Toward Wholeness: Rudolf Steiner Education in America

Four: To Feel the Whole in Every Part: Education As an Art

FOUR To Feel the Whole in Every Part: Education As an Art Waldorf School education must be listened to with other ears than those with which one hears about other kinds of education or educational reform. For the Waldorf School gives no answer to the questions people want to have answered today and which are ostensibly answered by other systems of education. What is the aim of such questions? Their usual aim is intelligence, much intelligence — and of intelligence the present time has an incalculable amount. Intelligence, intellect, cleverness — these are widespread commodities at the present time. One can give terribly intelligent answers to questions like: What should we make out of the child? How should we inculcate this or that into him? The ultimate result is that people answer for themselves the question: What pleases me in the child, and how can I get the child to be what I like? But such questions have no significance in the deeper evolutionary course of humanity. And to such questions Waldorf pedagogy gives no reply at all. To give a picture of what Waldorf Education is, we must say that it speaks quite differently from the way in which people speak elsewhere in the sphere of education: Waldorf School Education is not a pedagogical system but an Art — the Art of awakening what is actually there within the human being. Fundamentally, the Waldorf School does not want to educate, but to awaken. For an awakening is needed today. First of all, the teachers must be awakened, and then the teachers must awaken the children and the young people. — Rudolf Steiner, The Younger Generation When the teacher makes a garden with the students, or makes lunch with a class, or shows them how to make a shirt or knit socks, or make a book, or tell a story, or set up a lab experiment, these are part of something real. The garden is part of the earth and related to sun and moon, to weather and seasons, to nourishment of body and soul, to insects and birds and cows and worms, to the mystery and cycle of sprouting and harvesting and seed sowing, spring and winter. It is also related to 63 fertility gods and goddesses, to death and resurrection, to myth and poem and play and worship, to history, to science, and to the present community. Receptivity to the gifts from one's subjects and activities in school, from the earth, from the threads and fibres of animals and plants, from paper and color, and from the stories one tells and hears —this is the art of sophia, the art of wisdom, the feminine aspect of knowledge. Wisdom exists already in nature. Nature knows already how to engender, yield fruit, and die in new life. The thoughts lie within the forms. As we think them, we receive the thoughts like seed sown by a goddess's hand, by Demeter, the Goddess Natura. In Spiritual Ground of Education, Steiner says: If one desires to be a Waldorf teacher, which means to work from a true philosophy of life, this mysterious relationship between man and the world must have become second nature: (literal translation: it must become an unconscious wisdom of the feelings.) Certainly people take alarm today if one says: the Waldorf teachers start from Anthroposophy : this gives them their vision. For how if this Anthroposophy should be very imperfect . That may be. Produce other philosophies then, which you think are better. But a philosophy is a necessity to one who has to deal with human beings as an artist. And this is what teaching involves, (p. 132) From the ground of this philosophy, and from the study of humans and nature, as well as from self-knowledge, the teachers in Steiner schools are continually nourished by insight and by a sense of living context. Take, for example, human speech, or the so-called language arts. The learning of writing, of reading, of speaking a foreign language — these are deeply connected with the experience of oneself as ego, as individual spiritual being. Steiner's Practical Advice to Teachers explains that speech "is the expression of the feeling links we form with the objects around us. ... Vowels express soul stirrings that live in the sympathy we have toward things. . . . Just as vowels are related to our own sounding, so consonants are related to things; the things sound with them" (pp. 29-31). The vowels are the musical element; the consonants are the sculptural...