic thinking—whoever develops this ability— to configure their mind in this way—such a person becomes alive in a different way toward the unborn child and also toward a whole group, a whole number of unborn children; and it is precisely through this that one comes to derive the curriculum from the nature of the developing child.

[ 3 ] However, while I was in Stuttgart, I was compelled—since, of course, one cannot develop something like a school based solely on pedagogy and didactics within our current social conditions—to strike a compromise of sorts. I said: You must take the following three stages into account: Complete freedom with regard to the implementation of the curriculum throughout the first, second, and third school years. Then we want to bring the children to the point where they have the same educational goals as children in external schools. Then again after the twelfth year—that is, the 6th grade of elementary school—and then again when they leave school. So far, all we have been able to achieve is to implement the curriculum—which is now simply derived from the laws of nature—in these intermediate stages: that is, in the first three years, in the second three years of school, and in the third stage, the final two years of school. These are, of course, compromises that must be made in light of today’s social conditions. But within these intermediate stages, at least some progress can be made. For example, one can build upon the sound principle that one does not start with the intellectual—which is, after all, where most of today’s instruction begins—that is, one does not focus one-sidedly on this one aspect of the developing human being, the intellect, but rather starts with the whole human being.

[ 4 ] You see, the point is to first form a clear understanding of what the whole human being actually is. Today, people believe that one learns to think by logically guiding the developing human being to think, because one cannot observe how thinking is inherent in human nature. I must confess—and I am free to do so—that I have always devoted the six decades of my life thus far to pursuing the observation of human beings in this direction. Anyone who can observe the developing human being, anyone who can compare the developing human being with the fully formed human being, will see certain connections that are spread across the stages of human life—connections that, if one has not trained one’s eye for them, simply elude observation. I would like to cite something that I am happy to point out, because it points, in a certain almost proverbial way, to certain connections in human nature. If one observes children and sees how, because their environment relates to them in the right way, they can legitimately develop a sense of devotion toward their educators or, more generally, toward those individuals toward whom such devotion is warranted, and then follow on to see what becomes of these children later in life, one finds that this sense of devotion transforms more and more, so that these children grow into people who become a blessing to their fellow human beings simply by being there, by speaking to them, and sometimes even merely by casting a glance their way in any given situation. They become a source of blessing for the reason that, by learning to revere—or, if I may say so, by learning to pray—one learns to bless in later life, and truly acquires the power to bless. No hand can bless in later life that has not learned to revere, to pray, and to ask in childhood. The qualities of childhood are transformed metamorphically in later life in a completely natural way.

[ 5 ] One must simply pay attention to such things. To grasp such things, one must cultivate one’s perspective through a living science that can become feeling and will—not through a dead science, as we have today. In this way, one can see how to grasp the whole human being by first avoiding what is, of course, very tempting: introducing the child to convention in the broadest sense of the word.

[ 6 ] Isn’t it true that our task is to teach children to write? Yes, but writing as it exists today is an advanced cultural product. It arose because, in the course of human development, our present-day writing—which is abstract even in its conventional form—evolved from pictographic writing. If one tries to bring older forms of writing—I mean, Egyptian pictographic writing—to mind in all their fundamental character, then one sees how the original human inclination to trace the external world stemmed from it.

[ 7 ] Writing and drawing the external world are, in a certain sense, also fundamental to the development of human language. Many hypotheses have been put forward regarding this development of language. There is—and by this I do not mean something trivial, but rather the terms used in many scholarly works—the so-called “Bim-Bam theory,” which posits that speech is an imitation of certain internal sound characteristics of the environment. There is the “Wau-Wau theory,” which holds that speech is based on a kind of imitation of the sounds and the like that emerge from within the beings surrounding us. None of these theories stems from a sufficiently comprehensive consideration of the human being. A comprehensive consideration of the human being—and above all, a truly trained observation of children’s speech itself—shows how the human mind is engaged in a completely different way when learning the so-called vowels. Things are, after all, learned through feeling. But if one trains one’s observation, one sees how everything vowel-like, everything vocal, arises from the fact that the inner being of the human being undergoes certain experiences that are like simple or complex interjections, emotional outbursts, or inner experiences. In the vocal, the inner being of the human being expresses itself fully. In the consonantal realm, a person traces external processes. They trace external processes through their own organs; but they trace them. Speech itself is already a tracing of external processes through the consonantal realm, and a coloring, a painting over of this tracing with the vocalic realm. Thus, writing, too, is originally such a repainting, a retracing.

[ 8 ] If, therefore, we introduce to the child—as the child is today—what has now become our conventional writing, we are merely appealing to the intellect. That is why we should not start with the actual teaching of writing, but rather with a certain artistic grasp of those forms that are then expressed in handwriting, as well as in printed type.

[ 9 ] You see, if one lacks a bit of inventiveness, one could, of course, proceed by, for example, taking Egyptian hieroglyphs or some other pictographic script and then trying to derive today’s conventional letter forms from certain shapes in that script. But that isn’t even necessary. After all, it is not necessary for us to adhere strictly to the realistic course of human development. If we ourselves try to discover lines within today’s letter forms that offer us the opportunity to help the child practice this or that hand or finger movement—if we let the children draw these or those lines, quite apart from the fact that they are meant to become letters—if we help the children to intuitively understand curves, angular, horizontal, and vertical shapes—through their whole being, based on inner feeling—then we will lead the child toward a dexterity attuned to the world. And through this, we achieve something psychologically extremely important. At first, we do not teach writing at all, but we introduce a certain kind of artistically guided drawing that can even extend to painting, as we do in the Waldorf school, so that the children also develop a living relationship to color and color harmony during their youth—a relationship to which they are particularly receptive in the 7th and 8th years of life. If, quite apart from the fact that this is ultimately meant to lead to writing, we allow the child to enjoy these artistically guided drawing lessons, one notices how—because the child is compelled to move their fingers and their entire arm in a certain way, proceeding not merely from thought but from dexterity—the “I” is thereby able to develop the intellect within itself as something that appears as a consequence of the whole human being. The less one trains the intellect, the more one focuses on treating the whole person in such a way that the intellect arises—and it does arise—from the movements of the limbs and from dexterity; the better it is.

[ 10 ] At first, it may seem somewhat paradoxical when you walk into a handicrafts class at our Waldorf School in Stuttgart and see boys and girls sitting together, knitting and crocheting—and everyone doing not only “feminine” crafts, but also “masculine” ones. And why is this so? The success of this approach is evident in the fact that, unless artificially prevented from doing so, the boys take just as much pleasure in these activities as the girls. But why is this so? When one realizes that our intellect is not developed by directly pursuing intellectual education; when one realizes that someone who moves their fingers clumsily has a clumsy intellect, has inflexible ideas and thoughts, whereas someone who knows how to move their fingers properly also has flexible thoughts and ideas and can penetrate the essence of things—then one will not underestimate what it means to develop the outer self with the goal that, out of the entire handling of the outer self, the intellect emerges as a whole.

[ 11 ] In particular, the moment when one allows the written forms to emerge from what has been guided purely artistically—and from those written forms, the forms that underlie reading—is of very special educational importance. Thus, instruction in the Waldorf school begins with the purely artistic. From the artistic, it develops—for example, among other things; I merely wish to illustrate this—writing, and from writing, reading. In this way, the child is developed entirely in accordance with the forces that gradually seek to emerge from the child’s own nature. As a result, nothing foreign is actually introduced into the child, and it follows quite naturally that by around the age of 9, the child has progressed from drawing to writing and also to reading. This is of particular importance because in cases where education is carried out against the forces of human nature—rather than in harmony with them—one causes harm to the person for their entire life. If one proceeds in such a way as to do exactly what the child’s nature desires, then one approaches the person in a way that allows one to develop within them what will bear fruit for their entire life.

[ 12 ] As we move from the external to the internal, it is important to see how the child, initially in the 6th, 7th, 8th years, the child is not at all predisposed to distinguish itself from its surroundings as an “I”-being, and one, so to speak, takes something away from the healthy nature of the human being if this distinction between the “I”-being and its surroundings is developed too early. Just observe children looking at themselves in the mirror. Observe them before the age of 9 and in the 10th year—that is, after the age of 9—and develop an eye for the formation of their physiognomy. Then you will see that simply observing the formation of physiognomy reveals that, upon reaching the age of nine—roughly speaking, since everything is approximate, of course; it varies from child to child—something extraordinarily important occurs in human nature. One can characterize this important development by saying: Up until the change of teeth, a person essentially develops as a kind of imitator. It is a fundamental principle that a person imitates their surroundings. We would not learn to speak if we were not imitators during this period. This principle of imitation continues into the following years, up to about the age of nine. But already during the transition to permanent teeth, under the influence of a sense of authority, the principle begins to develop of accepting as correct what the respected figures in the child’s environment recognize as right. The point is that one must truly know how to maintain this sense of authority—a legitimate one, which arises during the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity—toward the child; for human nature demands it.

[ 13 ] All the rhetoric of our time—that, in a sense, the child itself should be allowed to decide what it considers right to learn—which is, after all, what many arguments boil down to today— all these assertions fail to take into account the very need of human nature itself, which is carried into one’s entire later life by the fact that, as a person continues to follow the principle of imitation from the age of 7 to 9, this principle of imitation is interwoven with the principle of a sense of authority. From the age of 9 onward, this principle of authority emerges more and more clearly, and from the age of 12 onward, a new element comes into play: the child’s own power of judgment.

[ 14 ] It is of fundamental importance for all educational practice that one not lead a person—a person in the making—to form their own judgments too early. Certainly, everything that is called “concrete instruction” has a certain limited validity and is of great significance within a limited sphere. But if one promotes visual instruction to the extent that one believes one should present to the child only what the child can grasp through direct observation, then one fails to recognize, first of all, that there are things in the world that simply cannot be observed directly and that must nevertheless be conveyed to the child. There are non-concrete things; for example, all religious matters are non-concrete. Likewise, all moral matters are non-concrete. At most, one can vividly demonstrate the effects of things in the world, but not the non-concrete aspects themselves. But quite apart from that, something else is at stake. Anyone who is unable to properly account for this feeling—of accepting something because one is faced with an authority, or of believing something because that authority believes it—and who fails to take this into due consideration, robs the person they are educating of something for the rest of their life. I mean, one should look at what one experiences. If—and I’ll take a very late example—as a 30- to 35-year-old person you recall something you were taught in school, it turns out that you didn’t understand it at the time, but because you loved the teacher, you accepted it. You had a feeling—which, of course, you didn’t articulate, but which you experienced—that you had to revere this man or this woman; if she believed it, you had to believe it too. It is such things—things one did not understand but accepted out of love—that one recalls in one’s thirties or thirties-five. Now one has matured. One looks at what one brings up from the depths of one’s soul with the perspective of one’s later self, and one comes to the following realization: what one took in many years ago out of love, one now brings back into the horizon of one’s life and clarifies for oneself. One need only be able to observe what this means. It means that from such a re-emergence of what is now understood only through one’s own maturity comes an elevation of one’s sense of life—one that we need if we are to become people who are truly useful to life, to social life in general. It would deprive people of much if we were to take away from them the ability to accept truths out of love—out of selfless love grounded in a justified sense of authority. The child must be exposed to this justified sense of authority, and we must work toward this with all the strength of our souls in the art of education, ensuring that we maintain this justified authority over the child from the time of tooth replacement through to sexual maturity.

[ 15 ] However, we must be clear that the very fact that we need to divide elementary school into three stages provides us with the basis for interpreting the curriculum and identifying the educational goals. The early years of elementary school: imitation is interwoven with the principle of authority. Ages 9 to 12: The principle of authority takes hold more and more, while mere imitation recedes. Age 12: The power of judgment awakens. As early as age 9, the child begins to separate the “I” from its surroundings even within its own inner experience. But starting at age 12, this “I” calls upon the child to form its own judgments.

[ 16 ] In this area, the way we think about and feel about life is indeed very closely connected to the way we think about proper teaching. You may have heard of the philosopher Mach, who emerged from a background in the natural sciences. He was a very honest, sincere man, but one who, in his way of life, truly embodied the materialistically minded person of our time. Because he was so honest—more honest than the others—he also lived out the inner structure of materialistic thinking to a particular degree. And so he recounts with a certain naive sincerity how he once, after being very tired, hopped onto a bus. Well, he got on, and—strangely enough—on the other side, directly across from him, a man who looked like a schoolmaster hopped on, as he put it, and made a very peculiar impression on him. It didn’t occur to him until after he had already sat down—as he himself admits—that there was a mirror opposite the entrance door, so that he had seen himself. That’s how little he knew about his own appearance! It happened to him again: there was a mirror mounted in front of a store window; he came face to face with himself in it and didn’t recognize himself! — The fact that this man had so little aptitude for recognizing physical characteristics is connected to his fanatical advocacy of a certain pedagogical principle. For this man is a fanatical enemy of any influence on a child’s youthful imagination. He does not want children to be told any fairy tales, nor does he want them to be taught anything other than a naturalistic imitation of an external, sensory reality. This is how he had his own children raised as well. He recounts this with naively honest candor.

[ 17 ] Well, one may think what one will about the spiritual content of external sensory reality, but it is poisonous for the developing human being if, precisely during the period between the ages of 6, 7, and 9, their imagination is not developed in a fairy-tale-like way. If the teacher is not a person of imagination himself, he will initially present everything he wishes to convey to the child about the human environment—for the child does not yet distinguish itself from its surroundings; this distinction only occurs later, in the ninth year—everything he teaches about animals, plants, and the rest of nature, he will convey to the child in the form of fairy tales. If only one were to familiarize oneself with the enormous difference between simply reading fairy tales to a child and first creating such fairy tales oneself! I urge you: read as many fairy tales as you like and tell your children the ones you’ve read—they will not have the same effect as when you create much poorer fairy tales yourself and present them to the children. This is because the process of creation within you—which is precisely what I mean by “the living”—has a lasting effect on the child, because it truly communicates with the child. These are the intangible aspects of interacting with children.

[ 18 ] It is of great benefit to a child’s development to try to teach the child certain mental images; for example, I believe it is good to instill in the child, as early as possible, a sense of the immortality of the soul. I try to do this by working toward it with every means at my disposal; I try to do this by drawing the child’s attention to how the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis and by pointing out: “This is how the immortal soul flies out of the body.”

[ 19 ] Now, of course, it is a metaphor; but you will only succeed with this metaphor if you do not present it to the child as an abstract, intellectual construct, but rather if you believe in it yourself. And one can believe in it. If one truly penetrates the mysteries of nature, then even what emerges from the butterfly chrysalis becomes, for one, the symbol of immortality placed in nature by the Creator Himself. One must believe in these things oneself. And what one believes and experiences in this way has a very different effect on the child than what is merely accepted intellectually. That is why, in our Waldorf school, we strive to introduce children to everything related to the human environment through the imagination during the early school years. As I said, a teacher who is not imaginative himself will not make the children imaginative, no matter how imaginatively he may talk about beetles, plants, elephants, and hippos.

[ 20 ] These are the two key points: first, to proceed artistically, with genuine self-dedication to artistic creation—let’s say, writing—as I have described it, allowing it to develop from drawing, and initially focusing on stimulating the imagination during these early elementary school years. Anything involving scientific descriptions or the like that is introduced to a child before the age of 9 is harmful. Realistic descriptions of a beetle or an elephant or whatever—as we are accustomed to presenting them in the natural sciences, including natural history—are harmful to a child before the age of 9. We must not yet appeal to the child’s capacity for realistic reflection, but rather to the imagination. Of course, we must be able to do this. We must then have the gift, when facing an entire class, of being able to truly observe. It doesn’t seem all that bad to me if classes—provided they are well-ventilated and meet health standards—have many students; for what is called “individualization” happens of its own accord when the teacher acts in such a way that what he does arises from a living grasp of human existence and the existence of the world. Then he becomes so interesting to his students that they individualize themselves. They are already individualizing themselves; they are actively individualizing themselves. There is no need to focus on each individual in order for passive individualization to occur. But the point is precisely that one should certainly strive to treat the entire class in such a way that this living contact with the teacher is present—a contact that arises quite naturally. When one has configured one’s own inner life to perceive what is alive, then what is alive speaks to those who are willing to receive it with a living spirit.

[ 21 ] Once one has truly developed a keen sense of observation, one can perceive things even when facing a large class. If one presents the artistic—which is only later abstracted and intellectualized—to the children in the way I have now outlined in broad strokes, one can see that the children’s physiognomies—their true physiognomies—change, just as subtle variations in their physical appearance begin to emerge, and that between the ages of 7 and 9, the child develops an inner sense of self such that one can see something healthy and active—rather than nervous and active—emerging in the child’s facial features. It is of paramount importance for the child’s entire life that this occurs; for through the emergence of this healthy, active element in their facial features, the child is able to develop, in later life, a love for the world, a sense of the world, and inner healing powers against every kind of hypochondria, excessive nitpicking, and the like. In fact, it is terrible if, as educators and teachers, we fail to ensure that by the age of nine, children are, even outwardly—in terms of their facial features alone—somewhat different from what they were before. I do not believe one need shy away from large school classes; on the other hand, one should strive—and I am well aware of the objections to this and will address them only after I have taken them into account—to ensure that, ideally, the teacher is not changed throughout the entire elementary school period; to assign the first elementary school class to a single teacher and have that teacher advance with the class, as far as is at all possible, ideally until the end of elementary school. As I said, I am aware of all the objections; but the resulting close bond that develops with the student body outweighs all the disadvantages; for this also compensates for those things that initially appear as disadvantages due to the inevitable lack of familiarity with the full individuality of, say, a class with many students; these things even out over time. You grow closer and closer to your class and truly come to understand the things I just mentioned. For it is not easy to notice this subtle change in the facial expression of the child in question.

[ 22 ] My point is not that I wanted to tell you, theoretically and for whatever reason, that one can trace every psychological and spiritual force in a human being in such a way as to see it in its connection with the physical body; rather, the point is that once you have grasped that the human being is a unity in this way, you will not rest until you have truly perceived it in every single case. It is only through this method of observation that one trains oneself to observe how people change as a result of being developed in an appropriate way. Perhaps I may reveal that one can even acquire a certain gift for observing how a person still listens when they have grown old. One can quite easily tell from a person’s facial expression whether they are listening with their whole being—that is, taking in what they hear through mental images, feeling, and will—or whether they are listening merely with their mental images, or merely with mental images and feeling, or whether, as a choleric person, they perhaps allow it to affect their will. It is particularly beneficial for the educator, under all circumstances, to cultivate such powers of observation for life in general; for everything we acquire in life helps us when it comes to furthering the development of children. When one can see, as I do at the Waldorf School, how the teacher works in accordance with his or her individuality, one notices how each class, together with the teacher, becomes a whole—which is something other than the sum of the children or of the teacher and the children—and from this whole emerges what constitutes the children’s development. This can take the most varied forms from one teacher to another, and all are equally valid. One need not at all believe that the things I am presenting here are unambiguous. They are not unambiguous. They are such that they can certainly be individualized, and one can say: Someone who teaches nine-year-old boys and girls can teach them well in a certain way. Another who teaches in a completely different way also teaches them well; for there, too, complete individualization takes place.

[ 23 ] Thus, I believe it is possible to derive the curriculum and educational goals for each stage of a elementary school student’s life from human nature itself. That is why it is so important that the teacher himself be the master of the school—if I may use the term “master”—that there be no set standards by which one must conform, but rather that the teacher himself be the master of the school, that he not only become one with the methodology, but that he becomes one with the school’s plan, that—whether he is teaching first or eighth grade in a given year—he is fully integrated with the entire structure of the elementary school itself, and that even in first grade he teaches in such a way that this method of instruction also provides the foundation for how one must then teach in eighth grade.

[ 24 ] Well, building on these points, the day after tomorrow I will describe the curriculum in detail and justify the learning objectives for each grade level. It is only natural that today—since we are, after all, immersed in a materialistic culture that also influences our curriculum and our educational goals—we present these things merely as an ideal for the future, and then implement them to the extent possible. If there happens to be a gap somewhere, as in the Württemberg School Law, one can just barely fill that gap with a compromise. But such things must indeed be incorporated; for I believe they are connected to what we must work through in order to overcome the dire situation that has become apparent in the events of the last five to six years.