Donate books to help fund our work. Learn more→

The Rudolf Steiner Archive

a project of Steiner Online Library, a public charity

Search results 5361 through 5370 of 6456

˂ 1 ... 535 536 537 538 539 ... 646 ˃
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: Educational, Teaching and Practical Life From the Point of View of Spiritual Science 28 Feb 1921, Amsterdam

Rudolf Steiner
Today, children are expected to understand everything immediately. The aim is to organize teaching in such a way that nothing goes beyond the usual eight- or nine-year-old understanding.
What one has already had in one's memory is now understood through the power that has matured. This awareness of having matured, this awareness of being able to bring something up, refreshes and invigorates the soul's strength in a way that is not appreciated in ordinary life, whereas it deserts the soul if one wants to tailor everything to the understanding of the child in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year.
It is not an abstract curriculum, but something that underlies the pedagogy of this school, just as painting can do for the painter, sculpting for the sculptor.
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: Question and Answer At the Teachers' Evening 28 Jul 1921, Darmstadt

Rudolf Steiner
I often use an example like this: let us assume we want to teach a child a concept – one that can be derived purely from an understanding of child psychology at a certain age – the concept of immortality. One can make this concrete in natural processes, for example, in the butterfly in the chrysalis.
You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life.
This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view.
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: Anthroposophy and the Riddles of the Soul 17 Jan 1922, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
And as little as it is present in consciousness, it is alive in the subconscious; this feeling lives out in certain anxious feelings in relation to the life of ideas, in feelings of fear. It sounds paradoxical, but this undercurrent of the human soul does exist. Most people know nothing about it, but most people, or actually all people, are constantly under its influence. And this undercurrent is an anxious current, that we could, so to speak, lose ourselves in the world, that we stand over an abyss because our world of imagination is a world of images.
We get to know the soul's departure from the body. In this way we learn to understand death through the dissolution of the will element. We learn to understand what happens to a person in death because we learn to understand what happens in a person in everyday volitional decisions.
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: The Supernatural in Man and the World 01 Nov 1922, Rotterdam

Rudolf Steiner
And so it is taken for granted today – and from a certain point of view it is quite right to do so – that the particular structure that results from the human way of life, which has grown out of the animal way of life, can be used to derive the different organization of the individual human limbs and thus to understand the upright gait as arising from purely natural conditions. One seeks to understand language from the natural organization and from the connection that this natural organization of the child has with the older human being. And one also seeks to understand thinking itself, the cultivation of thoughts, as something that is connected with the human organization.
And so there are hundreds and thousands of exercises that are directly exercises of the will, that directly aim at a change of the will, so that the will breaks away from that which is imposed on it by mere physicality. In this way, modern man undergoes something similar to what the ancient man went through with his bodily position. For the reasons mentioned, we cannot go back to these old exercises.
297a. Education for Life: Self-Education and Pedagogical Practice: Religious and Moral Education in the Light of Anthroposophy 04 Nov 1922, The Hague

Rudolf Steiner
You see, it is considered so important that a child understand everything that is taught to him with his still-tender mind. This contradicts the principle of self-evident authority.
Now one understands it, now one brings it up, now one illuminates it with mature life experience. Something like this – when, at a later age, one understands out of maturity what one had previously accepted only out of love for authority, when one feels such a reminiscence coming up in later life and only now understands it – something like this signifies a flare-up of new life forces, an enormous principle in the soul, of which one is just not always fully aware.
You see, it is extremely important to understand these things at the fundamental level if we want to educate and teach in a meaningful, truthful and realistic way.
342. Anthroposophical Foundations for a Renewed Christian Spiritual Activity: Fifth Lecture 15 Jun 1921, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
We must understand them, we must do everything possible to really understand them. Today, however, people only criticize the Gospels; they do not really want to understand them, and this criticism is largely based on the fact that one does not take the content of the Gospels seriously at all, but takes it superficially.
It is only difficult because today the world is intensively economizing on ideas. I can assure you that the people who understand it most easily are the farmers in the countryside. They understand it immediately, while only the people who have been educated in the current way do not understand it.
But you must understand it, then it is already alive in your sermon, even if you preach in the simplest way. For there is not only the ponderable understanding of things, which consists in your mouth speaking and your ear listening, but there is also the imponderable understanding that works from person to person.
342. Anthroposophical Foundations for a Renewed Christian Spiritual Activity: Discussion 15 Jun 1921, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
This would be the most practical way to attract people. This wording is as follows: The undersigned, who feels the urge to work towards the awakening of a new spiritual life to overcome the present forces of decline and hopes to achieve this goal in a new synthesis of worship and Christian teaching, hereby registers for a religious teaching course under the direction of Dr. Steiner and undertakes to treat the information provided for this purpose in strict confidence. Representative (name, address) Rudolf Steiner: When would you like to start the course?
Holland is then still the most likely option. In France and England, it is not understood. In Switzerland, it is completely out of the question. But I believe that there is as much to be gained from Germany as we need here.
342. Anthroposophical Foundations for a Renewed Christian Spiritual Activity: Sixth Lecture 16 Jun 1921, Stuttgart

Rudolf Steiner
A separate matter was not known; Everywhere you saw spiritual work, which has learned Augustine and no longer understood, and his great struggle we understand only by the fact that we learn to know that Augustine has passed through the decadent Manichaeism.
Having said that, I may say that it was Gnosticism that first tried to understand the mystery of Golgotha. And it was a profound spiritual science - albeit of an instinctive, atavistic kind - that tried to understand the mystery of Golgotha in those days.
The economists are so mired and corrupted in their views that there can be no question of understanding the threefold order; they can never be moved to do so. It is terribly obvious how little the threefold order has been understood in this area.
343. The Foundation Course: Anthroposophy and Religious life 26 Sep 1921, Dornach
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

Rudolf Steiner
In any case this involves a disproportion between our modern understanding of mankind's evolution and the understanding of the Gospels; there is always dishonesty when one goes hither and thither and does not confess that one is simultaneously a supporter of modern scientific thinking and also the Christ.
Ultimately the foundation of theology—if it wants to be correctly understood—is precisely the same foundations as that of the Gospels themselves. I have just expressed a sentence and naturally in its being said, it is not immediately understood, but it has extraordinary importance for our discussions here.
In this way a person feels himself coming out of a spiritual world, being partially connected to a spiritual world. These were the mysteries of birth, under which time one understood the blossoming of the Mysteries as something which human beings could go through during such an initiation.
343. The Foundation Course: The Essence and Elements of Sacramentalism 27 Sep 1921, Dornach
Translated by Hanna von Maltitz

Rudolf Steiner
Then again—and we will actually see this in the following days—quite a necessary path results from the understanding of the sinfulness of today's science, an inner human path which can be understood as grace. [ 10 ] With this I have initially indicated what we will be undertaking in the following days; because sometimes you have to do things a little differently to what is customary with today's science, when one wants to explain things in a proper way.
Only when we realize how the organism is organised in this way, to receive the suggestion for a defence—for us to have a defence there naturally has to be suggestion—only when we understand that by the defence against a substance coming from outside as a suggestion in the process of nourishment, will we be able to really understand nourishment.
As one of those who have entered into such a circle where an understanding for your work can be found, I would here like to be the spokesman for these circles. In this way I would like to advise you to make something of the coherence and mood of these people, in order to help them understand Anthroposophic thought and actions better.

Results 5361 through 5370 of 6456

˂ 1 ... 535 536 537 538 539 ... 646 ˃