Quick Answer
Twelve lectures, given in a fortnight in 1924 to about twenty young people, that became the founding text of a worldwide movement in the care of people with disabilities. Steiner is at his most practical and most demanding here: the course is about the inner state of the adult, not a set of methods, and its central claim is that the educator's own development is the only real instrument. The language is of its time and the diagnostic framework is his own. The insistence that the child is never the condition is what has lasted.
Key Takeaways
- The pedagogical law is the course's centre: the adult's inner work acts on the child.
- The child is never the condition. The individuality is whole; the incarnation has a difficulty.
- Method is secondary to the disposition of the person doing the work.
- Camphill came out of this room, through a twenty-two-year-old named Karl König.
- Expect dated language and read the recent edition, which addresses it.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Heilpädagogischer Kurs, the Curative Education Course, is the transcript of twelve lectures Rudolf Steiner gave at the Goetheanum in Dornach between 25 June and 7 July 1924, eight months before he died.
It has appeared in English under several titles. Education for Special Needs is the one used by Rudolf Steiner Press for the current edition, translated by Mary Adams and revised. The older Curative Education is the same text.
The lectures were not public. They were given to a small group who had asked for them, and they assume a working knowledge of Steiner's anthropology, his medical ideas and his account of child development. He explains almost nothing from the ground up.
What he offers instead is a way of seeing children whose development has gone differently, a set of principles for the adult who works with them, and, in the later lectures, a series of individual children discussed in front of the group.
A word on the title. Steiner's phrase was Seelenpflege-bedürftige Kinder, children in need of care for the soul, and he chose it deliberately against the clinical terms of his day. Every English title has struggled to render it. Education for Special Needs is the most neutral. None captures the idea that the care is of the soul and that the soul is intact.
The Room in 1924
The circumstances give the book its character and should be known before reading it.
Steiner in the summer of 1924 was giving several lecture courses at once, sometimes three a day, on agriculture, on medicine, on karma, on speech. He was already ill. The curative course was fitted in between the others, in the early afternoon, and the audience was a mix of young curative workers, a few doctors and some members of the Waldorf school staff.
The young people who had asked for the course had almost no experience. Three of them had opened a home for children with disabilities a few weeks earlier and had come to Dornach, in effect, to ask what to do.
Steiner's answer was not a manual. It was a demand that they become certain kinds of people. That is why the course reads as it does: less a treatise than an initiation into an attitude, delivered under pressure of time to people who were going straight back to work.
Lauenstein
The home that prompted the course, and the first of its kind.
Franz Löffler, Siegfried Pickert and Albrecht Strohschein, all in their early twenties and all connected to the anthroposophical youth movement, had rented a house at Lauenstein near Jena and taken in a handful of children whom the institutions of the time had classified as ineducable.
Steiner visited Lauenstein on 18 June 1924, met the children, and gave the course a week later. Several of the children he discusses in the later lectures are, almost certainly, the ones he had seen there.
The point matters because the course was not abstract. He had specific children in mind, had watched them, and was talking to the people who would be with them the next week. The urgency in the text is real.
The Pedagogical Law
The principle the whole course rests on, stated in the second lecture, and the most important thing in the book.
Steiner's anthropology describes the human being as four members: the physical body, the etheric or life body, the astral or soul body, and the ego. In education, he says, a law operates: any member of the adult works on the member one step below it in the child. The adult's etheric works on the child's physical. The adult's astral works on the child's etheric. The adult's ego works on the child's astral. And what works on the child's ego is something higher in the adult still, which he calls the spirit self, and which is present only to the degree the adult has developed it.
The consequence is stark. If a child's etheric body needs help, the instrument is the adult's soul life, and the adult's soul life must therefore be in order. If the child's ego needs strengthening, only the adult's own spiritual development can reach it.
Whether one accepts the anthropology or not, the practical claim is unambiguous and it has been the guiding principle of curative education ever since: the educator's inner condition is not a background factor. It is the treatment.
The pedagogical law is easy to state and hard to bear. It means that when a child in your care is not developing, the first place to look is yourself, and not in the vague sense of good intentions but specifically: your own habits of feeling, your own inner discipline, what you have or have not made of yourself. Steiner told twenty-two-year-olds this in a fortnight and sent them back to a house full of children. Some of them spent the rest of their lives on it. The law does not offer comfort and it is the reason the movement it produced has lasted a century.
The Four Members and Their Balance
The diagnostic framework, which is the part of the book most dependent on Steiner's system.
He describes typical development as a progressive integration of the four members into the body over the first twenty-one years, with the etheric becoming independent around seven, the astral around fourteen, and the ego around twenty-one. Difficulties in development are read as disturbances in this integration: a member that sits too deeply in the body, or too loosely, or that has failed to take hold of some organ or system.
He works this out in polarities. A child in whom the astral and ego penetrate too strongly into the metabolism versus one in whom they cannot get hold of it. A head that is too heavy with sense impressions versus one that cannot retain them. The whole of the middle lectures elaborates these poles and the physical, behavioural and temperamental signs of each.
The framework is internally coherent and it is his. It does not translate into clinical categories and was never meant to. Its value is in what it directs attention toward: the whole child, the rhythm of the day, the way the body is held, the relationship between what is taken in and what is done with it.
The Child Is Never the Condition
The claim that has outlasted the framework.
Steiner returns again and again to a distinction between the individuality, which is whole, and the incarnation, which has met a difficulty. The child in front of you is not the disability. The disability is something the child is living through, in this one life, and the person doing the living is complete.
He extends this to the observation that what appears as a limitation in one area is very often accompanied by a heightened capacity in another, and that the educator should look for the capacity rather than dwell on the limitation.
In 1924, when the dominant models in psychiatry and pedagogy were classificatory and, in Germany especially, sliding toward eugenics, this was a radical stance. It is the stance that the entire later movement took as its foundation and it does not depend on accepting anything else he said.
Karma and the Individuality
The spiritual background, and the part most readers outside anthroposophy will find hardest.
Steiner frames the disabled child within his teaching on reincarnation and karma. A condition met in this life belongs to a long biography of the individuality across many lives. It has causes and it has purposes, and one of the educator's tasks is to help the individuality accomplish, in this life, what it came to accomplish.
He is careful about this. He does not say that the child chose the condition, nor that it is a punishment, nor that it can be explained. He says that the individuality is on a path, that the path is longer than one life, and that the adult should relate to the child with the reverence due to a being on such a path.
A reader who does not believe in reincarnation can still take the practical instruction, which is to treat the child as a full person with a destiny of their own. Whether the metaphysics is needed to sustain that attitude in practice, over years, is a question the movement's history suggests should not be dismissed.
The Discipline of Observation
The skill Steiner most wants to train, and the part of the course closest to ordinary good practice.
He insists that the educator look. Not diagnose, not classify, but observe: the shape of the head, the way the child walks, the quality of the skin, the sleep, the digestion, what the child does with the hands when unoccupied, how the child responds to colour and to sound, what the child is like in the morning and in the evening.
The observation is meant to be sustained over weeks and to precede any conclusion. He is scathing about people who arrive with a diagnosis and see only what confirms it.
Much of the observational advice is simply good, whatever framework surrounds it. The instruction to watch the whole child in the whole day, rather than the symptom in the consulting room, is one that mainstream practice has taken a century to catch up with, in part.
The Case Presentations
The later lectures, in which children are brought before the group.
Steiner discusses a number of individual children, some by description and some, it appears, in person. He describes what he sees, works through his reading of it in terms of the members, and proposes a course of treatment.
The cases are the most vivid part of the book and the most uncomfortable. The children are described with a directness that would not be acceptable now. They are also described with a precision of attention that is striking: he notices small things, connects them, and treats each child as a distinct puzzle rather than an instance of a type.
Readers should hold both facts. The cases are documents of their time and they are also the record of someone looking very hard at children whom most people in 1924 had stopped looking at.
What He Actually Prescribes
The practical content, which is thinner than newcomers expect.
Across the twelve lectures, Steiner recommends curative eurythmy exercises, specific to particular conditions; medicines, mostly potentised mineral and plant preparations, in the manner of anthroposophic medicine; the use of colour in the child's surroundings; rhythmical activities and the structuring of the day; adjustments to diet; and forms of speech and movement work.
He gives few details. The course is not a formulary. Where he prescribes he does so for a particular child and warns against generalising.
The people who took the course and went on to found the movement developed the therapeutic repertoire over decades. The course gave them the disposition and the way of seeing. The methods came later, and largely from them.
Courage, Humour, Patience
The qualities Steiner asks for in the educator, which are the course's real curriculum.
He tells the young people that they will need courage, because the work will frighten them and because the children will sense any fear. He tells them they will need humour, because without it the work will crush them and because a child in difficulty needs to be met with lightness. And he tells them they will need patience of a kind that measures progress in years.
He adds a fourth quality, harder to name: a kind of inner calm that comes from having settled something in oneself, so that one is not looking to the child for confirmation.
These are not techniques and cannot be taught in a fortnight. The course names them and leaves the developing of them to the work. That is either a failure of the course or its deepest honesty, and the people who lived it out mostly took the second view.
The Problem of Language
A matter that must be faced.
Steiner spoke in 1924 and used the vocabulary of 1924. The German original contains terms for disability that were standard medical usage then and are slurs now. Early English translations rendered them literally. The current Steiner Press edition softens them and includes a note on the problem.
Beyond individual words, there is a tone. Steiner discusses children in front of an audience, describes their features and behaviour in detail, and speaks about them rather than to them. That was the practice of the age and it would not be the practice now.
A reader has two choices: reject the book for its language, or read past the language to what it is saying, which is in most cases the opposite of what the language implies. The second choice requires effort and it is the one this review recommends.
What Became of It
The afterlife, which is the reason the book is still in print.
Among the twenty or so people in the room was Karl König, a young Viennese doctor. In 1939, as a refugee from Austria, he gathered a group in Scotland and founded Camphill, a community in which people with and without disabilities lived, worked and learned together on the principles of the course.
There are now over a hundred Camphill communities in more than twenty countries, and beyond them a broad field of anthroposophic curative education and social therapy with its own training, its own literature and its own institutions.
The Lauenstein founders continued their work in Germany until the Nazi years made it impossible; some of the children in their care were murdered in the T4 programme. That history stands behind the movement's insistence on the intact individuality and should not be forgotten when the book is read.
Against the Clinical View
The philosophical stance, which is worth making explicit.
Steiner's account is not a medical model with spiritual additions. It is a different model. The clinical view of his time, and largely of ours, locates disability in a deficit that belongs to the individual and that treatment aims to reduce. Steiner locates it in a relationship between a whole individuality and a particular incarnation, and treatment aims at the balance of that relationship, in which the adult is a participant and not an observer.
The two models have different consequences. The clinical model produces diagnosis, categorisation and intervention. Steiner's produces observation, relationship and the transformation of the carer. Both have their failures. His is weak on measurable outcome and strong on the dignity of the person, and a century of practice has shown that the second is not a small thing.
This is the frame within which the general educational anthropology he had set out in 1919 gets applied to children for whom that anthropology's typical picture does not hold, and it is where his thought is most tested.
The Edition
The current Rudolf Steiner Press edition, in the Collected Works series, is the one to read. The translation has been revised, the problematic terminology is annotated, and there is an introduction placing the course in the history of the movement.
Older editions under the title Curative Education are the same lectures in a less careful rendering and without the apparatus. They are adequate if that is what you have.
The text is short, under two hundred pages, and dense. It is not a book to read quickly.
The Objections
Four, and readers within the movement raise them as readily as those outside.
The framework is unfalsifiable. Readings of children in terms of the four members cannot be checked against anything outside the framework, and disagreements between practitioners cannot be settled by evidence.
The medical claims are unsupported. The potentised remedies and the specific correspondences between conditions and organs have not been demonstrated and in some cases have been contradicted.
The language and the cases. Already discussed. It is a real cost and the edition mitigates it only partly.
The dependence on the adult. If the educator's inner development is the instrument, then a badly developed educator is worse than no method at all, and the course provides no way to tell the difference from outside.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you work in Camphill or an anthroposophic setting and have only had the principles second-hand.
Read it if you are a teacher or parent of a child with special needs and want to see where the language of the whole child and the intact person came from, before it was diluted.
Read it if you know Waldorf education and want the point at which it was asked to deal with children it was not designed for.
Read the second lecture, on the pedagogical law, even if you read nothing else. It is a claim about every educational relationship and not only the curative one.
The course's most demanding idea is not the anthropology. It is the pedagogical law read as a moral fact: that what you have made of yourself is what the child receives. Not what you say, not what you know, not what method you apply, but the actual condition of your inner life, which the child meets directly and cannot be protected from. Steiner said this to young people who wanted instructions and gave them a mirror instead. Every parent who has watched a child absorb a mood they thought they were hiding knows the law is true at some level. The course insists on it at every level, and that insistence is why it produced people who spent fifty years in one house with the same children and did not burn out.
Twelve lectures that founded a worldwide movement, and the demand at the centre of them.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our reservations about the framework, the medical claims and the language are set out above and were not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Education for Special Needs?
The English title of Steiner's Curative Education Course, twelve lectures given at Dornach in June and July 1924 to a small group of young people who had asked for guidance in working with children with developmental disabilities.
Who was it given to?
Around twenty people, mostly in their twenties, including Franz Löffler, Siegfried Pickert and Albrecht Strohschein, who had just opened a home for children at Lauenstein near Jena, and Karl König, who later founded Camphill.
What is curative education?
Steiner's term for the care and teaching of children whose development departs from the typical, understood as a healing activity carried out by the adult on themselves as much as on the child.
What is the pedagogical law?
The principle stated in the second lecture that in any educational relationship the higher member of the adult works on the next lower member of the child, so that the teacher's own inner development is the real instrument.
Are the case studies still useful?
Partly. Steiner presents individual children in the later lectures and describes them in terms of the interplay of physical, etheric, astral and ego. The observational detail is often sharp; the diagnostic vocabulary is his own and not clinical.
Is the language dated?
Yes. The original German uses terms that were standard in 1924 and are offensive now. Modern translations soften them, and the recent Steiner Press edition adds context. Readers should expect a text of its time.
What is the connection to Camphill?
Karl König attended the course at twenty-two, and in 1939 founded the first Camphill community in Scotland on its principles. There are now over a hundred Camphill communities in more than twenty countries.
Does it describe specific therapies?
Some. Steiner mentions curative eurythmy, specific medicines, rhythmical activities, colour, and adjustments to diet and daily rhythm, but the course is about the disposition of the educator rather than a set of techniques.
What does he mean by the child's karma?
That a disability belongs to one incarnation and not to the individuality, which is whole. Whatever one thinks of reincarnation, the practical effect is to insist that the child is never reducible to the condition.
How does it relate to The Study of Man?
The Study of Man, given in 1919, lays out the anthropology on which Waldorf education rests. This course assumes it and applies it to children for whom the typical development has gone differently.
Is it readable without anthroposophy?
With difficulty. Steiner uses his full vocabulary of bodies and members without explaining it. A reader new to him should start with a general introduction or with The Study of Man.
Who should read it?
Anyone working in Camphill or anthroposophic curative settings, teachers and parents of children with special needs who are curious about the source, and readers of Steiner who want to see him at his most practical.
Look at the instrument
Whatever you think of the metaphysics, try the law for a week. Take one relationship in which you are responsible for someone's growth, a child, a student, an apprentice, and assume for that week that the only variable you control is your own inner condition. Not what you say to them. What you are when you say it. Steiner claimed that this is what they receive, and that everything else is noise. It is an uncomfortable experiment because it removes every excuse. It is also, according to the people who built a century of practice on it, the only one that works.
Sources & References
- Steiner, Rudolf. Education for Special Needs: The Curative Education Course, GA 317, Rudolf Steiner Press.
- Steiner, Rudolf. The Foundations of Human Experience (The Study of Man), GA 293.
- König, Karl. The Child with Special Needs: Letters and Essays on Curative Education.
- Selg, Peter. Karl König and the Camphill Movement.
- Jackson, Robin, ed. Holistic Special Education: Camphill Principles and Practice.
- Historical accounts of Lauenstein and the origins of anthroposophic curative education.