The inner attitude Steiner asked of teachers of the youngest children: reverence before an individuality descending from pre-earthly life into an inherited body.
The Teacher's Priestly Office in Anthroposophy is the inner religious attitude Rudolf Steiner asked of anyone educating a child in the first seven years, described in the second lecture of The Essentials of Education (GA 308), given in Stuttgart on 9 April 1924. Steiner observed that the small child lives in bodily devotion: breathing, circulation, and digestion are surrendered to the surroundings the way an adult soul surrenders in prayer. Watching that surrender, and watching the struggle between the hereditary body and the individuality descending from pre-earthly life to build a second organism at the change of teeth, the teacher's own mood turns priestly. Steiner called the position of teacher a kind of priestly office, a ritual at the altar of universal human life whose offering is human nature awakened rather than a victim led to death. In Waldorf practice it grounds the teacher's self-education, since the young child imitates the adult's inner condition, not only outward conduct.
The Teacher's Priestly Office names a mood rather than a rank. No ordination is involved, and Steiner said plainly that the word is meant in a cosmic sense. What he asked for is the attention a priest brings to an altar, turned toward a small child whose body is still being built, and toward the divine spiritual world that child has just left.
In Steiner's Own Words
This must be our attitude to the growing human being; it is essential to any educational method. Without this fundamental attitude, without this priestly element in the teacher (this is said, of course, in a cosmic sense), education cannot be continued. Therefore, any attempt to reform the methods of education must involve a return of the intellectual element, which has become dominant since the fourteenth century, to the domain of soul and feelings, to move toward what flows from human nature as a whole, not just from the head. If we look at the child without preconceptions, the child’s own nature will teach us to read these things.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave this lecture in April 1924 and died the following March, so he never saw the institution his words most directly produced. Elisabeth von Grunelius opened the first Waldorf kindergarten at Easter 1926, on the Uhlandshöhe in Stuttgart, beside the school Steiner had founded there in 1919. She ran it until the National Socialist government closed it in 1938, then rebuilt the work in the United States, founding a kindergarten at Kimberton in Pennsylvania and another on the Adelphi College campus at Garden City, New York, in 1948. In 1969 the International Waldorf Kindergarten Association made her its honorary chairman.
Her rooms carried no curriculum in the ordinary sense. The teacher baked, mended, swept, and told stories while the children imitated, and the training that grew out of that practice asks the adult to work on her own inner condition first, because a child under seven takes in the mood behind a gesture along with the gesture. That is the priestly office in its practical form: a discipline of the teacher, not a claim about the teacher. Thalira synthesis: the offering Steiner placed on the altar is the only one the officiant cannot make on someone else's behalf, since the substance being consecrated is the teacher's own inner condition, and the child reads it whether or not it is confessed.
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