Steiner's name for knowledge of the human being carried so deeply that a teacher answers a child at once, without consulting theory first.
Pedagogical Instinct in Anthroposophy is the condition Rudolf Steiner described in which a teacher's knowledge of the human being has sunk so far below deliberate thought that it answers a child immediately, the way hunger answers food. Steiner set it out in the second lecture of The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education (GA 306), given at Dornach on 16 April 1923, four years after the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart. He argued that a teacher who first learns a theory and then applies it to a pupil has already stepped away from that pupil. The knowledge must permeate flesh and blood as well as soul and spirit before it can act at the speed a classroom actually moves. What falls short of this, Steiner said, produces educational routine rather than practice. Today it names the tacit competence that Waldorf class teachers cultivate through the Child Study conversation.
Pedagogical instinct is what Steiner asked of teachers instead of method: an inner readiness that meets each child without a rule standing in between. He compared it to hunger, which needs no theory of nutrition to know when to eat. The instinct is earned, not innate. It grows from patient study of human development until that study stops being something the teacher recalls and becomes something the teacher is.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, knowledge of the human being, which forms the basis of a sound and practical way of teaching, must create in the teachers, every time they face a child, something like the relationship between hunger and eating. The teachers' response to a given pedagogical situation has to become as natural as satisfying a sensation of hunger by eating. This is only possible if knowledge of the human being has permeated flesh and blood as well as soul and spirit, so that you intuitively know what needs to be done every time you face a child. Only if your knowledge of human beings has such inner fullness that it can become instinctive can it lead to the proper kind of practical teaching. It will not happen on the basis of psychological experiments leading to theories about pupils' powers of memory, concentration, and so on.
What it Means Today
Donald Schön, then Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education at MIT, published The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action with Basic Books in 1983. His argument was that the dominant account of professional competence, which he called technical rationality, gets the order backwards. It pictures the practitioner holding general theory and applying it downward onto particular cases. Schön watched architects, psychotherapists, and town planners actually work, and found something else: a knowing-in-action carried in the doing itself, revised on the spot, impossible to state as a rule beforehand. Sixty years earlier at Dornach, Steiner had rejected the same order in almost the same words, warning that intellectual ideas inserted between theory and practice externalize all educational methods.
Where they part is instructive. Schön describes tacit expertise as accumulated by repetition and reflection. Steiner asks for a specific training: sustained study of how a human being develops across the change of teeth, puberty, and after, held until it is no longer recalled but simply present. The Waldorf Child Study, in which a college of teachers takes up a single pupil across several meetings, is the practical form this takes, and the first such college met in Stuttgart from 1919.
Thalira synthesis: pedagogical instinct is not the opposite of knowledge but its final digestion, the point at which what a teacher has learned about the human being stops being a possession and becomes a sense organ.
Where to Read More
- The Child's Changing Consciousness and Waldorf Education, GA 306
- Find at SteinerBooks
- The Moon Tarot Card Meaning: Illusion, Instinct and the Unconscious
- The Centaurs: Half-Man, Half-Horse and the Tension Between Instinct and Reason
- Enneagram Subtypes: Self-Preservation, Social, and Sexual Instincts