The educative law of the elementary years: the child between seven and fourteen learns truth, beauty and goodness on the word of a loved and trusted teacher.
Authority and reverence name the way an elementary-school child meets the world. After the change of teeth the child stops imitating and begins to take what it learns on trust, looking up to a beloved grown-up whose word feels like the world speaking. Steiner placed this need at the centre of teaching between seven and puberty, when a freely given authority, not argument, carries knowledge into the soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
From the seventh year to puberty we have to do with a child who wants to take on authority what he has to know, to feel and will. And only with puberty comes the longing in man to gain a relationship to the world through his own individual judgment. Therefore in dealing with children of primary school age we must remember that at this age they long for the sway of authority from the innermost depths of their beings. We shall educate badly if we are not in a position to hold our authority in this age.
What it Means Today
When the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in September 1919 for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, Steiner gave its teachers a working rule rather than a theory. The class teacher who stays with one group through these middle years becomes, by design, the loved authority the principle describes. A grammatical rule, a historical date, a sense of right and wrong: each enters the child more deeply when it comes from a person the child admires than when it is proved on a blackboard. Reverence is the feeling that makes this possible, the child's glad looking-up to someone who seems to stand for the whole world.
Today's Waldorf movement reads this as the deliberate counterweight to its own first principle. Where imitation governs the years before seven, the second principle asks the teacher to be worth imitating in word as well as deed, to embody what is true. The synthesis Thalira draws is this: the freedom prized in Steiner's ethics is not the opposite of reverence but its fruit. A person who was met as a loved authority at nine, and allowed to look up before being asked to judge, arrives at puberty with something solid to push against. Independent judgment, the gift of the third period, ripens cleanly only where reverence was honoured first. What looks like submission is really the soil in which a later, freer relationship to truth takes root.
Where to Read More
- The Study of Man, GA 293
- Practical Course for Teachers, GA 294
- Find The Study of Man at SteinerBooks
- Human Design Projector: Strategy, Authority, and the Gift of Guidance
- The Hierophant Tarot Card Meaning: Tradition, Initiation & Inner Authority
- Human Design Generator: Strategy, Sacral Authority, and the Power of Response