The Waldorf method of reading a child's choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholic nature and teaching to it rather than against it.
The Temperaments in Teaching is the practice by which a Waldorf teacher recognises which of the four classical temperaments predominates in a child and adjusts seating, story, drawing and tone to suit it. Rudolf Steiner taught the method to the first Stuttgart teachers in 1919. The aim is never to suppress a temperament but to lead it, by sympathy, toward its own ripest gift in adult life.
The Temperaments in Teaching in Anthroposophy is the Waldorf practice of recognising each child's dominant temperament, choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholic, and shaping seating, story, drawing and tone of voice to match it rather than correct it. Rudolf Steiner set out the method in the 1919 Stuttgart teacher-training seminar, published as Discussions with Teachers (GA 295), as the practical companion to his Practical Course for Teachers (GA 294). Children of like temperament are grouped together so that one group can be held up as a living example to balance another. The teacher does not drive a temperament out but leads it toward its own best fruit, much as the choleric force in Michelangelo and Beethoven became creative power. Waldorf class teachers have applied this temperament seating since the first school opened in 1919.
In Steiner's Own Words
In such a case much depends on whether or not you can give individual treatment. In a large class many of your guiding principles will be difficult to carry out. But you will have the sanguine children together in a group, and then you must work on them by showing them the melancholic pattern. If there is something wrong in the sanguine group, turn to the melancholic group and then bring the melancholic temperament into play so that it acts as an antidote to the other. In teaching large numbers you must pay great attention to this. It’s important that you should not only be serious and restful in yourself, but that you should also allow the serious restfulness of the melancholic children to act on the sanguine children, and vice versa.
What it Means Today
Walk into a Waldorf classroom built on this method and the seating plan is already a piece of teaching. The choleric children, often stocky and quick to flare, sit in one corner; the dreamy phlegmatics in another; the lively sanguines and the inward, slender melancholics in their own clusters. A class teacher who carries the same group through the elementary years learns each child's grain by heart, and the temperament is the first reading of that grain. Steiner's instruction in the 1919 Stuttgart seminar was concrete and counter-intuitive: you calm an over-excited sanguine group not by demanding quiet but by letting the steady melancholics nearby become the example, one temperament tempering its opposite across the room.
The deeper principle belongs to the will, the solar-plexus pole of the growing human being, which Steiner held is reached through deed and rhythm rather than admonition. A temperament is treated as a force to be ripened, not a fault to be scolded out. The same choleric fire that makes a seven-year-old slam a desk, he reminded the teachers, lived in Michelangelo and Beethoven as creative power. So the teacher feeds the choleric child vivid, made-up stories of bold deeds, gives the melancholic something worthy to feel sorrow for, and meets the phlegmatic's calm with calm before quickening it. Thalira reads this as the Cain Pattern turned to schooling: the strong, difficult force is not exiled but apprenticed. Waldorf teachers have worked this way since the first school opened its doors in September 1919, and the temperament lesson remains a fixture of their training colleges.
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