Steiner's principle that a child's will is strengthened through repeated deeds, rhythm and example, never through moralising or rules of conduct.
The will in education is the Waldorf teacher's care for the deepest, least conscious layer of the growing child. Rudolf Steiner held that willing cannot be argued into being. It lives in the limbs and the metabolism, it sleeps even in the waking child, and it answers only to deeds repeated until they become habit. Exhortation produces nervous weakness; a daily task faithfully done builds inner strength.
The Will in Education in Anthroposophy is the principle that a child's willing is shaped not by spoken instruction but by deed, rhythm and repetition. In The Study of Man (GA 293, 1919), Rudolf Steiner taught the first Waldorf teachers in Stuttgart that the will lives in the limbs and the metabolism and remains largely asleep, so it cannot be reached by admonition or rule. It is strengthened instead through actions repeated daily, weekly and across the year until they become habit, and through the artistic work whose practice renews itself with fresh joy each time. Conscious repetition cultivates resolve; unconscious repetition cultivates feeling. The teacher who would educate the will assigns recurring tasks and works through example rather than moralising, knowing that a remainder of every act of will carries on beyond death.
In Steiner's Own Words
Why, for instance, should we use the Lord's Prayer every day? If a man nowadays were expected to read the same story daily, he simply would not do it; he would find it far too dull. The man of to-day is trained to do things once. But men of an earlier time not only said the same Lord's Prayer every day, they also had a book of stories which they read at least every week. And for this reason their wills were stronger than those produced by the present methods of education: for the cultivation of the will depends upon repetition and conscious repetition.
What it Means Today
A Waldorf classroom is built to honour this teaching long before any child names it. The school Steiner founded in Stuttgart in 1919, the first Waldorf school, opens each morning with a sustained block of one subject, the main lesson, that runs three or four weeks at a stretch, with verses, songs and movement repeated day after day. None of this is filler. The recurring form is the method by which willing is reached, because the will, as Steiner described it in Lecture 4, sleeps below thought and answers to the deed rather than to the lecture about the deed. A teacher who wants a class to grow honest does not deliver a talk on honesty; she gives a task to be carried out today, tomorrow and the day after, so that the right action settles into habit and then into the child's own resolve.
This sets a quiet boundary the movement still defends. Where a behaviour chart rewards a single correct choice, the Waldorf teacher trusts the rhythm of recurring work and the force of personal example, since the young child has already met the world through imitation before authority takes its place. The artistic subjects carry a special weight here, Steiner noted, because practice is repetition and yet painting or recorder playing yields fresh joy each time it is taken up, so the will is exercised without ever growing dull. Educating the will, in this lineage, means arranging deeds worth repeating and standing as someone worth imitating, and leaving moral admonition aside.
Where to Read More