In Steiner's pedagogy, the child's memory is grown from interest, feeling and the rhythm of habit, not drilled by abstract repetition exercises.
Memory and the Child in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of how the power of recollection is built in the growing human being, set out in The Study of Man (GA 293, 1919), the foundation course for the first Waldorf school in Stuttgart. Steiner holds that memory is not a faculty to be drilled by repetition exercises but a capacity that grows out of the sleeping will. Recollection happens when the will, in which the child is asleep, reaches into the unconscious and lifts a mental picture into waking consciousness. Because the will cannot be commanded directly, memory is strengthened indirectly, through lively interest, warmth of feeling and the rhythm of habit, rather than through abstract understanding. In Waldorf practice this means the elementary teacher feeds the child's recollection by arousing genuine interest in the lesson, so that what is loved is what is later remembered.
For Steiner, memory in the child is a riddle of will rather than of intellect. He told the first Waldorf teachers that we cannot order a child to remember any more than we can order a sleeper to be good. The treasure of pictures rises into consciousness when the sleeping will is roused, and the will is roused by interest and warmth, never by cold drilling. Strong memory is therefore cultivated through what the child loves.
In Steiner's Own Words
We must so plan our lessons that the interest we arouse for the animal world becomes greater and greater. The greater the interest such lessons arouse the more they affect the child's will; so that, when mental pictures of animals and ideas about them are required by the normally regulated memory, the will has the capacity to bring them forth from the subconscious, from the region of forgetting. Only by working through the force of habit and custom in man can you give order to his will and therewith also to his memory. In other words, you must understand how everything that awakens an intense interest in the child also contributes to a very great extent towards making his memory strong and efficient.
What it Means Today
The teachers who gathered in Stuttgart in September 1919 to open the first Waldorf school, the Freie Waldorfschule founded for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, carried this insight straight into the classroom, and Waldorf schools still work from it a century later. The practical expression is the main lesson: a single subject taught in a roughly two-hour block every morning for three or four weeks at a stretch. Crucially, a Waldorf teacher does not test the previous day's material first thing. The morning opens with recall, the children retelling and reliving yesterday's story or experiment before anything new is added. Memory is given a night to ripen. Steiner described this rhythm as letting forgetting and remembering breathe in and out, the way sleeping and waking do, so that what sinks into the sleeping will overnight surfaces again of its own accord. A teacher in a Class Three lesson on farming, for instance, will not hand the child a list of facts to memorise; she will arouse such love for the ploughing and the sowing that the picture returns by itself when it is wanted. This is why the elementary years, the second seven-year period after the change of teeth, are the proper season for cultivating memory through feeling and beauty, well before the abstract, judging intellect of adolescence arrives. The Thalira reading of this is plain: a memory rooted in warmth of interest is held for life, while one forced by repetition fades with the exam.
Where to Read More