The three stages of growth from birth to twenty-one, governed in turn by imitation, by loving authority, and by independent judgment.
The Three Seven-Year Periods are Rudolf Steiner's map of the two decades between birth and the early twenties, divided into three spans of roughly seven years. Each span carries a character of its own. The small child imitates, the schoolchild follows a beloved authority and asks for the beautiful, the adolescent begins to judge for itself and asks for the true. Read this way, growing up is not one slope but three doorways, and each calls for its own kind of teaching.
The Three Seven-Year Periods in Anthroposophy are the three roughly seven-year stages through which a human being grows from birth to the age of twenty-one, each ruled by a different unfolding of the child's nature. Rudolf Steiner set the scheme out for the first Waldorf teachers in The Study of Man (GA 293, 1919). The first period, birth to the change of teeth near the seventh year, belongs to imitation. The second, the change of teeth to puberty, belongs to a loved authority and the sense that the world is beautiful. The third, puberty to about twenty-one, brings the awakening of independent judgment and the search for truth. Steiner read these stages as the gradual birth of the etheric, then astral, then I-organisation, and built the Waldorf curriculum so that what is taught in each period meets the member then being freed.
In Steiner's Own Words
Now, as you know, the period of life which concerns us in teaching and education is that which includes the first two decades; and this time, as we know, is further divided into three periods. Up to the change of teeth the child bears a very distinct character, shown in his wanting to be an imitative being; he wants to imitate everything he sees in his environment. From the seventh year to puberty we have to do with a child who wants to take on authority what he has to know, to feel and will. And only with puberty comes the longing in man to gain a relationship to the world through his own individual judgment.
What it Means Today
When the first Waldorf school opened in Stuttgart in September 1919, for the children of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, Steiner did not hand its teachers a list of subjects. He handed them this picture of three lives lived in succession, and asked them to build the timetable out of it. The result is still visible in any Waldorf school: the kindergarten that protects imitation and gives the small child little to copy but good example; the eight years of the class teacher, who carries one group from the change of teeth toward puberty through story, picture and an authority the children love rather than obey; and the upper school, where specialist teachers meet the awakened power of judgment with debate, projective geometry and the history of ideas. Form drawing in grade one, the Norse and Greek myths in the middle grades, chemistry and the French Revolution in the upper school, each lands where Steiner placed the doorway. The scheme also shapes what is held back. Abstract grammar, formal proof and cold scientific definition wait until adolescence, because before the third period Steiner held that the child meets the world first as moral, then as beautiful, and only at the last as true. A teacher who reads the three periods correctly is less anxious about a slow reader at six and more watchful of the ninth-year crisis or the loneliness of fourteen, because the calendar of childhood, in this reading, is a map of what the growing human being is ready to receive.
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