Practical Course for Teachers (GA 294) is the methods half of Rudolf Steiner's founding teacher-training, fourteen lectures delivered in Stuttgart from 21 August to 4 September 1919 during the two intensive weeks before the first Waldorf school opened its doors. Where its companion volume sets out a picture of the growing human being, this course turns to the daily question every teacher faces: how does one actually teach a child to write, to read, to reckon, to take in geography and history, in a way that meets the child rather than the convenience of the adult? The answer Steiner gives, returned to again and again across the two weeks, is that teaching itself is an art and must be practised as one.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 294 belongs to a closely bound trilogy that Steiner gave to the founding faculty in late summer 1919. The first course, often called the study of the human being, supplies the developmental and psychological ground. This second course, the practical or methods course, builds the classroom craft on that ground. A third set of seminar discussions and curriculum talks rounds out the training. Read alone, the practical course can look like a string of teaching tips; read against its companion, every recommendation here rests on a specific reading of how thinking, feeling, and willing mature in the child.
The setting matters. Germany in 1919 was unsettled after the war, and the new school was meant for the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, hence the name the movement still carries. Steiner was not writing a treatise for later publication; he was preparing a particular group of teachers, some of them with little formal pedagogical background, to open a school in a matter of days. That urgency gives the lectures their direct, workshop tone and their constant movement between principle and worked example.
It helps to know how the three founding courses divide the work. The first asks what a human being is and how the soul forces of thinking, feeling, and willing unfold from birth onward. The second, this volume, asks how a teacher should act on that picture hour by hour in front of real children. The discussions that accompany them descend further still into the particulars of curriculum and timetable. A reader who keeps this division in mind will not mistake the practical course for a loose collection of opinions; each instruction is the practical face of a developmental claim made in the companion lectures. Steiner expected his teachers to hold both halves at once, so that method never hardened into recipe and principle never floated free of the classroom.
Themes and Structure
The fourteen lectures move outward from the youngest concerns to the structure of the whole school day. The opening lecture treats artistic activity, arithmetic, reading, and writing together, arguing that even the most conventional skills should be approached through an artistic and pictorial route rather than as bare abstraction. Steiner's well-known illustration is teaching writing out of drawing and painting, so that letter-forms grow from images the child has made rather than arriving as ready-made signs to be copied.
From there the course widens. Early lectures take up language and the human being's connection to the surrounding world, the plastic and formative arts, music and poetry, and the shape of a child's very first school lessons. Middle lectures turn to writing, reading, and spelling, and to the place of rhythm and rhythmical repetition in learning, where Steiner sets his own approach against the experimental psychology then in fashion. He grants that laboratory study has its uses, but insists that what forms memory and will is the living rhythm of teaching, not measurement of the child as an apparatus.
A decisive turning point in the child's life, around the ninth and again the twelfth year, organizes the lectures on natural history and the animal kingdom, on history and physics, and on how subjects should be arranged up to the fourteenth year. The course also gives sustained attention to the teaching of languages and of geography, the latter treated as a subject that can knit many others together. The closing lectures grow more practical still: how to connect school with practical life, how to draw up a workable time-table, and finally the moral educative principles that should carry over into daily classroom practice. Throughout, Steiner asks the teacher to work from the whole toward the part, introducing a sum before its addends or a living animal before its isolated traits, so that understanding grows the way life does.
Education and teaching must become a real art.
That sentence is the spine of the whole course, and it is worth dwelling on what Steiner means by it. He is not asking teachers to decorate lessons with songs and pictures and call the result artistic. He means that the inner attitude of making, the readiness to shape material toward a living whole, should govern how a child is taught to write, to count, and to read. The teacher who works this way begins with feeling and movement and lets the abstract crystallize out of them, rather than starting from the finished concept and asking the child to memorize it. So writing emerges from drawing, reading follows from writing, and arithmetic is approached through the activity of dividing and gathering rather than through rules laid down in advance. The aim is that learning should reach the whole child, the will and the feeling and not the head alone, because Steiner held that what touches only the head leaves the human being thinned out and cut off from the world.
Two further accents run through the lectures and are easy to miss on a first reading. The first is economy: Steiner repeatedly warns against overloading the young mind, and the second course is part of his argument for teaching one main subject in a sustained morning block rather than fracturing the day into many short, unrelated periods. The second is rhythm. Much of what a child must carry forward, he argues, is built not by single explanations but by patient, rhythmical return to the same material, so that it can sink and ripen during sleep. This is why the lecture on rhythm sets itself so firmly against treating the child as a measurable apparatus in a psychological laboratory.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 294. This study guide is the hub for those terms, and each one opens a fuller treatment of an idea the course develops:
- Imitation and Example
- Authority and Reverence
- The Pictorial Imagination in Teaching
- The Temperaments in Teaching
These four sit at the heart of the course. Imitation and the natural sense of a loved authority describe how the young child takes in the world before and after the change of teeth. The pictorial imagination names Steiner's insistence that lessons reach the child as images rather than dry concepts. The temperaments give the teacher a practical way of seeing and seating the individual children in a class so that each is met according to its own inner weather.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the lectures of GA 294 in an older English translation alongside the original German: rsarchive.org. For print and current scholarly editions, search the publisher at SteinerBooks, where this course also circulates under the title Practical Advice to Teachers.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to follow these teaching ideas across the wider body of Steiner's work.
- Visit the GA Work Library to find study guides to the companion volumes from 1919 and the rest of the education lectures.
- Begin with the four terms above if you want a working vocabulary before reading the lectures themselves.