Steiner's 1919 foundation course for the first Waldorf teachers, a knowledge of the growing child as body, soul and spirit drawn from the cosmos.
The Study of Man is the spiritual anthropology Rudolf Steiner gave the first Waldorf teachers in fourteen lectures at Stuttgart in late August and early September 1919. It asks who the child really is, and answers that the human being arrives on earth as a continuation of a life lived before birth. Teaching, in this view, means harmonising the soul-spirit the child brings with the body it has just entered.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now you will have seen, from what I have here developed, that really the human being can only be understood in connection with the cosmos. For when we make mental pictures we have what is cosmic within us. We were in the cosmos before we were born, and our experience there is now mirrored in us; we shall be in the cosmos again when we have passed through the gate of death, and our future life is expressed in seed form in what rules our will. What works unconsciously in us works in full consciousness for higher knowledge in the cosmos.
What it Means Today
The fourteen lectures of GA 293 are still the first text a Waldorf teacher meets in training. Steiner gave them across two weeks to the small founding faculty Emil Molt had gathered for the Waldorf-Astoria factory school in Stuttgart, opened that September of 1919. They are not a curriculum but a way of seeing: read the child backwards from the cosmos, and the practical lessons follow. From this course comes the picture that organised the whole pedagogy. Thinking is an image cast by the life before birth, willing is the seed of the life after death, and feeling beats between them like systole and diastole. A teacher who carries that picture, Steiner argued, works on the pupil differently from one who does not, because it changes what the teacher is, not only what the teacher does.
Seminars at the Goetheanum and Waldorf teacher-training colleges from Witten-Annen to Spring Valley still work this volume lecture by lecture, often alongside its 1919 companion courses on method and discussion. Where a modern curriculum hands a teacher techniques, the Study of Man hands a question to live with: what is breathing, sleeping, remembering and willing in this particular child? That insistence on knowing the growing human being before reaching for a method is the seed that the change of teeth and the three seven-year periods unfold in detail. It is why a Waldorf class begins with the children in front of the teacher rather than the syllabus.
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