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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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297. The Spirit of the Waldorf School: A Lecture for Prospective Parents of the Waldorf School 31 Aug 1919, Stuttgart
Translated by Robert F. Lathe, Nancy Parsons Whittaker

Rudolf Steiner
We can properly teach in elementary school only if we have a thorough pedagogical understanding of this revolution within the child of seven. Here I have given you only a single example of what, compared to the old way, the new pedagogy must thoroughly observe and understand.
This understanding of humanity, this understanding of the growing child, should so saturate the teachers that a love of humanity enters the teaching.
Why is it utopian? It is utopian because it is not understood, or because it is resisted! A second thing could happen. Understanding could arise for what is born out of true social understanding, understanding for the real practicality of this wish.
297. The Spirit of the Waldorf School: Supersensible Knowledge and Social Pedagogical Life 24 Sep 1919, Stuttgart
Translated by Robert F. Lathe, Nancy Parsons Whittaker

Rudolf Steiner
Now look at the most important characteristic of what I have referred to today as supersensible understanding in the sense of spiritual science. The most important characteristic is that this supersensible understanding uses those forces closely connected with what is human.
We rob the children of this possibility when, with banal instruction, we stoop to the level of the child’s understanding. What then is the task of the teacher who wants to bring the children something they can absorb, but perhaps will understand only after many decades?
They need to understand the spirit emanating from the language that permeates the people and forms the language into a unified whole.
297. The Spirit of the Waldorf School: The Social Pedagogical Significance of Spiritual Science 25 Nov 1919, Basel
Translated by Robert F. Lathe, Nancy Parsons Whittaker

Rudolf Steiner
We know that there was a mercantilist school, a physiocratic school and so forth, and we know how these different streams have attempted to understand social facts. They have attempted to discover how human social understanding can become a part of human willing, for example, in various governmental programs.
People try to limit instruction to what children can understand, to what such people, in their simple-mindedness, believe is the maximum children can understand.
However, to recognize that clumsy beginnings should be neither over- nor undervalued, you must be open to what is today often expressed by a slogan, but which, in connection with human life, people do not correctly understand.
297. The Spirit of the Waldorf School: A Lecture for Public School Teachers 27 Nov 1919, Basel
Translated by Robert F. Lathe, Nancy Parsons Whittaker

Rudolf Steiner
My child has stolen something!” We can, of course, understand how a father can despair about such things. But, now we attempt to understand the situation better.
The child previously had the greatest interest, for example, in what we (of course, in a manner understandable to a child) brought in describing natural sciences. Only after this change, around eleven or twelve years of age, does this interest (I understand exactly the importance of what I say) develop into a true possibility of understanding physical phenomena, of understanding even the simplest physical concepts.
We must have insight into certain inner connections if we want to understand clearly what people often say instinctively but without clear understanding. Today, with some justification, people demand that we should not only educate the intellect.
297. The Idea and Practice of Waldorf Education: Community From the Point of View of Spiritual Science 21 May 1920, Aarau

Rudolf Steiner
It is necessary to recognize that the spiritual life can only develop if it is placed under its own administration. Spiritual science recognizes that new movements, which have previously slumbered latently, are each pushing from the depths of humanity to the surface.
But the spiritual life cannot be governed by the State. It must be placed under its own administration. Those who direct the spiritual life should also administer it. The same applies to economic life, which can only be judged by people who are experts in the field.
297. The Idea and Practice of Waldorf Education: The Art of Teaching and the Waldorf School 08 Sep 1920, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
People have striven more and more to teach children only what they can understand. But in so doing they descend more and more into the most dreadful triviality. Just think how banal and ordinary things would have to be presented in order for a child to understand them!
If we have learned it correctly, from the right spirit, we know it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. You also remember: You did not understand that, you accepted that on authority. — You felt that: I am younger, the teacher is older, he understands it, I do not understand it.
In this way, schooling and education have an effect on later life, when the teacher, through the authority that is taken for granted, teaches the child what he will only understand later. In general, it is easy and plausible for superficial observation: one only wants to teach the child what he understands.
297. The Idea and Practice of Waldorf Education: Discussion of Pedagogical and Psychological Questions 08 Oct 1920, Dornach

Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner: I would like to say a few words about temperament, more to point out how, under the influence of the pedagogy that we want to cultivate in Waldorf schools, intellectualism and the other soul qualities gradually become an art of education.
You may need to ask the question a second time, because you realize that the child has not fully understood it. The child barely takes in the question completely, you may have to make an effort to formulate the question again forcefully, and so on.
The pedagogy cultivated in Waldorf school lessons is actually about the fact that, under certain circumstances, even if the content of what is taught is based on false premises – it does not have to be so, but it can be so – it can nevertheless have an effect on the child in an appropriate way through the way the art of education is applied.
297. The Idea and Practice of Waldorf Education: Anthroposophy and the Art of Education 29 Dec 1920, Olten

Rudolf Steiner
For just as willpower underlies the imitation instinct in the first seven years of life, so between the seventh year and the year of sexual maturity everything that is memorized underlies the child's expressions.
To do this, one must understand human life in its totality. The botanist looks at the plant in its totality. What today wants to be “psychology” only ever looks at the moment.
Not out of some foolish attitude or ideology, or because it wants to agitate for something, but out of the realization of the true needs of our time, anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect on the art of education. It wants to understand and feel correctly that which must underlie all real education and all real teaching. A true sense of this can be summarized in the words with which I want to conclude today, because I believe that if anthroposophy shows that it has an understanding for these words, the most inner, truest understanding, one will also not deny it its calling to speak into the pedagogical art, into the science of education.
297. Spiritual Science and the Art of Education 27 Nov 1919, Basel
Translator Unknown

Rudolf Steiner
And when I say, a real power of understanding physical phenomena and physical conceptions, 1 know the exact scope and bearing of my statement.
Now only do you understand it.” Anyone who smiles at the idea of such a source of strength in after life, lacks living interest in what is real in human life.
There is, therefore, no sphere of life, which ought not somehow to concern and touch the person 1 whose task it is to teach, to educate. But it is only those who learn to understand life from the spirit, who can understand it. To form and mould human life, is only possible for those who—to use Goethe's expression—are able spiritually to form il.
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: Educational, Teaching and Practical Life From the Point of View of Spiritual Science 24 Feb 1921, Utrecht

Rudolf Steiner
But a real intuitive perception of the immortality of the soul can only be conveyed to a child under very definite conditions. If, for example, a teacher thinks, “I am clever, the child is stupid, it must first become clever” – and the teacher thinks something like this in order to make the child understand something – then the teacher may perhaps achieve something, but what really brings the child to a sense of immortality will certainly not be achieved.
If we do not have the courage to do this, then those who understand these things will not allow themselves to be used to establish private schools or to appoint teachers for them.
This spiritual fact, which alone gives meaning to our earthly development, will be grasped in different ways by each age. Our age needs a new understanding of this fact. We can best grasp this fact if we learn to understand spiritual facts in general.

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