Translations of Quotations Taken Out of Context from Rudolf Steiner
(Before we begin, you deserve some attempt to make sense of Steiner’s frequent references to “soul ruining,” some of which are collected below. As a first pass at attempting to say, in part, what Steiner may have meant by “soul ruining,” we may turn to a recent item on NPR’s Planet Money. Job training, it turns out, is more effective for those who have had an early childhood education, controlled for socio-economic variables. Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman found that training relies on what he calls “soft skills,” which “involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated,” things you learn in preschool. Astonishingly, on average, boys who went to preschool, in one study, were found to be 50% less likely to be in jail, and to earn 50% more than their peers. Further, skills not learned early are harder and harder--and ultimately impossible--to learn later. Doesn’t it seem possible—adjusting for translation from an early 20th century German idiom, expressed in lectures transcribed later—that the souls of one group were less “ruined,” in an early 21st century, non-judgmental way, than the souls of the others?)
Conclusions can live and be healthy only in the living human spirit. That is, the conclusion is healthy only when it exists in completely conscious life. That is very important, as we will see later. For that reason, you ruin children’s souls if you have the children memorize finished conclusions.
p. 150
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf
Proceed to reflect with the children, without hesitation, that you are looking beyond their horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the children that they will understand only later. The principle that dictates that you teach the children only what they can understand and form an opinion about has ruined much in our culture.
pp. 48-49
You can present the human intellect, in a makeshift way, with historical or physiological facts before age twelve, but by doing so you ruin human nature; strictly speaking, you make it unsuitable for the whole of life.
p. 110
Do not give children verbal definitions but show them the connections between the concepts and the phenomena related to air and those related to solid bodies. Once we have grasped the concept of solid bodies flowing in the direction in which they tend when not prevented, we can dispense with the concept of air flowing into empty space. Healthier concepts would arise than those that fill the world today—such as Professor Einstein’s complicated theory of relativity. I mention this as a passing comment on the present state of our civilization, for I cannot avoid pointing out how many harmful ideas live in our culture (such as the theory of relativity, especially in its most recent variation). These ideas run a ruinous course if the child becomes a research scientist.
p. 117
By using shorthand, we retain something in our culture that, if left to ourselves with our present natural aptitudes, we would cease to notice and, in fact, forget. We thus keep something artificially awake in our culture that destroys it just as much as all-night studying ruins the health of overzealous students. For this reason, our culture is no longer truly healthy.
p. 132
The children do not as yet have a full understanding for matters of the rights sphere, and if they are confronted with these concepts too early in their development, their soul forces will be ruined for the rest of their lives because such concepts will be so abstract.
p. 151
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf
Thus, because of this method of treatment—giving him wine as a young child—he was completely ruined by the time he was seven years old.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/discussions_with_teachers/discussions_with_teachers.pdf
Experimental psychology can be a valuable basis of psychology but when it sneaks into pedagogy and even into courtrooms, it ruins everything that requires healthy development, that needs fully developed people not separated by a gulf from other fully developed people.
p. 150
We must not understand our task as imagining that what is good for one is good for everyone, since thinking so abstractly would be the ruin of all genuine desire.
p. 162
For the convenience of the faculty, the child has, for instance, mathematics or arithmetic in the first period; then, perhaps Latin, then, maybe a period of religion. After that, there is music or singing, but maybe not even that, and, instead, geography. We cannot more fundamentally ruin human nature than by teaching children in this manner.
p. 168
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/education_as_a_force_for_social_change/education_as_a_force_for_social_change.pdf
The first thing you have to do is to dispense with all the textbooks. For textbooks as they are written at the present time contain nothing about the plant and animal kingdoms that we can use in teaching. They are good for instructing grown-up people about plants and animals, but you will ruin the individuality of the child if you use them at school.
p. 37
The chief point is that thinking must never, never be separated from visual experience, from what the children can see, for otherwise intellectualism and abstractions are brought to the children in early life and thereby ruin their whole being. The children will become dried up and this will affect not only the soul life but the physical body also, causing desiccation and sclerosis.
p. 84
Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child’s feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/kingdom_of_childhood/kingdom_of_childhood.pdf
Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year. I was always glad to hear, therefore (and I don’t mind if you consider this uncivilized), that the children of some anthroposophists had no knowledge of writing and reading, even at the age of eight. Accomplishments that come with forces that are available later on should never be forced into an earlier stage, unless we are prepared to ruin the physical organism.
p. 116
Through ill treatment, a violin may be ruined for ever. But in the case of the living human organism, it is possible to plant principles that are harmful to growth, which increase and develop until they eventually ruin a person’s entire life.
p. 137
We ruin our students’ future worldviews when we introduce them prematurely to subjects such as chemistry, mineralogy, physics, dynamics, and so on.
p. 192
People prefer to fall back on traditional religious creeds, trying to bridge what remains unbridgeable unless they can rise from the sensory world to the spiritual world, as anthroposophy endeavors to do. For adults, such a conflict is indeed tragic. If it arises in childhood before the eleventh year, it brings disturbances in its wake that are serious enough to ruin the soul life of a child. A child should never have to say, “I study zoology and find nothing about God. It’s true that I hear of God when I study religion, but this does not help explain zoology.” To allow children to be caught in such a dilemma would be awful, since this kind of questioning can completely throw them off their proper course in life.
p. 281
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/soul_economy/soul_economy.pdf
At about the age of twelve, while still under the guidance of authority, another important desire, namely, to reason independently, begins to develop. If we use independent reasoning too much before the age of twelve, we will actually ruin the child’s soul and bodily forces. In a certain sense, we deaden human experiencing with reason.
p. 135
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/renewal_of_education/renewal_of_education.pdf
Showing posts with label early childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label early childhood. Show all posts
Friday, August 12, 2011
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Interpreting a Hard World
When I was a child of nine or ten, the world suddenly seemed hard. I mean this literally. Not that life was hard in some metaphorical way, but that everything from the porcelain sky through the shiny leaves and silver bark of maples in summer to the granular asphalt under my feet had an impenetrable quality. I was outside this world, and I found this alarming, discomfiting, depressing. This feeling overwhelmed me at times, especially on bright days when the sun mercilessly picked out the infinite detail of the world.
That the world was this way didn’t seem like my active perception of it so much as an intrusion from “out there,” and I struggled against it, mentally trying to soften things up, to penetrate their surfaces, or, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, to become one with them again.
But there was nothing I could do, there was, then, nothing to do about it. This feeling of otherness, of separation, was simply a fact of my existence, but one that I clearly had not noticed before.
For several years—until I was 15 or 16—I could summon this feeling at will, immerse myself in it, experience it, examine it anew. But this ability faded, and now I have only a memory of it.
I forgot about all of this for decades.
And then, a few weeks ago, something about the brightness of the sunlight (the leaves are off the trees), perhaps, triggered a memory, and it all came flooding back.
As an older person, I can begin to interpret this sense I had then. Small children are connected to the world and their parents, at first literally and then, for years and years, metaphorically and, without effort to reconnect, increasingly tenuously. I believe I experienced something of my separation—from my parents and family, but also from creation at large—something of my growing individuality, in seeing the appearance of the world as so impenetrable.
That the world so all-of-a-sudden took on this hard quality implies that it wasn’t that way before this, when I was one, two, three, or eight. That is, that my perception of it was different, that what I found now, by comparison, must have been different. I can only say that the metaphorical inside of the world was still united with its outside. (For Barfield, consciousness is “the inside of the whole world.”) And then these split.
That the world was this way didn’t seem like my active perception of it so much as an intrusion from “out there,” and I struggled against it, mentally trying to soften things up, to penetrate their surfaces, or, although I wasn’t aware of this at the time, to become one with them again.
But there was nothing I could do, there was, then, nothing to do about it. This feeling of otherness, of separation, was simply a fact of my existence, but one that I clearly had not noticed before.
For several years—until I was 15 or 16—I could summon this feeling at will, immerse myself in it, experience it, examine it anew. But this ability faded, and now I have only a memory of it.
I forgot about all of this for decades.
And then, a few weeks ago, something about the brightness of the sunlight (the leaves are off the trees), perhaps, triggered a memory, and it all came flooding back.
As an older person, I can begin to interpret this sense I had then. Small children are connected to the world and their parents, at first literally and then, for years and years, metaphorically and, without effort to reconnect, increasingly tenuously. I believe I experienced something of my separation—from my parents and family, but also from creation at large—something of my growing individuality, in seeing the appearance of the world as so impenetrable.
That the world so all-of-a-sudden took on this hard quality implies that it wasn’t that way before this, when I was one, two, three, or eight. That is, that my perception of it was different, that what I found now, by comparison, must have been different. I can only say that the metaphorical inside of the world was still united with its outside. (For Barfield, consciousness is “the inside of the whole world.”) And then these split.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Synesthesia, Eye, and Mind
Rudolf Steiner describes beautifully the way a child who wants a sweet wants it with her whole being; that it, we see her desire in her expression, her body, her fingers, her bouncy toes. (We reserved adults have learned to be more circumspect; only our salivary glands might give us away.) It is as if she can already taste the sweet, and, not only that, she experiences this sweetness not just on her tongue or palate, but throughout her being. Her senses are unified in anticipation of sweetness.
Doesn't this remind us of synesthesia, the condition in which a sensory perception produces an automatic, involuntarily perception via another (or more than one other) sense? Those with synesthesia may see colors when they listen to music. They aren't just imagining them, as I might; the colors are diachronically consistent; that is, if you ask the synesthetic person to describe them, record this impression, and return months later, the reaction to and description of the colors for the same piece of music will be virtually unchanged.
This is similar, in fact, to a common test for synesthesia: If you suspect you're synesthetic (many creative persons--Duke Ellington, Wasily Kandinsky, Richard Feynman--have been), write down the digits 0 through 9. For each, record the color impression that each creates in your mind when you look at it. (If this baffles you, you're not synesthetic; stop here.) Put it away for a few weeks or more. Seal it in an envelope, say. Before you open the envelope, write down the same digits in a different order. Record again the colors you associate with each. If you're synesthetic, you should be able to open the envelope and discover a remarkable consistency between your previous perceptions and your current ones.
Even those of us who are not synesthetic have experiences that are similar to this. Most of us experience colors as "warm" (orange, for example), or "cool" (blue, for example). If asked to name an abstract spiky shape, we might choose a name like "Kiki," that has a "spiky" sound; for a rounded blob, perhaps "Bouba." (This is the so-called "Bouba/Kiki effect," and it's been researched.) Even the words "spiky" and "blob," even the letters "B" and "K" record our associations of sound and shape--and these are robust across languages.
Regardless, relating experiences of synesthesia--possibly the most remarkable case is that described by Luria in his famous The Mind of a Mnemonist, about an anonymous, illiterate Russian synesthete with a prodigious memory--common metaphorical experience, and observations of children, isn't it reasonable to say that all of us come into the world synesthetic, our senses undifferentiated? It's only over time, perhaps, the first months or years of life, that our senses differentiate and compartmentalize themselves. We grow into our perceptions and our very way of looking at--and therefore thinking about (remember Merleau-Ponty's The Primacy of Perception) the world. If we speak a different language, use our senses differently, have different adults to emulate and imitate, we'll grow not only to think differently and speak differently, but, literally, to perceive differently.
To think that our senses are "objective" apparatuses like cameras or tape recorders is to make a category mistake. Our eye isn't "like" a camera; a camera is like highly sophisticated, mechanically complex aspects of our eye. Our actual living eyes perceive not because they are cameras, but because, as research increasingly demonstrates, of the mind behind them.
(Much more to say; to be continued...)
Doesn't this remind us of synesthesia, the condition in which a sensory perception produces an automatic, involuntarily perception via another (or more than one other) sense? Those with synesthesia may see colors when they listen to music. They aren't just imagining them, as I might; the colors are diachronically consistent; that is, if you ask the synesthetic person to describe them, record this impression, and return months later, the reaction to and description of the colors for the same piece of music will be virtually unchanged.
This is similar, in fact, to a common test for synesthesia: If you suspect you're synesthetic (many creative persons--Duke Ellington, Wasily Kandinsky, Richard Feynman--have been), write down the digits 0 through 9. For each, record the color impression that each creates in your mind when you look at it. (If this baffles you, you're not synesthetic; stop here.) Put it away for a few weeks or more. Seal it in an envelope, say. Before you open the envelope, write down the same digits in a different order. Record again the colors you associate with each. If you're synesthetic, you should be able to open the envelope and discover a remarkable consistency between your previous perceptions and your current ones.
Even those of us who are not synesthetic have experiences that are similar to this. Most of us experience colors as "warm" (orange, for example), or "cool" (blue, for example). If asked to name an abstract spiky shape, we might choose a name like "Kiki," that has a "spiky" sound; for a rounded blob, perhaps "Bouba." (This is the so-called "Bouba/Kiki effect," and it's been researched.) Even the words "spiky" and "blob," even the letters "B" and "K" record our associations of sound and shape--and these are robust across languages.
Regardless, relating experiences of synesthesia--possibly the most remarkable case is that described by Luria in his famous The Mind of a Mnemonist, about an anonymous, illiterate Russian synesthete with a prodigious memory--common metaphorical experience, and observations of children, isn't it reasonable to say that all of us come into the world synesthetic, our senses undifferentiated? It's only over time, perhaps, the first months or years of life, that our senses differentiate and compartmentalize themselves. We grow into our perceptions and our very way of looking at--and therefore thinking about (remember Merleau-Ponty's The Primacy of Perception) the world. If we speak a different language, use our senses differently, have different adults to emulate and imitate, we'll grow not only to think differently and speak differently, but, literally, to perceive differently.
To think that our senses are "objective" apparatuses like cameras or tape recorders is to make a category mistake. Our eye isn't "like" a camera; a camera is like highly sophisticated, mechanically complex aspects of our eye. Our actual living eyes perceive not because they are cameras, but because, as research increasingly demonstrates, of the mind behind them.
(Much more to say; to be continued...)
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Beware "First Grade Readiness"
This post may strike some readers as a minor, picayune point, but to others it may go to the core of their trouble with Waldorf school ideologues.
Many Waldorf schools leave it to kindergarten teachers to determine which children are "ready" for first grade. Parents are told, following assessment, whether or not, in the eyes of these teachers, their child is ready for first grade.
Often, assessments don't take place until late spring, leaving parents anxious and wondering--if my child isn't "ready," will I still have time to get him into another local private school's first grade? Parents may use this waffling to look around. And get excited--or see their children get excited--about the green grass on the other side of the fence.
You see, for parents, the issue is often NOT whether or not the child is "first-grade ready," but whether or not the Waldorf school will promote him. A child judged not to be first-grade ready, in my experience, is more likely to leave the school for first grade somewhere else--another Waldorf school, the local public school. It's relatively rare that parents are so committed to the school or to Waldorf education at all costs that they'll bow to the teachers' judgment in this case.
I'm not saying the teachers are wrong, I'm just saying that the language and process they use can unnecessarily alienate parents. A goal for a school could be to have any family that leaves--after being denied admission or after being counselled out for any reason--to wish fervently that they could have obtained the pearl they sought. Somehow, Harvard manages to do this and Waldorf schools don't.
And isn't such a process like leaving high school admissions to the 8th grade teacher? Or college admissions to high school teachers? Yes, teachers should take into account the recommendations of previous teachers--8th grade, kindergarten--but determination should rest with the school or class or grade the child is entering, in almost every case. "First-grade readiness" should more accurately, less politically, less ideologically, more politely, be called "elementary school admissions."
Most children are simply ready for first grade, anyway, based on "normal" development and birthday. Yet, often, a whole class of parents is held hostage to assessments made late in the kindergarten year. Wouldn't it make more sense to alert the few parents of children for whom there's an issue--a true developmental delay, a real concern over birthdate--and let the others breathe easy? Shouldn't these parents know long before the spring of kindergarten rolls around that there may be some developmental or educational issue that they and their teachers may wish to address?
When children are assessed in the spring of their kindergarten year for admission to elementary school the following fall--half a year away--they still have almost ten per cent of a life to lead! Lots can change...
Another point: Often, children apply directly to first grade, having attended another (non-Waldorf) early childhood program. Are these children shipped to the kindergarten to be assessed? No! They're interviewed by the first grade teacher or her proxy! Why the special treatment? (Really, why the normal treatment?)
I understand that I'm writing about unusual circumstances. But, as a former school administrator, I know that it only takes one angry parent every other year or so to make a school's life really difficult. And don't forget that the early childhood program is the base on which the whole school is built. Small kindergarten? Don't expect a large first grade. Shrinking kindergarten? Your operating budget for the foreseeable future is in jeopardy.
Also, the solution--changing the way we talk about things and not using the phrase "first-grade ready;" talking directly to parents as partners in education; and acknowledging that, after all advice and recommendations, it's up to the elementary school to select the students it can teach--is so easy.
Many Waldorf schools leave it to kindergarten teachers to determine which children are "ready" for first grade. Parents are told, following assessment, whether or not, in the eyes of these teachers, their child is ready for first grade.
Often, assessments don't take place until late spring, leaving parents anxious and wondering--if my child isn't "ready," will I still have time to get him into another local private school's first grade? Parents may use this waffling to look around. And get excited--or see their children get excited--about the green grass on the other side of the fence.
You see, for parents, the issue is often NOT whether or not the child is "first-grade ready," but whether or not the Waldorf school will promote him. A child judged not to be first-grade ready, in my experience, is more likely to leave the school for first grade somewhere else--another Waldorf school, the local public school. It's relatively rare that parents are so committed to the school or to Waldorf education at all costs that they'll bow to the teachers' judgment in this case.
I'm not saying the teachers are wrong, I'm just saying that the language and process they use can unnecessarily alienate parents. A goal for a school could be to have any family that leaves--after being denied admission or after being counselled out for any reason--to wish fervently that they could have obtained the pearl they sought. Somehow, Harvard manages to do this and Waldorf schools don't.
And isn't such a process like leaving high school admissions to the 8th grade teacher? Or college admissions to high school teachers? Yes, teachers should take into account the recommendations of previous teachers--8th grade, kindergarten--but determination should rest with the school or class or grade the child is entering, in almost every case. "First-grade readiness" should more accurately, less politically, less ideologically, more politely, be called "elementary school admissions."
Most children are simply ready for first grade, anyway, based on "normal" development and birthday. Yet, often, a whole class of parents is held hostage to assessments made late in the kindergarten year. Wouldn't it make more sense to alert the few parents of children for whom there's an issue--a true developmental delay, a real concern over birthdate--and let the others breathe easy? Shouldn't these parents know long before the spring of kindergarten rolls around that there may be some developmental or educational issue that they and their teachers may wish to address?
When children are assessed in the spring of their kindergarten year for admission to elementary school the following fall--half a year away--they still have almost ten per cent of a life to lead! Lots can change...
Another point: Often, children apply directly to first grade, having attended another (non-Waldorf) early childhood program. Are these children shipped to the kindergarten to be assessed? No! They're interviewed by the first grade teacher or her proxy! Why the special treatment? (Really, why the normal treatment?)
I understand that I'm writing about unusual circumstances. But, as a former school administrator, I know that it only takes one angry parent every other year or so to make a school's life really difficult. And don't forget that the early childhood program is the base on which the whole school is built. Small kindergarten? Don't expect a large first grade. Shrinking kindergarten? Your operating budget for the foreseeable future is in jeopardy.
Also, the solution--changing the way we talk about things and not using the phrase "first-grade ready;" talking directly to parents as partners in education; and acknowledging that, after all advice and recommendations, it's up to the elementary school to select the students it can teach--is so easy.
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