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A Study of the Element"Water" by Christian Smit
Water as the Medium for Life by Jorgen Smit
Goethe's Theory of Color by Torger Holtsmark
Zoology and Mythology by Jens Bjorneboe
Chemistry in Grades Seven to Nine by Jan Haakonson
Astronomy: The Oft Forgotten School Subject by Sven Bohn
The Starry Heavens and Our Self by Jorgen Smit
Teaching Biology in a Human Context by Graham Kennish
Aesthetic Knowledge as a Source for the Main Lesson by Peter Guttenhofer
Adolescents - Their Relationship to the Night and the Senses in Connection With Their own Development by Peter Glasby
Thoughts on Information and Communication Technology by Florian Oswald

Download the article: A Study of the Element "Water"

Translated by Ted Warren

In middle school physics, it is fruitful to bring well-known phenomena into more clear and conscious light. Such an everyday topic is water. Because we take water for granted and we assume we know so much about it, we rarely reflect upon the element’s being and meaning. Every child enjoys splashing in it. No one outgrows the fun of water. But they may be surprised to discover the nature of this element.

We studied water in a three-week block, using our imagination, curiosity and flexible thinking. We practiced sculpting thoughts and concepts in order to follow the winding stream on which water led us.

The water cycle as the basis for life
This theme was taught in the fifth grade biology lessons, so we began our study with review: The warmth of sunlight draws water from the seas, oceans, moist earth and vegetation up to the atmosphere. There the water forms a layer of wet air around the earth, which condenses into rain, snow and hail that wander back to the earth, seas and oceans. We recalled that water movements in fresh water begin in the different levels in rivers, waterfalls and rapids, while movements in salt water begin with temperature differences, wind pressure, the rotation of the earth and tides.

We admired the miraculous balance between evaporation and the discharge of rivers into the oceans during this pulsating cycle. We looked for other ways in which water or any fluid moves through a cycle. Our attention fell upon the great ocean currents, and we made drawings of the Gulf Stream before focusing on the circulation of blood in our bodies. We agreed that the movement of fluids provides
a unique foundation for life.

Download the article: Water as the Medium for Life

Translated by Ted Warren

If we observe a tree trunk, for example an old, rugged oak trunk, we observe something that was once alive. Through the tree trunk, life still streams. But in the coagulated form before us, life has almost completely disappeared. As soon as the living parts of the plant become hard and stiff, the plant is removed from the living stream. In the forms created by the dying substance, we observe a life-stream in a coagulated condition. The dead or partially dead plant materials still serve life as a supportive base, and are thereby part of the totality of the living organism. New life can grow forth on the old, half-dead trunk’s coagulated formations. But where does it grow forth? Only there where something is still soft enough that there is a possibility for a streaming, rhythmical movement. It needs no more than a weak indication of such streams, but the possibility must be there.

The prerequisite for such a streaming movement to appear is liquid. The streaming, moving can also be air, for example in our lungs, but for the most part flowing liquids are the element of life. Solids are either a supportive base for the streaming, moving liquids or they are actually in a dissolved condition when taken into the moving life-stream. Of all of the liquids, water has a unique ability to enable life to unfold.

Download the article: Goethe's Theory of Color

Translated by Ted Warren

Goethe’s Theory of Color is one of the least accessible documents in the history of modern interpretations of nature. The writer considered it his main piece of work and his testament. At the same time he compared himself to a chess player who had merely made his introductory moves. He knew many years would pass before the general public would understand his distant goal. With bitter irony he stated that his theory would rest in a dormant state until the year 2000. What is the position it now holds in 2007? A renaissance for Goethe’s Theory of Color has not taken place but many outstanding scientists have considered it necessary to take a position to it. From the highest, most responsible academic quarters it has been stated that Goethe’s method holds the seed to a new approach to nature and that this approach is more encompassing than the natural scientific approach we have today. They add that Goethe’s science is yet a distant, future possibility and that mankind must first follow its present course to the end.

One thing is certain: from an educational perspective Goethe’s Theory of Color is an important and highly relevant document. Obviously one can never teach it as it is. That would be a misunderstanding, one reason being that his actual presentation was limited by knowledge available at the time and his conflict with Newton that was merely of local, historical interest. One aspect of the theory that we can learn a great deal from is that colors are treated as objective realities in nature. Nor is the traditional border drawn between so-called subjective and objective sensory qualities.

Download the article: Zoology and Mythology

Translated by Ted Warren

Zoology is actually an aspect of mythology. Many of the most well known animal species appeal to such powerful feelings that they provoke the same, deep layer of our unconsciousness that can only be touched with the most simple and true myths. The word tiger contains just as mystical and secret a sound as the word Cain. Eagle, lamb, lion and hare are all words that can penetrate right through us, and sink into deep layers of our soul, like a stone that falls far into the earth through a deep mineshaft.

Elephant—what an endless, soul-like firmness lies in that word! And what a remarkable group of sounds, vowels and consonants meet each other here! Nightingale, swan, and shark! Butterfly and rhinoceros! Yes, there may be no doubt that we belong to their family, together with lonesome wolves, mother hens and rooster chicks. We are created in their picture also. In our distant past we must have had a lot in common.

The great English mystic and author William Blake wrote the beautiful poem on the tiger and it begins with two lines that are already powerful:

Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forest of the night......

He describes the tiger as a mystical, supernatural being, the true tiger of fairy tale-like dimensions, liberated from nature’s most awesome secrets.

Lessons in zoology can build upon the dream-like dimensions of the animal, on the soul of the animal and the most complete equivalent, its ideal physical expression. Every animal is a human characteristic, a soul condition held in ideal form.

Download the article: Chemistry in Grades Seven to Nine

Translated by Ted Warren

A teacher takes on the task of conveying to young people natural phenomena as well as insights into the relationships between natural events, and preferably in such a way that they receive a powerful developmental impulse. Chemistry is relevant in the seventh grade. But in chemistry lessons a negative effect can easily take place, either a cramping effect that leads to direct antipathy for the subject or the creation of rigid and abstract mental images. The first is more often found among girls and the latter among boys. This is not chemistry’s fault, for this subject can answer some of the deepest riddles in nature and in the human being.

In addition we can practice active thinking. To do so, we cannot pack chemistry into a gray mass of formulas and experiments. If the teacher starts with methods that result in abstraction, it is hard to make chemistry come alive again. The children’s first meeting with chemistry must help them understand that the subject has to do with them and with the world around them. Teachers should not believe they can introduce chemistry in the seventh grade according to scientific recipes. Chemistry must be embedded in a number of subjects, whether children are learning within the world of nature, culture, art or handicrafts. The subjects should support each other, and in that way children will be engaged from many sides and can respond from different aspects of their beings.

Download the article: Astronomy: The Oft Forgotten School Subject

Translated by Ted Warren

Astronomy has never enjoyed a distinguished place among modern school subjects. Despite the decisive meaning of our globe’s daily rhythm and the changing of the seasons for all life on earth, the study of astronomy lacks a certain relevance that would bring more focus to it as a school subject. A few sections can be found in the final pages of geography books, a situation that not even modern space travel has been able to change.

Is this exaggerated? Do most people know the modem scientific worldview of our solar system with the planets circling in continually wider elliptic paths? And that the shining stars are newer suns in space, perhaps with planets circling. And who does not know there are star clouds that in truth are huge Milky Way like system galaxies far, far away? Most significantly we associate astronomy to the foundation of reliability: magnificent [astronomical!] numbers. Temperatures of millions of degrees, massive formations as large as entire planetary systems, density thousands of times more concentrated than gold. And most impressive are the enormous distances. Just to the moon it is as long as circumnavigating the earth, it is 150 million kilometers to the sun, the closest fixed star is four light years away. Does everyone know what a light year is? The diameter of the Milky Way is 100,000 light years, enough to give you goosebumps when you read these numbers. Kant must have felt this when he spoke of devotion for the starry heavens above and the moral laws within. Did someone say education in our times is weak in astronomy?

Download the article: The Starry Heavens and Our Self

Translated by Ted Warren

Modern astronomy has provided an incredible amount of knowledge on the stellar heavens. With help of enormous observatories and powerful computers, all of what we know about the phenomena of the heavens is now charted with more precision than ever before, our observations double what was previously available.

We can participate in this knowledge through large encyclopedias, thick astronomical books and popular science accounts. But has all this development and accessibility of information resulted in a closer, human relationship to the stars than we have had before? Or has it, to the contrary, actually distanced us from a more intimate experience of the stars?

Modern astronomy presents a model of the starry heavens that resembles a huge machine. And despite the fact that many propose there is probably life and consciousness somewhere else in the cosmos than on earth, it is still unknown. We are most interested in the purely quantitative content, the cold, hard facts, for this kind of information can be manipulated by computers. Life and conscious beings on other planets are only used to balance out the known facts in all kinds of fantasies in the comics and in novels, just as distant from reality as the knowledge that we now have concerning the starry heavens is dead.

Download the article: Teaching Biology in a Human Context

Reprinted from Steiner Education, Vol.22, No.1 (UK)

“Your body is a space capsule, your head the command module.” So begins the introduction to a three-dimensional moving pop-up picture book on the human body now available in the U.K. “When you reach puberty your hormones switch on,” announces a heading in the London Science Museum permanent exhibition called A Study of Ourselves. An advertisement for beer displayed on vast billboards in the U.K. recently shows a series of ape-like figures progressively reaching a vertical posture, the penultimate figure with a bowler hat (symbol of the English business gentleman) and the final figure carrying a can of the appropriate beer. A question mark points to the potential evolutionary leap which awaits discerning drinkers.

These three examples are particularly gross reflections of deeply held beliefs in the West, beliefs firmly underpinned by faith in scientific objectivity. One of these is that the human body is nothing more than a highly complex machine which human beings will eventually be able to take apart and reconstruct. A second, that our bodies and our minds are subject to the outcome of a complex chemistry. The third, that human beings have evolved from a primitive animal condition and that any further evolution is in the random and arbitrary hands of environmental influences. In teaching any science to adolescents one is aware of the forceful nature of these beliefs which are carried subliminally or openly throughout our culture.