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Practical Advice to Teachers: (CW 294) (Volume 2)
14 lectures, Stuttgart, August 21-September 5, 1919 (CW 294) 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. German Erziehungskunst. Methodisch-Didaktisches (GA 294).
205 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 1975
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About the author
Rudolf Steiner
4,266 books1,072 followersAuthor also wrote under the name Rudolph Steiner.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His teachings are influenced by Christian Gnosticism or neognosticism. Many of his ideas are pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of this movement, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality. His philosophical work of these years, which he termed "spiritual science", sought to apply what he saw as the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, dance and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked on various ostensibly applied projects, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.
Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's world view in which "thinking…is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." A consistent thread that runs through his work is the goal of demonstrating that there are no limits to human knowledge.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
July 29, 2015
With my Waldorf teacher training interrupted, I have really only read Lectures Nine and Ten from this book. Here are my favorite bits:
"You will soon see: Even if you have in your class the worst young scamps who never pay any attention at all, when you set them the task of finding examples to fit a rule of syntax (and you can do this very well if you yourself are fully alert as you teach) they will start to take pleasure in these examples and especially in the activity of making them up themselves. When the children now come to school after the long summer holidays, having played and romped out of doors for weeks on end, you will have to realize that they have little inclination after these weeks of playing and romping to sit quietly in class and listen attentively to things that they are expected to remember. But even if you find this rather disturbing during the first week and perhaps also in the second week, if you conduct particularly your foreign language lessons in a way that lets the children share in the soul activity by making up examples, you will discover among them after three or four weeks a number who enjoy making up such examples just as much as they enjoyed playing and romping out of doors. But you too must take care to make up some examples as well and not hesitate to make the children aware of this. It is very good for the children once they have got into the swing of this activity if they want to go on and on so that it might happen that while one is giving an example another already calls out: I have one too. --And now they all want a turn to say their examples. It is then good if you say at the end of the lesson: I am ever so pleased that you like doing this just as much as you enjoyed romping out of doors! --A remark like this echoes on in the children; they carry it with them all the way home from school and tell it to their parents at lunch. You really must say things to the children that they like to tell their parents at the next meal. And if you actually succeed in interesting them so much that they ask their mother of father at the next meal: Can you make up an example for this rule? --then you really have carried off the prize." (p. 135-136)
"Only consider what a difference it makes if you discuss with the children in a spirited way... instead of developing grammar and syntax in the usual way... Compare this living way of teaching grammar with the way it is so often taught nowadays. ...Soon all their bones ache because the seats are so hard. If proper education and teaching had been going on, there would have been no need to take such care in designing chairs and desks. The fact that so much care has had to be lavished on the making of seats and desks is proof that education and teaching have not been done sensibly, for if children are really taken up in their lessons the class is so lively that even if they are sitting down they do not sit firmly. We should be delighted if our children do not sit down firmly, for only those who are themselves sluggish want a class of children to remain firmly seated, after which they drag themselves home aching in every limb. Particular account must be taken of these things in grammar and syntax lessons." (p. 136)
"This can be applied particularly to the teaching of foreign languages when you let this include: reading aloud by the children (with attention paid to proper pronunciation whereby rather than giving too many pronunciation rules you read a section and then let the children read after you), retelling of the passage read, and letting the children form their own thoughts about it and then express them in different languages; and quite separate from this the lessons on grammar and syntax with rules to be remembered and examples to be forgotten." (p. 139)
"The first stage of schooling lasts up to the ninth year. What do we do during that period? Our starting point will be the artistic realm. We shall work musically and in painting and drawing with the children in the way we have discussed. We shall allow writing to arise gradually out of painting and drawing. Step by step the forms of writing will arise out of the forms of our drawings, and then we shall move on to reading." (p. 140)
"But for children of this age group foreign language lessons must only involve learning to speak, the children must learn to speak the foreign language." (p. 142)
"Then we come to the third stage leading up to the fourteenth, fifteenth years. We now start to teach syntax for which children are only really ready at about twelve years of age. Before that we treat in an instinctive way what can lead to the forming of sentences by the children." (p. 143)
"[W]e cannot expect poems to be recited or speak about history if the little children in the next room are trumpeting." (p. 144)
"You will soon see: Even if you have in your class the worst young scamps who never pay any attention at all, when you set them the task of finding examples to fit a rule of syntax (and you can do this very well if you yourself are fully alert as you teach) they will start to take pleasure in these examples and especially in the activity of making them up themselves. When the children now come to school after the long summer holidays, having played and romped out of doors for weeks on end, you will have to realize that they have little inclination after these weeks of playing and romping to sit quietly in class and listen attentively to things that they are expected to remember. But even if you find this rather disturbing during the first week and perhaps also in the second week, if you conduct particularly your foreign language lessons in a way that lets the children share in the soul activity by making up examples, you will discover among them after three or four weeks a number who enjoy making up such examples just as much as they enjoyed playing and romping out of doors. But you too must take care to make up some examples as well and not hesitate to make the children aware of this. It is very good for the children once they have got into the swing of this activity if they want to go on and on so that it might happen that while one is giving an example another already calls out: I have one too. --And now they all want a turn to say their examples. It is then good if you say at the end of the lesson: I am ever so pleased that you like doing this just as much as you enjoyed romping out of doors! --A remark like this echoes on in the children; they carry it with them all the way home from school and tell it to their parents at lunch. You really must say things to the children that they like to tell their parents at the next meal. And if you actually succeed in interesting them so much that they ask their mother of father at the next meal: Can you make up an example for this rule? --then you really have carried off the prize." (p. 135-136)
"Only consider what a difference it makes if you discuss with the children in a spirited way... instead of developing grammar and syntax in the usual way... Compare this living way of teaching grammar with the way it is so often taught nowadays. ...Soon all their bones ache because the seats are so hard. If proper education and teaching had been going on, there would have been no need to take such care in designing chairs and desks. The fact that so much care has had to be lavished on the making of seats and desks is proof that education and teaching have not been done sensibly, for if children are really taken up in their lessons the class is so lively that even if they are sitting down they do not sit firmly. We should be delighted if our children do not sit down firmly, for only those who are themselves sluggish want a class of children to remain firmly seated, after which they drag themselves home aching in every limb. Particular account must be taken of these things in grammar and syntax lessons." (p. 136)
"This can be applied particularly to the teaching of foreign languages when you let this include: reading aloud by the children (with attention paid to proper pronunciation whereby rather than giving too many pronunciation rules you read a section and then let the children read after you), retelling of the passage read, and letting the children form their own thoughts about it and then express them in different languages; and quite separate from this the lessons on grammar and syntax with rules to be remembered and examples to be forgotten." (p. 139)
"The first stage of schooling lasts up to the ninth year. What do we do during that period? Our starting point will be the artistic realm. We shall work musically and in painting and drawing with the children in the way we have discussed. We shall allow writing to arise gradually out of painting and drawing. Step by step the forms of writing will arise out of the forms of our drawings, and then we shall move on to reading." (p. 140)
"But for children of this age group foreign language lessons must only involve learning to speak, the children must learn to speak the foreign language." (p. 142)
"Then we come to the third stage leading up to the fourteenth, fifteenth years. We now start to teach syntax for which children are only really ready at about twelve years of age. Before that we treat in an instinctive way what can lead to the forming of sentences by the children." (p. 143)
"[W]e cannot expect poems to be recited or speak about history if the little children in the next room are trumpeting." (p. 144)
April 18, 2009
I am a certified Waldorf teacher. It has been sad to see other teachers falling into the trap of deifying Steiner. Although his lectures provide insight into human development, it doesn't need to become a dogmatic approach to teaching. So many teachers simply need to chill!
November 21, 2024
This book started me on my steiner journey
September 4, 2016
Very interesting and inspiring material. It's a tough read, and takes some serious study time to comprehend. It also really helps to have some pre understanding of Anthroposophy beforehand, f.ex by reading Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy first.
There are practical guidelines for teachers and parents on bringing up children based on a wider understanding of how the world works, and it really is only truly understood as a lifestyle and not only as intellectual study.
A great book and a must read if you want to dive deep into Anthroposophy and pedagogy.
There are practical guidelines for teachers and parents on bringing up children based on a wider understanding of how the world works, and it really is only truly understood as a lifestyle and not only as intellectual study.
A great book and a must read if you want to dive deep into Anthroposophy and pedagogy.
August 1, 2008
If you want to know about Waldorf Education, read some of Steiner's lectures, some of it is brilliant, some of it is utter nonsense. Snails shells and human head being evolutionarily equivalent.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews