Education

How do Waldorf teachers put their educational ideals into practice in the classroom? How does a teacher connect geography and art and language in a way that enlivens the souls of children? What does a child's respect for the teacher mean for later life? These are only a few practical aspects of this initial course for Waldorf teachers.
During an intensive two weeks, Rudolf Steiner gave three simultaneous educational courses to those who would be the first teachers of the original Waldorf school. One course provided the foundational ideas behind Waldorf education (The Foundations of Human Experience); another provided a forum for questions and lively discussions on specific issues in the classroom (Discussions with Teachers). In this course, Steiner takes the middle-path by integrating theory and practice.
Here, Steiner spoke of new ways to teach reading, writing, geography, geometry, language, and much more. His approach is tailored to the spiritual and physical needs of the children themselves, not to an arbitrary curriculum based solely on external results.
At a time when public education is in a state of crisis, this book describes how children around the world are being guided into adulthood with a fuller sense of themselves and with a creative approach to life and the world around them.

Sponsored by the industrialist Emil Molt and inspired by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the first Free Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart, Germany, on September 7, 1919. Since then, the Waldorf movement has become international with many hundreds of schools around the world.
This book contains all of the more-or-less informal talks given by Steiner in the Stuttgart school from 1919 to 1924. Included are speeches given by him at various school assemblies, parents' evenings, and other meetings. Steiner spoke here with spontaneity, warmth, and enthusiasm.
Readers will find a unique glimpse of the real Steiner and how he viewed the school and the educational philosophy he brought into being.

16 lectures, Dornach, Dec. 23, 1921-Jan. 5, 1922 (CW 303)
Today’s schools fill children’s heads with information instead of helping them develop their natural human faculties and capacities. They place too much stress on memory, leading to inner exhaustion instead of real learning for a healthy, fulfilling life.
The important lectures in this volume were given in Dornach, Switzerland, to leading educators, including many from England. As a result, he was invited to Oxford to expand on some ot the themes presented in these talks.
Steiner begins by placing Anthroposophy as the foundation for understanding the principles behind Waldorf education. In what follows, he describes an education based on the human as a continually developing being of body, soul, and spirit. From this perspective, Waldorf education depends on the teacher’s ability to observe and respond to each stage of a child’s development. Steiner shows how Waldorf education emphasizes the efficient use of children’s inner energies and how children can be nurtured through their natural stages of development by giving them just what they need at the right time―an approach that Steiner calls “soul economy.”
These detailed and accessible lectures give parents and teachers the keys to a much-needed renewal of education for our children and their future.

This compendium contains all of Rudolf Steiner’s statements regarding the teaching of language arts—writing, reading, literature, grammar, spelling, handwriting, on the subject of teaching language arts in the Waldorf school

Three and a half years after the founding of the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart, Germany, these talks were given to an audience of Swiss school teachers, most having little knowledge of Anthroposophy. This is the context of these lectures, which are among Rudolf Steiner's most accessible talks on education.
A teacher who attended the lectures wrote in the Berne School Paper: “Every morning, as we listened anew to Dr. Steiner, we felt we had come closer to him and understood better what he had to say and how he had to say it. Daily, we newcomers gathered, asking ourselves: Why are more of our colleagues not here? It is untrue that anthroposophy limits a person, develops blinkers, or avoids real life.... Step by step, Dr. Steiner shows its application to life...illumining the details and disclosing their connection with profound questions of life and existence. I came to the conference to stimulate my school work. I found benefit in abundance. But also, I unexpectedly received a greater richness for heart and soul―and, from this in turn shall stream richness for my classes.”
In other words, these lectures are ideal for anyone who is approaching Waldorf education for the first time. Using language that any teacher or parent can understand, Steiner goes into the essentials of his educational philosophy, providing many examples and anecdotes to convey his meaning. In this way, against the background of the developing child, he allows the curriculum and the method of teaching to emerge as the commonsense conclusion of practical experience.

As early as 1884, while tutoring a boy with special needs, Steiner began a lifelong interest in applying spiritual knowledge to the practical aspects of life. Steiner originally published the essay at the core of this book in 1907. It represents his earliest ideas on education, in which he lays out the soul spiritual processes of human development, describing the need to understand how the being of a child develops through successive “births,” beginning with the physical body’s entry into earthly life, and culminating in the emergence of the “I”-being with adulthood.
Also included are several early lectures on education, ranging from 1906 to 1911, well before the birth of the Waldorf movement in 1919.

These talks were given during an educational conference in 1924. They are the last public lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Germany. According to one member of his audience, "Seventeen hundred people listened to him; the prolonged applause from this great crowd at the end of every lecture was deeply moving, while at the end of the last lecture the applause became an ovation that seemed as if it would never end." This kind of adoration was the result not only of who Steiner was as an individual but of what he accomplished as well. People had already begun to realize the potential and the promise for the future that Waldorf education held out to the children of the world.
The Essentials of Education, together with its companion book, The Roots of Education, present a remarkable synthesis of what Waldorf education is and what it can become. The Waldorf "experiment" had matured for five years since 1919, when Steiner helped to establish the first Waldorf school. He had guided that school from its beginning, observing very closely all that happened. As a result, he was able to distill and present the essentials of Waldorf education with elegance as well as with the urgency he felt for the coming times.

This course on education contains some of the most remarkable and significant lectures ever given by Rudolf Steiner. Because these lectures were given to teachers, however, they have suffered the misconception that they are useful only to teachers. Any teacher who wants to teach in a way that encompasses the whole child certainly needs a functional understanding of what Steiner presents here, but these lectures will also greatly benefit parents, psychologists, counselors, or anyone else involved with child development.
Steiner gives his most concise and detailed account of human nature in these lectures, which are absolutely essential for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Steiner's spiritual science. Those who are willing to work through this work will discover here a new, powerful, convincing, and profoundly phenomenological “anthropology” of human spiritual psychology.
In these lectures, Steiner laid out for the first time the principles that form the basis for renewing the art of teaching. The Foundations of Human Experience is probably the most important text for studying and understanding the human developmental and psychological basis of Waldorf educational principles.

During the first year of the first Waldorf school, Rudolf Steiner agreed to give a science course to the teachers, which was to be on the nature of light. At the last minute, he was asked to give an additional course on language, which he improvised. "The Genius of Language" is the result. Steiner demonstrates how history and psychology together form the different languages and how ideas, images, and vocabulary travel through time within various cultural streams. He describes how the power to form language has declined, but that we can still recover the seed of language, the penetration of sound by meaning. He also explains how consonants imitate outer phenomena, whereas vowels convey a more inner sense of events; he talks about the differentiation of language as it is influenced by geography; he speaks of the "folk soul" element and the possibility of "wordless thinking"; we hear about the capacity of language to transform us and of its importance to our spiritual lives. This is not just a course on language for those who love words but demonstrates ways to teach children. This little book will prove tremendously valuable to both educators and parents-in fact, to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of language and its significance for our lives.

These seven intimate, aphoristic talks were presented to a small group on Steiner’s final visit to England. Because they were given to “pioneers” dedicated to opening a new Waldorf school, these talks are often considered one of the best introductions to Waldorf education.
Steiner shows the necessity for teachers to work on themselves first, in order to transform their own inherent gifts. He explains the need to use humor to keep their teaching lively and imaginative. Above all, he stresses the tremendous importance of doing everything in the knowledge that children are citizens of both the spiritual and the earthly worlds. And, throughout these lectures, he continually returns to the practical value of Waldorf education.
These talks are filled with practical illustrations and revolve around certain themes―the need for observation in teachers; the dangers of stressing the intellect too early; children’s need for teaching that is concrete and pictorial; the education of children’s souls through wonder and reverence; the importance of first presenting the “whole,” then the parts, to the children’s imagination.
Here is one of the best introductions to Waldorf education, straight from the man who started it all.

Following a lecture of November 27, 1919 requested by the Basel Department of Education, sixty members of the audience invited Rudolf Steiner to return and deliver a complete lecture course on his approach to education. These lectures are the result.
Rudolf Steiner begins by outlining the gradual development of the child with the help of spiritual forces and enlightened educational practices, which form the basis for Steiner's approach to education. He describes the problems that modern educators face and provides practical solutions. Steiner explains the effects of morality on real freedom and how the development of a child's will leads to a free, flexible ability to think. He describes the life-long effects that teachers have on children through the ways they teach in the early grades.
The subjects of these lectures cover a broad range, from the threefold nature of the human being to the teacher's responsibility toward their students' future; from arts such as music and eurythmy to the problems involved in training teachers; from zoology and botany to language, geography, and history. Like many of Steiner's lectures to public audiences, these are accessible and practical and provide a real overview to his ideas for renewing modern education.

These lectures on Waldorf education were given as a course during Easter week, 1924, in Bern. Although these talks were given more than eighty years ago, they remain remarkably contemporary. Every word still resonates with passion and dedication to the human adventure.
"We must develop an art of education that can lead us out of the social chaos into which we have fallen during the last few years and decades.... There is no escaping this chaos unless we can find a way to bring spirituality into human souls through education, so that human beings may find a way to progress and to further the evolution of civilization out of the spirit itself" (Rudolf Steiner).
At the time of these lectures, Steiner had only eleven months left to live in this world. The first Waldorf school had been established five years earlier, and the intervening period witnessed Steiner's tireless activity in every area of that school's life. Now it was, in a sense, time to bring the ripe fruit of this work to the public.
Together with its companion course The Essentials of Education, presented three days earlier, this book provides a stimulating synthesis of the Waldorf approach to education.