Warming the young child's inborn reverence and gratitude, through example rather than precept, so that free conscience can later awaken from within.
Moral and religious education, in Rudolf Steiner's pedagogy, begins long before a child can reason about right and wrong. The little one arrives reverent, trusting that the world is good, and absorbs the moral gesture of those nearby by imitation. The teacher's task is to feed that gratitude and wonder, never to preach. Conscience is then free to ripen of its own accord toward adolescence.
In Steiner's Own Words
He is still filled with the devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth? This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious assumption that the whole world is of a moral nature.
What it Means Today
When the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in 1919 for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria factory, Steiner asked its teachers to leave doctrine to the home and the church and to cultivate, in the classroom, only the religious mood of childhood: the quiet reverence and gratitude the small child already carries. The conviction was simple. A child who learns by imitation cannot be argued into goodness; it can only see goodness lived and warm itself at it.
That conviction shapes daily life in Waldorf kindergartens still. A grace is spoken before the snack, hands folded, before anyone eats. A seasonal table holds a candle, a stone, a sprig of what is ripening, and the year is walked through its festivals so that gratitude attaches to sun, soil, seed and rain. The morning verse greets the day rather than instructing about it. None of this asks the child to believe a proposition. It asks the child to feel that the world is worthy of thanks, and to meet the adults around it as people who themselves stand in reverence.
Steiner's wager, set down in his 1923 Ilkley lectures, was that morality planted this early as feeling, never as a rule, becomes the soil from which independent ethical judgment rises freely near the fifteenth year. Gratitude in the young child, reverence ripening into love, love maturing into conscience: this is the sequence Waldorf education has worked with for a century, and it remains its distinctive answer to the question of how a free human being learns to be good.
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