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The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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Search results 5631 through 5640 of 6552

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297. The Idea and Practice of Waldorf Education: The Art of Teaching and the Waldorf School 08 Sep 1920, Dornach

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: 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

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

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

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.
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

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

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

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

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

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.

Results 5631 through 5640 of 6552

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