(My friend Winslow Eliot, a former Waldorf student and administrator and current part-time Waldorf high school English teacher, sent me her version of an elevator speech. I've decided to post it here rather than in comments on the old post in an attempt to re-spark the discussion. What do you think? What would you say?)
Person in Elevator: “What’s Waldorf Education?”
Me: “Waldorf Education, based on Rudolf Steiner’s insights into human beings, integrates three essential components:
1. It’s holistic. Education is not just about learning facts and figures; it’s about exposing students to emotional and character building skills and physical, active development. This means showing them how to accomplish and finish projects so they know they can DO things as well as think and feel them.
2. It’s developmental: A seven-year-old doesn’t learn the same way a seventeen-year-old does. We teach kinesthetically and experientially in the lower grades. We try to inspire more interest and engagement in the middle years – teaching history through the telling of biographies, for example, instead of asking students to memorize historical facts. In high school, their intellectual lives are ripe for analysis, knowledge, and weighing what matters and what students themselves can do to impact the world for the better.
3. It’s phenomenological. It’s developed and presented by teachers’ own experience and observations of children and of the subject matter.”
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Who is becoming a Waldorf teacher?
I’m just wrapping up a week of teacher education (the program meets for 13 weeks over the course of a bit more than two years), and I took some notes on the backgrounds of these adult students who plan to become Waldorf school teachers:
Public school principal
Public school assistant principal
Pediatrician
Social worker
Speech therapist
Pharmaceutical sales rep
Lawyer
CFO of a small business
Business manager
College registrar
Artist
Actress
Chef
3 public school teachers
4 mothers
5 students moving from BA or MA programs to teacher education
Of these, two have some background in Waldorf education, having attended Waldorf schools for part or all of their elementary school education.
Approximately one-third first learned of Waldorf education in finding schools for their own children.
Approximately one-third are choosing a mid-career change that will almost certainly earn less money and fewer benefits but, they hope and believe, bring greater intrinsic rewards.
Approximately one-third already have advanced degrees.
Two are men; the rest are women.
Their ages range from twenty-two to fifty-five or so.
Public school principal
Public school assistant principal
Pediatrician
Social worker
Speech therapist
Pharmaceutical sales rep
Lawyer
CFO of a small business
Business manager
College registrar
Artist
Actress
Chef
3 public school teachers
4 mothers
5 students moving from BA or MA programs to teacher education
Of these, two have some background in Waldorf education, having attended Waldorf schools for part or all of their elementary school education.
Approximately one-third first learned of Waldorf education in finding schools for their own children.
Approximately one-third are choosing a mid-career change that will almost certainly earn less money and fewer benefits but, they hope and believe, bring greater intrinsic rewards.
Approximately one-third already have advanced degrees.
Two are men; the rest are women.
Their ages range from twenty-two to fifty-five or so.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Is Waldorf Education a Religion? Is it Religious? Is it Based on a Religion Called Anthroposophy?
The issue of religion and Waldorf education is not a simple one. The field extends, minimally, over three points of view. The first might be that all education, all meaningful human endeavor, has, in the broadest sense, a religious component. As A.N. Whitehead (1929/1967) said, “The essence of education is that it be religious.” (14) To speak of value, explicitly or implicitly, is to give evidence of a religious engagement with the world. This view is too broad to consider here, however, and does not necessarily distinguish Waldorf education from other methods.
The second point of view, probably the source of Waldorf critics’ frustration with aspects of Waldorf education as manifested by certain teachers or, potentially, by certain schools, is that Waldorf education is religious in a more conventional sense because some ideologues, through misunderstanding and misapplication of Steiner’s work, make it so. As Dorothy St. Charles, former principal of the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School said in a radio interview, Waldorf education is not a religion, “but some people make it one.”
The third point of view, and the more carefully considered, is that Waldorf education and anthroposophy, the method that underlies it, are not religions at all. Douglas Sloan, former coordinator of the joint program in Religion and Education between Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, made this point eloquently as an expert witness in a lawsuit arguing that charter Waldorf schools, as religious schools, violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sloan (2004) argued against this view:
St. Charles, D. (1994) Interview by Alan Chartock on WAMC, 90.3 FM, Northeast Public Radio, Albany, NY. April; exact date unavailable. Reference obtained from undated cassette tape recording.
Sloan, D. (2004) “Declaration of Douglas Sloan in Support of Defendants’ Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment…” Case No. CIV. S-98-0266 FCD PAN. PLANS, Inc. v. Sacramento City Unified School District, Twin Ridges Elementary School District, DOES 1-100. United States District Court, Eastern District of California. July 30, 2004.
Whitehead, A. (1929/1967) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.
The second point of view, probably the source of Waldorf critics’ frustration with aspects of Waldorf education as manifested by certain teachers or, potentially, by certain schools, is that Waldorf education is religious in a more conventional sense because some ideologues, through misunderstanding and misapplication of Steiner’s work, make it so. As Dorothy St. Charles, former principal of the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School said in a radio interview, Waldorf education is not a religion, “but some people make it one.”
The third point of view, and the more carefully considered, is that Waldorf education and anthroposophy, the method that underlies it, are not religions at all. Douglas Sloan, former coordinator of the joint program in Religion and Education between Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, made this point eloquently as an expert witness in a lawsuit arguing that charter Waldorf schools, as religious schools, violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sloan (2004) argued against this view:
By all scholarly criteria of what constitutes religion, anthroposophy is not a religion. ...
The attempt to define religion has been notoriously difficult, and the approaches to doing so are many. In general there have been three main approaches.
The first can perhaps be called the essentialist approach. Essentialist definitions tend to focus on the inner essence or substance, the metaphysical reality claims, of religions, and the relationships to these demanded of human beings by the claimed realities. One of the conceptual difficulties with this focus is that philosophers and others can make metaphysical and ethical arguments about the nature of reality without advancing these as themselves constituting a religion, although they may well have implications for religion.
The second main approach to the study and definition of religion can be called the functional approach, and is probably the theoretical approach most favored by social scientists, although as I shall point out, some theologians also favor it. Functional definitions of religion stress the effects, the functions of religion, in actual life—the ways in which religion functions to fulfill basic human needs, both individually and communally. Different scholars stress different functions as the defining characteristic of religion. Among these various functional definitions are, for examples: the cognitive—religion provides meaning systems for understanding and coping with life; the psychological—religion functions to meet psychological needs, such as, a sense of security in the face of life’s uncertainties, a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and so forth; the social—religion serves primarily to provide values for social cohesion and the preservation of the social group; and the ideological (Marxist definitions of religion are a good example)—religion serves the power interests of governing elites by deluding the masses. Each of these taken by itself is decidedly reductionist, and, in order to avoid inordinate reductionism, most scholars attempt to fashion combinations of various functional approaches.
One form of functionalism, often utilized by students of religion, is that of the twentieth-century American theologian, Paul Tillich. Religion Tillich defined as expressing “the ultimate concern” of an individual or of an entire culture. Every person and every society, he argued, has its “ultimate concern” (often, to be sure, directed toward less than ultimate objective realities).
In fact, for Tillich, every culture is grounded in its own ultimate concern, to which it gives concrete expression. Culture itself as a whole is, therefore, the religious expression and activity par excellence.
“Religion,” Tillich famously wrote, “is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion.” Tillich’s position can be a good illustration of how the strength of the functionalist can also be its main weakness. The strength is that it enables one to see the religious functions, as noted above, of many human activities not usually recognized as religious: the state, the university, science, technology, the stock exchange, Sunday afternoon football, and so on. Each has its ultimate concern, and often its own “priesthood,” paths of initiation, dogmas, sacred texts, and other marks of religion.
The weakness is that a definition which begins to apply to everything often ends up telling us little about anything.
In view of these various approaches, it is not surprising that one leading historian of American religion (Catherine Albanese of UC Santa Barbara), whose works I reviewed in forming my opinion, has observed that scholars have become increasingly less certain about what should be counted as religion as a general phenomenon. “In the end,” she writes, “religion is a feature that encompasses all of human life, and therefore it is difficult if not impossible to define it.”
In this light it is probably also not surprising that historians of religion turn mainly to the third approach to the definition of religion, namely, the formal. Scholars in the history of religion and comparative religion deal primarily with the actual religious forms manifested by concrete religious groups and movements. These religious forms include such things as beliefs and doctrines (creeds), ritual activities, forms of worship, sacred texts, and recognized sources of authority. The advantage and strength of this approach is that it is concrete and makes it possible to determine whether a group actually functions, not just religiously in general, a la Paul Tillich, for instance, but as a formal, identifiable religion as such. It also is possible then to distinguish it in detail from other religions and their forms, and to trace the actual development of a specific religion over time. In this perspective, a religious group is one that manifests and is organized around these common religious forms, albeit with its own distinct versions of them. This approach can also incorporate aspects of the first two approaches.
It is especially from the perspective of this third approach to the definition of religion, the formal, that I can meaningfully and concretely testify that anthroposophy is not a religion. …
Anthroposophy is the name given by Rudolf Steiner to designate the way of knowing, the method of inquiry, that he established. …
It is a wholly personal choice not only whether one follows Steiner’s method of knowing and tries to develop it, but also whether, out of conviction, one accepts–or does not–Steiner’s own results and content flowing from that method as he practiced it. If the principle of individual freedom based on knowledge is violated in following Steiner’s indications, then the entire method is vitiated.It is worth noting that the case was dismissed and dismissed again upon appeal. I believe PLANS plans another appeal. Stay tuned.
St. Charles, D. (1994) Interview by Alan Chartock on WAMC, 90.3 FM, Northeast Public Radio, Albany, NY. April; exact date unavailable. Reference obtained from undated cassette tape recording.
Sloan, D. (2004) “Declaration of Douglas Sloan in Support of Defendants’ Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment…” Case No. CIV. S-98-0266 FCD PAN. PLANS, Inc. v. Sacramento City Unified School District, Twin Ridges Elementary School District, DOES 1-100. United States District Court, Eastern District of California. July 30, 2004.
Whitehead, A. (1929/1967) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
The Elevator Speech: What is Waldorf Education?
What do you say? I mean it, what do you say? Comment below!
It happened again. A dinner with strangers, four couples at a round table in a big room. –And what do you do? –I’m co-founder, Faculty Chair, and a teacher at the Great Barrington Waldorf High School. –Oh. Great. Waldorf? What’s that?
And, as usual, I’m at a bit of a loss. I just don’t have an elevator speech. Depending on the noise level of the room and my assessment of the question, I say something about balancing academics, arts, physical activity, and social health. Or I say something about a non-denominational, non-sectarian approach to spiritual questions.
Sometimes I find myself in a meaty, fruitful conversation. Sometimes people’s eyes glaze over and I turn the conversation to another topic as soon as possible.
When I started looking into definitions and descriptions of Waldorf education, more than fifteen years ago, I believed it would be easy to find, say, a pithy paragraph in Rudolf Steiner’s work that would begin, “Waldorf education is…” But such a paragraph doesn’t exist. So I looked at the work of Henry Barnes, Jeffrey Kane, Eugene Schwartz, Steve Talbott, Douglas Sloan, and other very smart writers and thinkers about Waldorf education. All of them had lots of good things to say, but none had a synopsis that could fuel the elevator speech or the dinner table introduction.
So I’m putting it to those who read this blog: What do you say?
It happened again. A dinner with strangers, four couples at a round table in a big room. –And what do you do? –I’m co-founder, Faculty Chair, and a teacher at the Great Barrington Waldorf High School. –Oh. Great. Waldorf? What’s that?
And, as usual, I’m at a bit of a loss. I just don’t have an elevator speech. Depending on the noise level of the room and my assessment of the question, I say something about balancing academics, arts, physical activity, and social health. Or I say something about a non-denominational, non-sectarian approach to spiritual questions.
Sometimes I find myself in a meaty, fruitful conversation. Sometimes people’s eyes glaze over and I turn the conversation to another topic as soon as possible.
When I started looking into definitions and descriptions of Waldorf education, more than fifteen years ago, I believed it would be easy to find, say, a pithy paragraph in Rudolf Steiner’s work that would begin, “Waldorf education is…” But such a paragraph doesn’t exist. So I looked at the work of Henry Barnes, Jeffrey Kane, Eugene Schwartz, Steve Talbott, Douglas Sloan, and other very smart writers and thinkers about Waldorf education. All of them had lots of good things to say, but none had a synopsis that could fuel the elevator speech or the dinner table introduction.
So I’m putting it to those who read this blog: What do you say?
Monday, September 12, 2011
Waldorf Schools: Where are the Boys?
Several years ago, one of my master’s degree students wrote a study (unpublished) based on a sample of 4000 U.S. Waldorf school students in grades 1 through 8 and found that there were 8% fewer boys than girls in Waldorf schools. These results are independent of the gender of the teacher (we had theorized that male teachers might attract or retain more male students) and independent of the grade. That is, first grades are “missing” boys just as often as the higher grades. (We had theorized that boys and girls might enter in equal numbers, but that boys would leave over the years for one reason or another.)
Following this work, another student (also unpublished) surveyed Waldorf school parents. Parent attitudes largely determine school choice, and, perhaps, mothers choose Waldorf schools for their children. Fathers are then more likely to intercede and insist that their sons attend another school, one with a more competitive sports program or an apparently beefier math and science program. The study, not conclusive, suggested that this was the case. Anecdotally, that has been true of several families at the school in which I teach.
A further study might investigate what aspects of Waldorf education are perceived as more appropriate for girls than for boys.
Regardless, Waldorf schools—individually and jointly in teachers’ conferences—would do well to keep an eye on the breakdown of their enrollments between boys and girls, and attempt to address imbalances through study, research, experimentation, and hard work. Eight per cent is two students in a class of 25; what school can afford to overlook such an enrollment boost?
(My own small Waldorf high school currently enrolls 16 boys and 15 girls, but we continue actively to address the questions I raise above.)
Following this work, another student (also unpublished) surveyed Waldorf school parents. Parent attitudes largely determine school choice, and, perhaps, mothers choose Waldorf schools for their children. Fathers are then more likely to intercede and insist that their sons attend another school, one with a more competitive sports program or an apparently beefier math and science program. The study, not conclusive, suggested that this was the case. Anecdotally, that has been true of several families at the school in which I teach.
A further study might investigate what aspects of Waldorf education are perceived as more appropriate for girls than for boys.
Regardless, Waldorf schools—individually and jointly in teachers’ conferences—would do well to keep an eye on the breakdown of their enrollments between boys and girls, and attempt to address imbalances through study, research, experimentation, and hard work. Eight per cent is two students in a class of 25; what school can afford to overlook such an enrollment boost?
(My own small Waldorf high school currently enrolls 16 boys and 15 girls, but we continue actively to address the questions I raise above.)
Monday, August 29, 2011
Did Dwight Shrute go to a Waldorf School?--New Addition
New information has come to light that warrants re-posting this:
Is there other evidence that Dwight Schrute did?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Comments, please!
- He wears Birkenstocks with socks AND carries a spare pair in his car.
- He speaks German and apparently knows about that awful German children’s book, Struwwelpeter.
- He plays the (fluorescent plastic) recorder.
- He believes exposure to germs strengthens your immune system.
- He wanted to teach children to make cornhusk dolls...
Is there other evidence that Dwight Schrute did?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Comments, please!
Friday, August 12, 2011
How to Ruin the Soul of the Child
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
(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
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