Steiner's teaching that before the change of teeth the whole child is a single sense organ, taking the surrounding world into its own bodily form.
The Child as Sense Organ in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's description of the first seven years of life, in which the young human being does not yet perceive the world at a distance but takes it directly into the substance of the body. Steiner set it out most plainly in the lecture of 19 April 1922 at Stratford-on-Avon, printed in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1 (GA 304): until the change of teeth the whole child is one great sense organ, receiving not only the deeds of the adults around it but their thoughts, feelings, and sentiments. The bearer is the physical body together with the etheric formative forces still bound up in it, since the astral body and the I have not yet fully incarnated. Steiner adds that these senses do not perceive so much as sculpt, making the small child an inner sculptor of its own organism. Waldorf early-childhood practice guards what is done near an infant rather than what is explained to it.
The child as sense organ names what Steiner saw when he looked at an infant: not a small adult gathering impressions, but a being whose whole body stands open to its surroundings the way an eye stands open to light. What enters is not information. It is form. The gesture, the mood, and the honesty of the adults nearby pass into the child's growing organs.
In Steiner's Own Words
A child’s inner bodily nature, when born into the world, is so organized that it may actually be described, strange as this might sound, as a kind of sensory organism. Until the change of teeth, which occurs around the seventh year, the whole child is one great sense organ. It receives impressions not only from the actions but also from the thoughts, feelings, and sentiments of those who educate it. Being thus surrendered to the environment, a small child is at the same time a little sculptor sculpting its whole human nature.
What it Means Today
Developmental psychology long treated the newborn as a bundle of reflexes with little working relation to the people around it. That picture broke in 1977, when Andrew N. Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore published "Imitation of Facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates" in Science. Infants between twelve and twenty-one days old answered a tongue protrusion with a tongue protrusion, a mouth opening with a mouth opening, a finger movement with a finger movement. A 1983 replication in Child Development pushed the age down to babies tested in their first hours. Meltzoff, later co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, built from this his "like me" account of infancy: the child arrives already reading other people as beings of its own kind, before language or reward or any learning history.
Steiner had said in Stratford-on-Avon that the small child receives the gesture of the adult into its own limbs. Meltzoff measured the moment. The two readings part company on what the imitation is for: for the laboratory, early social cognition; for Steiner, construction, the child using the gesture the way a sculptor uses a model.
Thalira synthesis: what should unsettle a parent is not that the infant copies, but that the copying is structural, so the temper you carry through the room is not witnessed and forgotten, it is built into a body that will still be standing in eighty years.
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