Download the article: How to Create, Tell and Recall a Story

Let me give you an example of something which can sink into the child’s soul so that it grows with his growth, something which one can come back to in later years and make use of to arouse certain feelings within him. Nothing is more useful and fruitful in teaching than to give the children something in picture form between the seventh and eighth years, and later, perhaps in the fourteenth and fifteenth years, come back to again in some way or other. Just for this reason we try to let the children in the Waldorf school remain as long as possible with one teacher. When they come to school at seven years of age, the children are given over to a teacher who then takes his class up the school as far as he can, for it is good that things which at one time were given to the child in germ can again and again furnish the content of the methods employed in his education.

Download the article: Education Seen as a Problem Involving the Training of Teachers

From our last lectures you will have seen that the problem of education is the most important of all the questions that now occupy our minds. We have already emphasized that the whole social problem contains as its chief factor the problem of education. A week ago I gave you certain indications for the changes which are needed in the whole system of education so that you will easily understand that the most important sub-question in this problem is that of the training of teachers themselves.
If you study the character of the epoch which began in the middle of the fifteenth century, you will gain the impression that throughout that time a wave of materialistic probations swept through the whole evolution of humanity, and in the present time we must realize that it is necessary to work our way out of this materialistic wave and to find our way back to the spirit. The spiritual path was known to humanity in past epochs of culture, but in those olden times men trod this path more or less instinctively and unconsciously, and they lost it in order that they might re-discover it through their own impulse, out of their own freedom. The path leading to the spirit must now be sought consciously, in full consciousness.

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Download the article: Religious and Moral Education in the Light of Spiritual Science

The following is excerpted from a lecture given by Rudolf Steiner at the Hague on November 4, 1922. It
appears for the first time in English translation as part of a collection entitled Education, Teaching, and the Practical Life (available from AWSNA Publications). This lecture was also published in the Research Bulletin, Vol.13 #1, 2007.

An artistic element, I might call it a mood of piety toward the human essence, belongs in education, in teaching. This is particularly the case if we direct our gaze at the religious and moral education we want to bestow on the child. And here anthroposophical spiritual science shows us that especially when it comes to the religious and moral element, there is something in the human time-body that is of great significance for the life span on earth of the entire human being. If one can recognize the small child’s mood as that of an essentially imitative being imitating the outer world, and if we can put ourselves in this mood, the only way to characterize it is this—the child is completely open to the outer world; the child gets lost in the outer world. Just as the eye loses itself in the outer world of color, the outer world of light, so too the child loses itself in the outer world. The inner world dawns in the child only gradually. Specific mental representations emerge little by little out of dreams, which still completely live and weave in the outer world.

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Download the article: Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the Soul

The following is an excerpt of a chapter entitled “Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the Soul” from Rudolf Steiner’s previously untranslated book, Education, Teaching, and Practical Life, edited by David Mitchell, AWSNA Publications, available in Spring 2007. This lecture was also published in the Research Bulletin, Vol. 12 #2, 2007.

Human beings confront the riddles of existence only once we have developed a certain level of consciousness about life, when we feel the urge to formulate representations, sentiments, and feelings about their relationship with the world. But once we get there, these riddles truly represent what one might call a vital question, for they are not just the expression of theoretical longings, purely external cultural questions. Indeed, they affect our entire stance in the world, the manner in which we find our way in life, the level of inner security and steadiness with which we go through
life. Everything depends on the solution to these riddles.

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