Steiner's rule that a school's teaching plan must be read off the growing child's own development, not invented by adult intellect.
The Curriculum as a Copy of Human Development in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's governing principle for what is taught and when: the teaching plan is not constructed by the intellect but read off the developing human being. Steiner stated it in the first lecture of The Essentials of Education (GA 308), given in Stuttgart on 9 April 1924, where he said the curriculum must reproduce what we read in the evolutionary process of the human being. The bearer is the child's own fourfold organism, whose physical, etheric, astral, and I members come to birth in roughly seven-year rhythms. The teacher who knows those rhythms reads the child like a book that tells, from week to week, month to month, and year to year, what the next lesson must do. In practice this makes the Waldorf class curriculum a developmental score, not a fixed syllabus imposed from outside.
The curriculum as a copy of human development is the principle that decides sequence in a Steiner school. Steiner told the Stuttgart teachers that a true knowledge of the human being turns the growing child into a legible text. What the child is becoming at nine, at twelve, at fourteen sets what the class receives, so subject order follows biography rather than administrative convenience.
In Steiner's Own Words
We can hold a balance between the two by what happens in the soul when we allow the will to pass gently into the child's own activity and by toning down the intellect so that feelings are cultivated in a way that does not suppress the breathing, but cultivates feelings that turn toward imagery and express the buoyant capacity I described. When this is done, the child's development is supported between the change of teeth and puberty. Thus, from week to week, month to month, year to year, a true knowledge of the human being will help us read the developing being like a book that tells us what needs to be done in the teaching. The curriculum must reproduce what we read in the evolutionary process of the human being.
What it Means Today
Steiner died on 30 March 1925, less than a year after these Stuttgart lectures, and the work of turning the principle into a written document fell to Caroline von Heydebrand, a class teacher at the first Waldorf school, opened on 7 September 1919 for the children of workers at Emil Molt's Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Her Vom Lehrplan der Freien Waldorfschule, published in 1925, is the first written Waldorf curriculum, and it is deliberately thin: a few pages per class year, describing what children of that age are before naming what they should meet. Class three carries farming, house building, and stories from the Hebrew scriptures because a nine-year-old is separating self from world. Class six carries physics, mineralogy, and Roman law because a twelve-year-old is meeting causality, skeleton, and outer authority at once. Later English compilations, including the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship volume edited by Martyn Rawson and Tobias Richter, keep that shape: developmental description first, subject list second.
Thalira synthesis: von Heydebrand's book stays short because a copy cannot be larger than its original, and the original is a child, so any curriculum document that swells beyond the picture it is copying has stopped copying and started legislating.
For a teacher the working question changes shape: not what should a twelve-year-old know, but what is a twelve-year-old doing, and which subject answers that. Observation comes first, the plan second.
Where to Read More
- The Essentials of Education, GA 308
- Discussions with Teachers, GA 295, the 1919 curriculum lectures
- Find The Essentials of Education at SteinerBooks
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