X. Synthesis and Analysis in Human Nature and Education

Here we can place the teaching of arithmetic in parallel with teaching language, where we begin with the whole and then go on to the individual letters. In our Waldorf School it is very pleasing to see the efforts the children make when they take a complete word and try to find out how it sounds, how we pronounce it, what is in the middle, and so forth, and in that way go on to the individual letters. When we atomize or analyze in this way, children will certainly not have any inclination toward materialism or atomism such as everyone does today, because modern people have been taught only synthetic thinking in school and thus their need to be analytical, their need to separate, can only develop in their worldviews.