In Steiner's pedagogy a school class is itself a living being, carrying its own spiritual structure and group spirit, not merely a sum of pupils.
The Class as a Living Being in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's observation that a school class forms one being with an individuality of its own, and not simply a collection of separately developing children. Steiner set it out in Human Values in Education (GA 310), the lectures given at Arnheim in the Netherlands in July 1924, where he told the assembled teachers that for the Waldorf college of teachers the classes are living beings also, not only the individual pupils. The bearer of this being is the whole group taken together: the proportion of boys to girls, the temperaments present, and the imponderable forces moving between them give each class what Steiner called a quite definite spiritual structure. He describes a group spirit that pervades the class, so that a class reciting in chorus can carry a poem no single child in it can yet say alone. Waldorf colleges of teachers still study each class as a character in its own right.
The class as a living being is the working assumption behind the Waldorf class teacher's craft: that the group in front of you has a biography, a temperament, and thresholds of its own. Steiner asked teachers to study the class the way they study a child, watching what the class can do that no pupil in it can do alone.
In Steiner's Own Words
It is interesting to see how from year to year the “college of teachers” as a whole is able to deepen its faculty for psychological perception. In addition to all that I have already described, the following must also be stated when one comes to consider the individual classes. We do not go in for statistics in the ordinary sense of the word, but for us the classes are living beings also, not only the individual pupils. One can take some particular class and study it for itself, and it is extraordinarily interesting to observe what imponderable forces then come to light.
What it Means Today
Waldorf teacher training carries this as a practical discipline, not a doctrine. Torin M. Finser's School as a Journey: The Eight-Year Odyssey of a Waldorf Teacher, published by Anthroposophic Press in 1994, is the fullest record of it in English. Finser, who later led Waldorf teacher education at Antioch University New England, took one class from first grade through eighth and wrote the result as the biography of a class rather than a sequence of lesson plans. The class in that account has moods lasting a whole term, difficulties that arrive at a particular age rather than with a particular pupil, and a character that outlasts the pupils who come and go.
This is the reason the Klassenlehrer, the class teacher, stays with one group for eight years in the Waldorf model. If a class were only an administrative bracket, reshuffling it every September would cost nothing. If it is a being with a development of its own, the teacher who has watched it from day one is holding something a substitute cannot pick up cold. In the Arnheim lecture of 24 July 1924 Steiner named the shadow side plainly: work only with the chorus, and in the end no child by himself will know anything. Thalira synthesis: the class individuality is not a poetic name for group dynamics but a fourth presence in the room, which is why an experienced Waldorf teacher reads a class's silence as closely as one child's handwriting.
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