VI. Teaching Eurythmy, Music, Drawing, and Language

I have had the teachers in the Waldorf School do the following exercises because they should be working entirely out of an artistic perspective. Our teachers may not be satisfied when the children can draw a circle or a square or a triangle. Instead, our children need to learn how to feel a circle, triangle, or square. They need to draw a circle so that they have a feeling of roundness. They should learn to draw a triangle so that they have a feeling for the three corners and that when they have first drawn one corner they should feel that there will be three. In the same way, when they draw a square, they should have a feeling of the right angle, a feeling that is carried throughout the whole drawing process from the very beginning. Our children need to learn what an arc is, what vertical or horizontal is, what a straight line is, not simply in seeing it, but an inner feeling of how the arm or the hand follows it. This is done as a basis for teaching writing. None of our children should learn to write aP without first having the experience of the vertical and an arc, not simply that a child has an abstract understanding of that, of the vertical and the arc, but a feeling for a felt experience of such things.