Education E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A social basis for education; The spirit of the Waldorf school; Educational methods based on anthroposophy; The child at play; Teaching from a foundation of spiritual insight and education in the light of spiritual science; The adolescent after the fourteenth year; Science, art, religion and morality; The spiritual grounds of education; The role of caring in education; The roots of education and the kingdom of childhood; Address at a parents' evening; Education in the wider social context.

Leseprobe

EDUCATION

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RUDOLF STEINER

EDUCATION

An Introductory Reader

Compiled with an introduction, commentary and notes by Christopher Clouder

Sophia Books

All translations revised by Christian von Arnim

Sophia Books An imprint of Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

For earlier English publications of individual selections please see Sources

The material by Rudolf Steiner was originally published in German in various volumes of the ‘GA’ (Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized volume is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach (for further information see Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures)

This selection and translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 335 6

Cover photograph by Aliki Sapountzi Cover design by Andrew Morgan Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Christopher Clouder

1. A Social Basis for Education

2. The Spirit of the Waldorf School

3. Educational Methods Based on Anthroposophy

4. The Child at Play

5. Teaching from a Foundation of Spiritual Insight and Education in the Light of Spiritual Science

6. The Adolescent after the Fourteenth Year

7. Science, Art, Religion and Morality

8. The Spiritual Grounds of Education

9. The Role of Caring in Education

10. The Roots of Education and the Kingdom of Childhood

11. Address at a Parents’ Evening

12. Education in the Wider Social Context

Afterword by Christopher Clouder

Notes

Sources

Further Reading

Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures

Introduction

by Christopher Clouder

Although the texts in this book are the records of lectures given nearly a century ago, they still have a particular resonance for those concerned with education in the contemporary context. Rudolf Steiner’s insights are as relevant to us as educators as they were to the people of his own time. His diagnosis of the failings of the educational system that was then practised and his emphasis on the real needs of the child are salutary reminders that in education we are faced with the continual struggle to improve, while at the same time responding to the new questions posed by social, economic and cultural changes. Yet in some respects we can find a constant. We struggle to realize principles and ideals and simultaneously assist children to find the capacities to live a life that involves compromises and an ability to adapt. Piaget stated that the true definition of intelligence is ‘knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do’. This is an intelligence that will increasingly be called upon in our twenty-first century world as the challenges facing us become more complex and demanding. Individual initiative and responsibility are essential in the creation of values and social harmony. ‘The world is up for reinvention in so many ways. Creativity is born in chaos, what we do, why we do it, when we do it—these may be different and they could be better... Change comes from small initiatives that work, initiatives, which initiated, become the fashion. We cannot wait for great reasons from great people... It is up to us to light our own small fires in the darkness.’1

We are constantly being reminded that we live in a turbulent and changing world; our children will live in a world that we can barely conceive; and we can perceive that even the quality of childhood experience is a rapidly evolving one. With such a prognosis before us, education, in whatever context, cannot serve merely as a transmitter of accumulated knowledge but must take on formidable new tasks and be prepared to re-evaluate its methods, practices and intentions continually. Steiner’s emphasis on this aspect of education as a force for renewal has a long West European pedigree dating back to Charlemagne in the ninth century CE. As King of the Franks and Emperor of the West, he set about cultural and political renewal of the state and a transformation of his people by implementing educational reforms and encouraging ‘a new enthusiasm for human knowledge’.2 This ‘new enthusiasm’ is a necessary concomitant for our intentions too and speaks clearly through all Steiner’s 200 pedagogical lectures as well as his conversations with children, parents and teachers.

David Elkind, the eminent professor of child development at Tufts University, Massachusetts, recently wrote an article entitled ‘Schooling the Postmodern Child’, in which he states that Steiner was a forward-looking modern educational theorist whose insights are of great value in the post-modern educational debate. As we now increasingly live with the phenomenon of permeable families, rather than the more traditional and stable nuclear or extended family, Steiner education becomes a necessary area of stability and integration. Our society requires us to play many roles. In industry and commerce, for instance, familiar boundaries of work definition are less and less applicable and secure careers are no longer for life. We have to learn to coordinate our efforts in new ways. In many countries there is a shift in age structure with longer life expectancies and declining mortality rates as well as aging populations; female labour force participation has increased dramatically over the last two decades. Schools have taken on parental functions and early-years centres have to take responsibility for day care that was once seen as the province of the family. The international concept of ‘early childhood education and care’ brings together concepts and tasks that were previously discrete. The extended teacher-pupil relationship and the child’s self-evident and uninterrupted belonging in the social grouping of a school class that is provided by Steiner education provides a place of secure interaction for the child. This sense of security and being respected and liked for who one is, as well as knowing that one’s contribution to the class is welcomed, provides a healthy basis for self-confidence and later personal development

The approach to a curriculum that Steiner pioneered, where the growth of knowledge and skills are viewed as an artistic and integrated totality, goes beyond the artificial subject divisions of a regulated timetable and prescriptive curriculum. Within a secure and predictable form children can find their own creative interrelationships. Elkind points out that the use of the narrative as a tool of understanding and comprehension, which is implicit in the Steiner method, takes into account the most fundamental way we, as humans, learn anything at all that goes beyond the boundaries of logic and reason. He concludes: ‘Steiner’s pedagogy is extremely innovative and particularly suited to the post-modern orientation and the permeable family. It remains for the rest of society to discover this educational programme that is so uniquely adapted to the needs and interests of the children growing up in today’s post-modern world.’3

Already in 1898 Steiner was developing radical new ideas about new educational forms: ‘Whether we have doubts about the veracity of what we convey or do not convey to the youth of today is of no importance. We convey these to young people with the implication: this is how we see the world; now look yourselves as to how the world appears to you. We have to awaken capacities and not offer convictions.’4 His seminal lecture, which was given in response to numerous requests for him to address educational matters and which is entitled ‘The Education of the Child in the Light of Spiritual Science’, was given in Berlin in January 1907 and subsequently appeared as an essay. He refers to it later when speaking in Oxford: ‘I was speaking on education there as one who disagrees with much in modern education, who would like to see this or the other treated more fundamentally...’ It was this lecture that provided the basis of what was to come and lead to the approximately 900 schools now around the world, each of which was founded on individual initiative and endeavour. In this lecture, as he surveys the inner and outer development of the growing child, he reminds his audience that much of what he imparts remains to be fully worked out in the future: ‘Of course these things can only be touched on here, but in the future, spiritual science will be called on to give the necessary indications in detail, which it is in a position to do. For it is not an empty abstraction, but a living body of facts that can provide guidelines for the conduct of life’s realties.’5 These guidelines are not an infinitely adaptable template but rather a resource for individual initiative and insight. Each school is autonomous and only the school community and those who have direct responsibility can make the necessary decisions that often require courage, self-development and creativity. Yet all share a common responsibility and wish to work together across all boundaries and hindrances. After more than 80 years of such experience, Steiner education is having an influence on the well-being of children that reaches beyond the confines of the schools and kindergartens themselves. This brings with it new challenges and paradoxes that confront all forward-looking educational practices and practitioners.

Looking forward is fraught with difficulties. Yet change is in the air and we have to come to terms with it and equip our children to do likewise. As it is put in the UNESCO report Learning, The Treasure Within: ‘Education for pluralism is not just a safeguard against violence but an active principle for the enrichment of present-day societies. Between the extremes of abstract and oversimplifying universalism and the relativism which makes no higher demand going beyond the horizon of each particular culture, one needs to assert both the right to be different and receptiveness to universal values.’6 For Steiner this was the ideal practice in every classroom in respecting the individuality and gifts of every child and forming a cohesive, appreciative and free society that embraces all humankind. Howard Gardner, whose scientific work led to the influential concept of multiple intelligences, comes to a similar conclusion. He expresses concern at the ‘disease’ in our societies where success is often measured by values that are insufficient in that they ignore parts of the human spirit that should be respected. He affirms that education can equip us to make a difference. ‘Our contributions depend on our rootedness in visions of the true, the beautiful and the good; our willingness to act upon these visions, individually and synergistically: our understanding of the changes as well as the constants of this world.. .’7 Steiner also set the good, the beautiful and the true at the core of any meaningful curriculum and conscientious educational enterprise.

Steiner was remarkably percipient and there are many currents of educational thought in our contemporary world that bear a marked resemblance to what he was saying and putting into practice in the first Waldorf school that was founded in Stuttgart in 1919. It came into being in the midst of the chaotic repercussions of the First World War. Europe and the world have experienced many convulsions since and the more we reflect on these human tragedies, and the more our biological and psychological knowledge of the human being grows, the more we can see the vital importance of those early years of our lives. Every teacher has to work with this because culture and knowledge cannot be divorced from values. Education is as much about how we are ourselves as the curriculum, school management, buildings, training and social acceptance. ‘It is our task to let the future work in us... If we are willing to focus our attention on the future by becoming aware of what is past and what is coming into being... Then another attitude arises in us concerning human destiny, an attitude that transcends egotism.’8 He goes on to state that a teacher should not be permitted to instruct or educate ‘without having acquired a concept of how the past and the future reach over into our culture. The Roman life of rights, the Greek spiritual substance, and the undefined rebel of the future that saves us.’9 This is a statement of a man of the early twentieth century living in a Central European context who reaches out to something new born of his own spiritual insight, and simultaneously, as we shall see, a teacher with a global twenty-first century perspective.

These texts were originally given as lectures and not as pre-prepared papers, nor were they edited from stenographic records for later publication. Steiner was a consummate and popular lecturer whose audience could sometimes number thousands. He worked from the briefest of notes and his words were also created from a responsiveness and sensitivity to the listeners, as well as the historical, political and cultural context of his time. It is fascinating to see how his ideas and deep insights into education developed over time and he himself was prepared to change his perspective as his suggestions and ideals became realized in practice. As he categorically stated, all education is self-education.

1. A Social Basis for Education

Steiner gave three lectures on this theme in May and June 1919. During that time the first Waldorf school was being prepared and organized and at the same time the Versailles peace treaty was being negotiated. In April that year, Steiner had been invited by the managing director of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Emil Molt, to speak to all his workers and colleagues about his vision of the renewal of a society devastated by the experiences of the war. These ideas went under the term ‘the threefold social order’ and were a diagnosis of the social failures that had led to such catastrophe, as well as representing radical proposals to ensure that such failures would never recur. These ideas were presented to the Versailles negotiators but ignored; however, they inspired many, including Emil Molt, who then resolved to pioneer an education based on them in the hope that future generations would know and act in a better way.

Steiner’s April lecture was a call to action and an appeal against the status quo in which many were disadvantaged. He spoke of how the factory workers passed educational institutions each day on their way to work and how in these institutions the patterns of thought were propagated that the governing classes would then utilize. An unfair class structure was based on these educational and spiritual privileges and the time had now come when everybody had a right to an education that fulfilled them as human beings and gave them an equal chance for self-development. At a meeting on 23 April, the school was conceived as the Free Waldorf School and Steiner then returned to develop his ideas. This second of the series of lectures, like the others, stresses the vital importance and the right of self-development and of school education as provided in the basis for this in the childhood years.

‘Through the catastrophe of the World War which now, outwardly at least, lies behind us, history has wished to teach us a lesson ...But the great misfortune of the present time is that human beings have lost the capacity to learn. So, with the ear of the spirit we may now hear resound through the world like a battle-cry this call: learn how to learn!’10

I do not propose today to follow up directly what I was saying here last Sunday. On that occasion I tried, as far as this was possible in mere outline, to show in a general pedagogical and introductory way how we should conceive the organization of a life of spirit, of education, independent of either the economic life or that of the state. I also tried to show how, once this independence is established, the various branches of instruction have to be applied in a new way, in order to provide those things which must reveal themselves to teachers and educators as some kind of anthropological and pedagogical form or, perhaps it is better to say, a kind of anthropologically pedagogical activity. On the same occasion I remarked that one essential in the future will be the training and particularly the examination of a prospective teacher or educator to discover whether his personality is fitted for the task.

I will reserve the direct continuation of these matters for a later occasion and try to pursue my main subject in quite another way. I shall try to put before you clearly how it is necessary for me to think out of the evolutionary forces of the age—and how today we should speak at teachers’ conferences, for example, or at something of the sort, where people really desire to serve their times. At present it is a fact that, if we want to emerge from utter confusion and chaos, many things will have to be spoken of quite differently from how the present thinking habits prompt us to do.

Today even at teachers’ conferences people talk—as can be proved by striking examples—along the old hackneyed lines. Yet it should be possible to introduce a really liberal education for the future, if only educators and teachers were able to rise to the level from which they could survey the very great tasks at present facing us, in so far as, out of the very nature of education and instruction, these tasks lend themselves to logical development. True, the manner in which I shall speak to you today will not be what I should like to hold up as a standard or even a pattern. But what I want to do is to indicate the angle from which we should speak to teachers so that they may themselves receive the impulse to get to work on an education which gives them freedom and room for manoeuvre. It is precisely those who do teaching who must rise to the level of the great and all-embracing tasks of the age; they must be first to gain insight into the nature of the forces concealed behind present world events; they must see which forces have to be recognized as coming from the past and therefore needing to be superseded, and which forces need to be specially cherished as having their roots in our present existence.

These matters must be looked at today culturally and politically in the best and most ideal sense if we are to create a foundation for the impulses which will have to exist in those who are teachers. Above all, people must become aware that at every stage of instruction and guidance our education has suffered impoverishment and the reasons for this must be understood. The principle reason is that education has lost its direct connection with life. Educationalists today talk of many things which have to do with method, above all the tremendous benefits that education will derive from state control. In an almost automatic way, it seems, they still speak of those benefits when in theory they have in part accepted the concept of the necessary threefold social organism. There has never been an age when thinking has been so automatic as it is now, and this is particularly evident where ideas on education are concerned. These ideas on education have suffered under something that up to now we have been unable to escape; we must, however, escape from it. There are indeed questions today that cannot find so easy a solution as the following: ‘On the basis of past experience this or that will be possible.’ Then doubt will immediately take possession of the hearts and minds of people. Today there are innumerable questions which will have to be answered by: ‘Is it not imperative that something should happen if we are to extricate ourselves from confusion and chaos?’ Here we are dealing with questions of will, where the often apparently justified intellectual doubt regarding the validity of experience can settle nothing. For experience has value only when worked upon in a suitable way by the will. Today there is much in the way of experience, though very little worked upon thus by the will. In the educational sphere itself a great deal is said against which, from the purely intellectual and scientific point of view, not much objection is to be made, and which from its own point of view is quite clever. But today it is important to understand the real issue—above all to understand how alien from real life our education has become.

I should here like again to refer to a personal incident. In Berlin about 23 years ago a society was formed concerned with college education. Its president was the astronomer Wilhelm Forster. I too belonged to this society. We had to hold a course of lectures, most of which were given on the assumption that all it was necessary to know were certain stereotyped things about dealing with the various branches of science, about grouping these into faculties, and so on. I tried—though at the time I was little understood—to draw attention to the fact that a college should be a department of life in general, that whoever wants to speak about college education ought to start with the question: ‘From the standpoint of world history, what is our situation in life at present in all its different spheres, and what impulses have we to observe in these various spheres of life in order to let these impulses stream into the college, thus linking it with the common life?’ When we work out such things, not in the abstract but concretely, countless points of view are revealed which, for example, help to reduce the time to be expended on any particular subject; and new ways of dealing with the various subjects are discovered. The moment any proposal is made for such a reduction simply out of the ideas with which education works today, everything collapses; the educational centres in question become mere institutions for training people who have no real connection with the world.

Now what are the intrinsic reasons, the underlying reasons, for all this? Whereas in recent times thinking on the lines of natural science has made such wonderful progress, this fine method of thinking, which on the one hand has come to look upon the human being as purely a being of nature, has—to speak the truth—cut off all knowledge of the real human being. We have spoken quite recently of the tremendous importance of this knowledge of the human being for the right kind of teacher—the knowledge that recognizes the real nature of living human beings, not in the formal way in which they are so often represented today but in accordance with their inner being, particularly in accordance with the evolution of that being. There is a symptom, to which I have often referred here, showing how dreadfully foreign the human being’s real nature is to the modern educational movement. When something of this kind is said, it may perhaps be considered paradoxical; it must be said today, however, for it is of the utmost importance. The loss of any real knowledge of the human being has produced that dreary, barren effort that is a branch of what is called experimental psychology. I have no complaints against it as such, but the so-called intelligence tests are a horrible travesty of what is really beneficial in the sphere of education.

I have perhaps often described how, by certain physical contrivances, experiments are made with the avowed object of testing the memory, the understanding, of a human being, in order to register whether the particular person’s memory and understanding are good or bad. In a purely mechanical manner, by giving part of a sentence and demanding its completion, or by some other device, the attempt is made to form an idea of the abilities of a growing human being. This is a symptom of how the direct relationship between people—which alone is profitable—is a forgotten factor in our culture. It is a symptom of something cheerless that has been allowed to develop; but today it is admired as being remarkable progress—this testing of intelligence, this offspring of what in modern universities are called psychological laboratories. Until people see how necessary it is to return to a direct intuitive knowledge of a person by studying the human being himself, particularly the growing human being, until we get rid of the unhappy gulf in this sphere between person and person, we shall never be able to understand how to lay the foundations for an education that is really alive and for a life of the spirit which is free. We shall have to purge all our educational establishments of this desire to experiment on the human being in order to satisfy the educationalists. I consider experimental psychology of value as providing the groundwork for a reasonable psychology; in the form in which it has crept into education and even into the courts, however, it is a perversion of the sound development of the evolving human being, between whom and his equally evolving fellow there is no yawning chasm. We have brought matters to such a pass that we have excluded everything human from what we strive to achieve culturally; we must retrace our steps and once again develop what belongs to human beings. We have also to find the courage to make an energetic stand against much of what in recent times has aroused growing admiration as a great achievement; otherwise we shall never make any progress. This explains how those who leave college today with the intention of teaching and proceed to educate people have the most misguided conceptions about the real nature of the human being. They fail to acquire a true conception because the kind of superficiality has arisen in its place that we can see in these intelligence tests. This will have to be recognized as a symptom of decline. We must seek within ourselves the capacity for judging the abilities of a human being, since he is a person and we ourselves are people. It must be understood that, because of this, every other method is unsound, for it destroys the fullness of what is immediately and vitally human—so necessary a factor in beneficial progress.