Waldorf Education & Child Development

Steiner's rule that anthroposophy enters the classroom as knowledge of the human being shaping method, never as a subject taught to children.

The older spiritual path that wore the body down through pain until the spirit could perceive, replaced in Steiner's teaching by strengthened thinking and will.

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.

Steiner's practice of seating boys and girls together in every Waldorf class and giving both the same handwork, so that mutual understanding between the sexes forms in childhood.

Steiner's term for the subtle breathing injury caused when teaching between seven and fourteen stays intellectual and never becomes imagery, congesting the out-breath.

Cramping pain that Steiner traced to karma a person could not fulfil at its appointed hour, postponed then to the next incarnation.

Steiner's teaching that a child's temperament has a bodily seat, so sugar, potatoes and other foods can be adjusted to steady it.

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 rule that teaching must keep pace with what destiny already planted in a child, drawing it out rather than working against it.

Steiner refused to give meditative exercises to children before sexual maturity, holding that they would disorder the growing bond between soul-spirit and body.

Experimental pedagogy is the measurement of children's thinking, memory, and will from outside; Steiner granted its results and read its existence as a symptom.

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

Steiner's name for the soul that grows fresher as the body hardens, fed by living concepts planted in childhood.

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.

The unweighable soul influences, a teacher’s inner thoughts, feelings, and convictions, that work formatively on a child beneath every outward lesson.

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.

Steiner's name for knowledge of the human being carried so deeply that a teacher answers a child at once, without consulting theory first.

Waldorf schools teach one subject every morning for about four weeks at a stretch, so nothing later in the day erases what was just learned.

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.

Steiner's observation that how a child plays before the fifth year announces how that same person will meet practical life in their twenties.

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.

Steiner's finding that a child's sugar intake regulates liver glycogen activity, and that pathological melancholy needs more sugar while pathological sanguinity needs less.

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.

Steiner's 1923 diagnostic that a child's walking supplies the beat behind sentence structure, while freed arm movement supplies the melody behind speech modulation.

Steiner's reading of Clever Hans: the horse answered not by reading tiny cues but by taking up its master's thought through a bond of feeling.

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.

Steiner's teaching that before the change of teeth the whole child is a single sense organ, taking the surrounding world into its own bodily form.

Steiner's term for the way a child before the change of teeth gives itself over to surrounding gesture with the whole physical body, not with the soul.

In Steiner's pedagogy a school class is itself a living being, carrying its own spiritual structure and group spirit, not merely a sum of pupils.

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

The faculty body that runs a Waldorf school without a principal, and whose regular conference Steiner called the soul of the whole school.

Steiner's rule that a school's teaching plan must be read off the growing child's own development, not invented by adult intellect.

Steiner's observation that a childhood influence reaches the soul within a few years but needs seven or eight times as long to surface in the body.

Around the eleventh or twelfth year, independent judgment begins to stir inside the age of authority, and the child first grasps physical law.

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 three-stage portrait of the educator: the Greek gymnast formed the whole body, the Roman rhetorician formed speech, the modern professor only transmits knowledge.

The first physical body, inherited from father and mother, is not the child's own form but a model the etheric body works from, and then discards.

Steiner's name for the moment, near thirty-five or forty, when a childhood teaching accepted purely on trust is finally understood and releases fresh life force.

Steiner's caution that teaching by visible demonstration works inside a narrow band, and leaves beauty, morality and religion entirely outside its reach.

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.

The capacity, ripening in later life, to benefit others by presence alone, grown from the reverence and prayer a person learned as a child.

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.

Steiner's four-track curriculum for training an educator: anatomy for the physical body, modelling for the etheric, music for the astral, language for the ego.

The inner attitude Steiner asked of teachers of the youngest children: reverence before an individuality descending from pre-earthly life into an inherited body.

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.

Steiner's three golden rules: receive the child in gratitude, educate with love, and release the young person into freedom, none of them optional for a teacher.

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.

A plaything left deliberately incomplete, so that the child must finish it inwardly every time it is picked up, keeping imagination awake.

In Steiner's pedagogy the teacher, the psychologist and the doctor become one office, because everything a child meets in soul settles into the body.

Two verses Rudolf Steiner gave in September 1919 to open the Waldorf school day, one for the four lower classes, one for the upper classes.

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

Steiner's term for the etheric body seen as an organism extended through time, in which every life period keeps working into the ones that follow.

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.