Accumulating knowledge is like building a collection, right? Each piece in the collection is much like any other. A fact about astronomy is much like a fact about history or writing technique or piano playing or wine tasting or empathetic listening. A degree of certainty or truth adheres to it or is apparent in it, and we accept it for our—growing, we hope—stockpile of things that we know. It can be digitized and stored in a computer and shared online.
Well, no. Knowledge is not singular. Knowing the names of stars is not like knowing how to play the piano or like knowing how to offer solace to someone in pain. Like intelligence, which we used to believe was one thing—measured on an IQ test, for example, but now seen as, at least, a multi-faceted collection of human faculties—knowledge comes in different forms. We can know in different ways. Waldorf and Steiner schools emphasize in particular three ways of knowing, the conscious development of each corresponding roughly with preschool, elementary school and high school.
Michael Polanyi called a first kind of knowing “tacit knowing”, knowing “more than we can say.” Clearly, infants—those without voices—know more than they can say. We can know how to cut a carrot, or the taste of the soup it makes, or how to play the viola, or how to solve a problem in geometry. We can describe these things in language, but the value, meaning, and even the truth of these activities—cutting, tasting, playing, solving—does not translate into language. These become apparent only when we learn to do these things ourselves. Without the experience of doing, often, knowing has little meaning.
You could write a manual describing what you do—nurse, stockbroker, artist—but, if you had to train someone to replace you, would you rather hand off instructions or offer an apprenticeship, some doing? Read a book on building a stone wall, and then claim that you know how to build one. Your aches and calluses will tell you another story. We learn much and know much through doing, and, often, doing precedes and informs our knowing. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance of “doing” in preschool, before we emphasize other forms of knowing.
A second kind of knowing is aesthetic knowing. Its value is apparent in contrast to our concept of something that is anaesthetic, or numbing. Aesthetic knowing is alive, awake, and sensitive. It is knowing in heart and gut (yes, the brain plays its role, but we experience our feelings in our hearts and lungs and guts). It is intuitive (“taught from within”). It is a form of knowing especially valuable for artists, musicians, clinical psychologists, theoretical physicists, and even advertising copywriters. It is a form of knowing that connects us powerfully to the world. And it develops in children most readily when they have separated from their parents and begun to comprehend the world around them for themselves. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance of beauty and feeling in the elementary school.
A third kind of knowing is knowing through thinking. By thinking, however, I mean a particular kind of thinking that attempts in Henri Bortoft’s phrase to “swim upstream”, reversing fragmentation, categorization, and specialization in order to recover wholeness. Thinking logically with given postulates, thinking algorithmically, is “downstream” thinking, the outcome determined by the input. It is powerful but dead, inherited from the creative insight of others. Recognizing the validity of postulates different from convention, however, involves insight of our own. This synthetic, living thinking can encompass or embrace analysis, logic, and critical thinking. But it seeks to go beyond them to recover or reach the origin of creative thought and imagination. And it develops in students who are wrestling not so much with the world around them as with their own identities in that world. Hence, in Waldorf schools, the importance in high school of the development of thinking.
These three ways of knowing are cumulative and integrative. We do not leave one for the next, but build on what comes before. As adults, our thinking is enriched if we also know how to do and to feel. All three forms of knowing are present earlier, too—small children learning to walk and talk (two of the most important forms of doing) can also feel and think. But by emphasizing one way of knowing at the appropriate time, allowing other ways to develop simultaneously but sleepily, we work in accordance with children’s growth away from their parents and into the world and themselves. We know in our hands, in our hearts, and in our heads. We know goodness, beauty, and truth. The more ways we know, the more value we find in life, and the more value we bring to those around us and to whatever we are called to do.
(I wrote this before hearing on NPR recently about memory studies that divide memory into “declarative” memory—clearly cognitive—and “non-declarative” memory, which sounds just like the memory associated with tacit knowing above. Two points about this: First, interesting that cognitive memory is given pride of place; that is, non-cognitive memory is not given its own name, but is simply called “non-declarative.” Second, interesting that memory associated with the heart isn’t even considered…)
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