The first principle of early education: the young child learns the world by copying the deeds and moral gesture of those around it, long before it can follow a word.
Imitation and Example names the way the very young child takes hold of the world. In the years up to the change of teeth, the child does not follow rules; it copies what it sees and senses, down to the gesture and the hidden feeling. The educator therefore works less through words than through being worth imitating in every visible and invisible deed.
Imitation and Example in Anthroposophy is the first principle of early education, the recognition that the child before the change of teeth learns not from instruction but by inwardly copying the deeds, gestures and even the moral mood of the people around it. Rudolf Steiner set out this principle for the first Waldorf teachers and elaborated it in his 1921 Hague lectures, later gathered as Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy (GA 304). In these years the young child is, in Steiner's phrase, wholly a sense-organ: it absorbs its surroundings as the eye absorbs light, taking in the speech, the movement and the unspoken intentions of adults and forming itself accordingly. The educational consequence is exact. One cannot reach such a child by command or reprimand. One teaches only by becoming, in deed and in inner attitude, something worthy of imitation.
In Steiner's Own Words
A real teacher must know these things. During the first seven years of life, one cannot guide and direct a child by reprimands, nor by moral commands. During this period, one must guide a child by one’s own deeds and by setting an example. But there are of course imponderables to be reckoned with in human as in outer nature. We guide a child not only with external deeds, but also with inner thoughts and feelings. If children enjoy the company of grown-ups who never allow unworthy thoughts or feelings to enter into their lives, something noble and good could become of them.
What it Means Today
In a Waldorf kindergarten the adult rarely instructs. The teacher bakes bread, mends a doll, sweeps the floor, and the children, gathered close, do the same of their own accord. This is the imitation principle put to work, and it has been the visible signature of the movement since the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919 for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. The early-childhood training centres that grew from it, among them the Waldorf Kindergarten seminars run today at Emerson College in Sussex and the Internationale Vereinigung der Waldorfkindergärten in Stuttgart, still hold to Steiner's stricture that the young child should be surrounded by deeds worth copying rather than lessons to be memorised.
What gives the principle its edge is the claim that imitation reaches all the way into the unseen. Steiner held that a child copies not only the gesture but the intention behind it, so that a teacher's private irritation or genuine reverence is taken in along with the movement of the hands. A Thalira reading of this is the Threshold Gesture: the young child stands at the open border between worlds and registers the moral weather of a room before it can name a single thing in it. The practical demand is therefore on the adult, not the child. One does not correct a five-year-old who copies a parent taking money from a drawer; one examines what the child has been given to imitate.
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