 The
Roots of Education
5 lectures by Rudolf Steiner
Introduction by Torin Finser
"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
Steiner had only
eleven months left in this world when he gave the Roots
of Education
lectures. The first Waldorf school had been established five
years earlier, and the intervening period had witnessed
Steiner's tireless activity in every area of the school's
life. Now, in a sense, it was time to bring the ripe fruit of
this work to the public.
Together with its companion course,
The Essentials of Education,
(given three days earlier), this book provides a stimulating
synthesis of the Waldorf approach to education. Teachers,
parents, and anyone interested in education will discover the
fundamental characteristics of a new art of education.
Brief
synopses of the lectures:
1. A new education requires a new knowledge of the whole human
being in body, soul, and spirit. The change of teeth signals
the end of the first stage of childhood. Soul and spirit
descend into a body provided by inheritance, which is used as
the model for the "second" human being. During the
first stage the child is a sense organ that perceives moral
influences. The influence of the teacher's temperament.
2. The goal of Waldorf education is to reveal new methods of
teaching. The power of spiritual perception for understanding
children and adults. Sleeping and waking. The seasons
reflected in the human being. Thinking as an etheric
"grasping." Materialistic ideas and insomnia.
Psychic influences and physical effects.
3. Memory before and after the change of teeth. The physical
and etheric bodies. The etheric body and sculpting. The astral
body and music. The I-being and speech. The musical scale and
the human body. The teacher as therapist. Doctors and the
school. Teaching letters.
4. The sense organization and moral development at the change
of teeth. Mathematics begins with the whole. The child's
natural religious impulse. The need for images after seven.
The need to feel a connection with destiny after fourteen. The
child's relationship with the world.
5. The three divisions of the middle stage of childhood.
Nature and history. Children after puberty go into life. The
experience of immortality. Punishment. Reading the child. The
need for a living experience of one another today. Moon and
Sun forces in the plant world. Spiritual science reveals the
unity of the human being with the world.
Trans: unknown
(5 lectures, Bern 13 - 17 Apr 1924, GA309); 128pp
Anthroposophic Press
ISBN:
0 88010 415 5; paperback
Copyright © 2003 Skylark Books
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