Discussions with Teachers gathers the practical seminar that Rudolf Steiner held for the founding faculty of the first Waldorf school, delivered across fifteen working sessions in Stuttgart between 21 August and 7 September 1919. Where a companion lecture cycle set out the theory of the growing human being, this volume is the hands-on counterpart: a series of methodical conversations in which Steiner and the prospective teachers rehearse how to actually meet children in a classroom. The published edition also carries three curriculum lectures and Steiner's closing words, so the reader follows a school being assembled in real time, from questions of temperament and discipline to the shape of a school day. It is one of the most concrete records we have of anthroposophical education taking its first form.
Place in Steiner's Work
These discussions belong to what is often called the founding impulse of Waldorf education. In the late summer of 1919, Steiner was preparing a group of teachers for a school that would open its doors the following month, a school established at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart for the children of its workers. During those same weeks he was giving several parallel courses to the same circle, and this seminar is the daily, question-and-answer layer of that effort. If the theoretical course asks what a child is, the seminar asks what a teacher should do on Tuesday morning with a class of very different children in front of her.
The volume therefore sits at the meeting point of Steiner's spiritual science and ordinary teaching craft. It shows anthroposophy not as abstract doctrine but as a working assumption behind lesson planning, storytelling, and classroom management. Because the material was recorded from live exchanges, it preserves the give and take of the seminar: a teacher reports on a problem, Steiner responds, and a method is worked out on the spot. For anyone studying how Steiner's ideas about the human being translate into daily practice, this is among the most grounded and useful sources in the entire body of his educational work.
It is worth noting how this seminar relates to the other cycles from those weeks. Steiner addressed the same small group of teachers in the mornings with the theoretical course on the nature of the developing child, and again with a course of practical method lessons. Read together, the three form a single training. The reader who comes to the present volume after the theory course will notice how often a principle stated there returns here as a concrete decision about a lesson, a seating arrangement, or a way of answering a difficult child. This layering is deliberate, and it is part of what makes GA 295 valuable: it lets us watch general ideas being tested against the friction of a real classroom.
Themes and Structure
The seminar is organized around recurring practical questions rather than a single unfolding argument. Its most sustained thread is the doctrine of the four temperaments. Steiner opens by asking the teachers to recognize the sanguine, melancholic, phlegmatic, and choleric dispositions in their pupils, and he relates each to the fourfold view of the human being used in spiritual science. Much of the early material is given over to a striking piece of classroom strategy: seating and grouping children by temperament so that they gently correct one another, with the settled steadiness of one group acting as a counterweight to the restlessness of another.
The way Steiner handles temperament is characteristic of the whole seminar. He does not offer a fixed formula so much as a way of seeing. A sanguine child whose attention drifts is not simply scolded; the teacher is shown how to make the child aware of the drift through a light, humorous comparison with a more settled classmate, so that the children begin to correct their own tendencies. Steiner is explicit that methods need not be rigidly uniform, that one teacher may do well what another does differently, yet that certain underlying principles must be firmly grasped. This balance between freedom of approach and firmness of principle runs through every session.
From there the discussions widen. The teachers work through the teaching of reading and writing, drawing and form, arithmetic, and the rhythm of the school day, always with an eye to the age of the child and the stage of development. Steiner favors beginning from the whole and the artistic, letting written letters grow out of drawn forms rather than being drilled abstractly, and he treats the day itself as something to be shaped rhythmically, with concentrated head-work kept short and balanced by storytelling and artistic activity. Art, in particular, he presents as a training of the will, not an ornament added once the real lessons are done.
A second major thread is storytelling. Steiner treats the narrative hour as a discipline of its own, mapping a progression from fairy tales in the first year, through animal fables, Bible stories taken as history, and on to accounts of the different peoples of the earth. The teachers are told they must gather this material themselves and deliver it in a free, living narrative style rather than reading it aloud. The story is meant to nourish the child's inner life and imagination, and Steiner treats the choice and telling of tales as a serious educational instrument rather than a break from teaching. This is the material that most directly informs the glossary entry linked below.
The closing portion of the volume turns to the curriculum proper. In three curriculum lectures Steiner sketches how subjects should be distributed across the grades, and he ends the seminar with words of encouragement to the new faculty. Throughout, the register stays practical. Questions of discipline, of how to handle the child who will not engage, of art as a training of the will, and of the moral atmosphere the teacher carries into the room recur again and again. The reader should treat the volume as a casebook of pedagogical judgment rather than a system to be memorized.
Teaching and education depend on what passes from the soul of the teacher to the soul of the child.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entry in the Thalira glossary draws on GA 295. It links to its full definition, where you will find the concept set in the wider context of Steiner's thought:
The connection is direct. Steiner's treatment of the storytelling hour, his insistence that the teacher find and shape the material and carry a graded sequence of tales from early childhood onward, is one of the clearest sources for the idea of the educational story as a deliberate instrument of teaching rather than mere entertainment.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of this volume at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation used here. To find print editions and current publication details, search the publisher directly through SteinerBooks. The English edition presented in the archive was translated by Helen Fox, and the seminar is sometimes cited under closely related titles in different printings, so searching by the phrase Discussions with Teachers will surface the relevant volumes.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas gathered here, follow any of these paths:
- Begin with the linked entry above and then browse the full Thalira glossary to see how Steiner's educational vocabulary connects to his wider spiritual science.
- Return to the GA Work Library to study the companion volumes from 1919, including the theoretical lecture course that Steiner gave alongside this seminar.
- Trace the theme of storytelling and imagination through related glossary terms to see how narrative, memory, and the growing child fit together in Steiner's picture of education.