Waldorf Education & Child Development

The educative law of the elementary years: the child between seven and fourteen learns truth, beauty and goodness on the word of a loved and trusted teacher.

The artistic groundwork Steiner set before letters, where the child meets the living line and the soul of colour as the seedbed of later thinking.

Steiner's Babylonian friend-pair: an old initiate-soul and a young clairvoyant soul whose joined gifts opened the third post-Atlantean epoch.

The first principle of early education: the young child learns the world by copying the deeds and moral gesture of those around it, long before it can follow a word.

Steiner's name for the post-Atlantean polarity between the settled, nature-transforming Zarathustra-people of Iran and the nomadic Turanians of decadent astral clairvoyance.

In Steiner's pedagogy, the child's memory is grown from interest, feeling and the rhythm of habit, not drilled by abstract repetition exercises.

Warming the young child's inborn reverence and gratitude, through example rather than precept, so that free conscience can later awaken from within.

In Steiner's pedagogy, the young child's free play is serious work, the buried seed of the initiative and capacity for purposeful labour the adult later needs.

The Waldorf principle that a child's will is schooled not by a thing said once but by the same deed returning in daily and weekly rhythm until it becomes habit.

In Waldorf schooling, the child draws first, the letters grow out of those drawings, and reading is allowed to follow later from writing.

The old Oriental way of knowledge in which the yogi consciously transformed the breath to send thinking inward and wake the experience of the self.

Steiner's name for teaching practised as a living art, drawn from real knowledge of how the child unfolds, not from a fixed method imposed from outside.

The planetary initiation-schools of ancient Atlantis, named by Steiner as the Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and Venus Oracles, all crowned by the highest Sun Oracle.

The seventh-year shedding of the milk teeth, which Steiner read as the moment the body-building forces are freed to serve memory and thinking.

The one Waldorf teacher who leads a single class through all eight elementary years, teaching every main subject and growing alongside the same children.

Birth to the change of teeth, when the child is wholly a sense-organ and takes in the world by imitating what surrounds it.

Steiner's modern replacement for breath-yoga: consciously ensouling light and sense perception, since the air lost its soul and the soul now rides on light.

Steiner's method of clothing every elementary lesson in image, picture and story, so the school-age child learns through fantasy rather than abstract concept.

Childhood from the change of teeth to puberty, when the growing person learns through feeling, beauty and the word of a loved authority.

The seven initiated teachers of the ancient Indian epoch, pupils of Manu, each the human instrument through whom one of the Seven Planetary Spirits spoke.

A pre-Christian ladder of seven symbolic ranks, Raven to Father, by which the oriental Mysteries led a candidate out of the group-soul into individual spirit-knowledge.

Steiner's 1919 foundation course for the first Waldorf teachers, a knowledge of the growing child as body, soul and spirit drawn from the cosmos.

The Waldorf method of reading a child's choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic or melancholic nature and teaching to it rather than against it.

In Steiner's scheme, the years from puberty to twenty-one, when the young person wakes to independent judgment and begins to test the world for what is true.

The three stages of growth from birth to twenty-one, governed in turn by imitation, by loving authority, and by independent judgment.

Steiner's view of the child as head, chest and limbs, so that teaching reaches thinking through feeling and the will, not the head alone.

Steiner's principle that a child's will is strengthened through repeated deeds, rhythm and example, never through moralising or rules of conduct.

The three great streams of ancient Indian spiritual life that Steiner reads in the Bhagavad Gita: revelation, the science of soul-forms, and the path of inner development.