{"corpus":"steiner","locus":"GA 24/l14/p006","lang":"en","edition":"AP1985","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"text":"The primary school is entrusted with the child at a period of its life when the soul is undergoing a very important transformation. From birth to about the sixth or seventh year, the human being naturally gives himself up to everything immediately surrounding him in the human environment, and thus, through the imitative instinct, gives form to his own nascent powers. From this period on, the child's soul becomes open to take in consciously what the educator and teacher gives, which affects the child as a result of the teacher's natural authority. The authority is taken for granted by the child from a dim feeling that in the teacher there is something that should exist in himself, too. One cannot be an educator or teacher unless one adopts *out of full insight* a stance toward the child that takes account in the most comprehensive sense of this metamorphosis of the urge to imitate into an ability to assimilate upon the basis of a natural relationship of authority. The modern world view, based as it is upon natural law, does not approach these fact of human development in full consciousness. To observe them with the necessary attention, one must have a sense of life's subtlest manifestations in the human being. This kind of sense must run through the whole art of education; it must shape the curriculum; it must live in the spirit uniting teacher and pupil. In educating, what the teacher does can depend only slightly on anything he gets from a general, abstract pedagogy: it must rather be newly born every moment from a live understanding of the young human being he or she is teaching. One may, of course, object that this lively kind of education and instruction breaks down in large classes. This objection is no doubt justified in a limited sense. Taken beyond those limits, however, the objection merely shows that the person who makes it proceeds from abstract educational norms, for a really living art of education based on a genuine knowledge of the human being carries with it a power that rouses the interest of every single pupil so that there is no need for direct “individual” work in order to keep his attention on the subject. One can put forth the essence of one's teaching in such a form that each pupil assimilates it in his own individual way. This requires simply that whatever the teacher does should be sufficiently alive. If anyone has a genuine sense for human nature, the developing human being becomes for him such an intense, living riddle that the very attempt to solve it awakens the pupil's living interest empathetically. Such empathy is more valuable than individual work, which may all too easily cripple the child's own initiative. It might indeed be asserted—again, within limitations—that large classes led by teachers who are imbued with the life that comes from genuine knowledge of the human being, will achieve better results than small classes led by teachers who proceed from standard educational theories and have no chance to put this life into their work.","text_trust":"verbatim","quote_safe":true,"title":"14. The Pedagogical Basis of the Waldorf School","site_heading":null,"date":null,"location":null,"word_count":514,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/24/l14/p006","alignment_confidence":"medium","alignment_reason":"off_by_one_paragraph","two_voice_volume":false,"translation_credit":null,"edition_coverage":{"de":["original"],"en":["AP1985","SOL2024"]},"available_versions":[{"lang":"de","edition":"original","edition_basis":null,"is_original":true,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/24/l14/p006"},{"lang":"en","edition":"AP1985","edition_basis":null,"is_original":false,"is_default_edition":true,"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/en/ga/24/l14/p006"}],"paired_german":{"status":"no_paragraph_pairing","note":"No paragraph pairing exists for this paragraph, so no German text is given. The German paragraph of the same number is a different passage or an unestablished one. Read the German unit (german_unit.fetch_unit) and find the place by its content.","german_unit":{"lang":"de","edition":"original","unit_locus":"GA 24/l14","paragraph_count":16,"fetch_unit":{"ga":"24","lecture":"l14","lang":"de","edition":"original"},"url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/de/ga/24/l14","json_url":"https://anthroposophy.ai/v1/steiner/ga/24/l14?lang=de"},"pairing_state":"proposed","verified":false,"nearest_pairs":{"after":{"de":[7],"en":[7]}}},"witness_completeness":{"ratio":1.11,"band":"comparable","note":null,"word_count":3061,"original_word_count":2754,"may_be_abridged":false},"witness_quality":{"translator":{"status":"unknown","warning":"No translator is recorded for this edition. An unattributed translation cannot be weighed as a witness: you cannot tell which hand made the choices in it. Cite the German for anything load-bearing."},"entity_parity":{"status":"not_checkable","note":"No verified paragraph alignment covers this passage, so its names cannot be compared with the German."},"note":"quote_safe certifies the bytes of this text. This block is about the translation as a WITNESS: who made it, and whether it carries the same names as the original. See witness_completeness for how much of the original this witness holds."}}