VIII. Waldorf Pedagogy

Education from the change of teeth until puberty should appeal primarily to the artistic aspect in children. An artistic element definitely pervades the Waldorf curriculum from the students’ seventh to fourteenth years. Children are guided pictorially in every respect. Thus, the letters of the alphabet are not taught abstractly. There is no human relationship to the abstract symbols that have become letters in our civilization. Written symbols are abstractions to children. We allow the letters to evolve from pictures. At first, we let our young students paint and draw, and only then do we evolve the forms of the letters from the drawings and paintings that flowed directly from their human nature. Only after the child’s whole organism—body, soul, and spirit—has become fully immersed in writing, through an artistic activity, only then do we go over to another activity, one involving only a part of the human being. Only then do we go to reading, because reading does not involve the complete human being, but only a part, whereas writing is evolved from the entire human organization. If one proceeds this way, one has treated the human individual according to the realities of body, soul, and spirit. If one’s teaching is arranged so that the artistic element can flow through the children, so that in whatever the teachers do they become artists in their work, something rather remarkable can be observed.