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A READER'S JOURNAL
Education for Adolescents, GA#302
(also called Supplementary Course)
by
Rudolf Steiner
Volume X of Steiner’s Writings on Education
8 Lectures in Stuttgart, June 12-19, 1921
Translated by Carl Hoffman
Introduction by Hans-Joachim Mattke
ARJ2 Chapter: Spiritual Science
Published by Anthroposphic Press/MA in 1996
A Book Review by Bobby Matherne ©2017
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In his Introduction, Mattke says that Steiner did not treat the adolescent period as comprehensively as the second seven-year period. I have found this to be the case in the twenty volumes of Steiner’s works on education I have studied and reviewed: most of his effort went to the first and second seven-year periods of growth. His focus here on the third seven-year period makes this volume of lectures especially valuable. Mattke says:
[page 10] We should not view puberty and adolescence as an isolated age but as a condition for transition, as a transitory state of being, paradise having been lost and not yet regained. We could also refer to this third seven-year period as a river flowing between the banks of childhood and adulthood — appreciating its connection with both the preceding and following seven-year periods.
One of the aims of Waldorf Education is to allow to bloom out of children the goals they have brought into their life from the spiritual world, a world from which they have so recently arrived. They bring spiritual limbs, if you will, which must grow as they grow physically, so teachers do best to provide spiritual activities which foster the growth of ideas and feelings of their students, just as they provide physical activities which change as their physical limbs grow. Unless feelings and ideas mature as limbs do, they may grow into adults with fully developed arms and legs and stunted ideas and feelings more appropriate to pre-adolescents.
[page 16] We must see to it that our teaching does not remain rigid, static, but that it can grow with them, change as they change during the course of development, so that at the age of thirty or forty they will still have the benefit of what they learned at seven or eight, because the learning has grown and developed as their complicated limbs have developed, because it has slowed down at the appropriate time, and so forth.
Why are feelings important in the education of children? Feelings allow us to remember events of the past. Children are not robots to be filled with facts and data; they are full human beings of body, soul, and spirit. Data stored without feelings get as lost as valuables put into a bank safety deposit box when no record is kept of the box's location. Feelings provide our access to our vast vault of memories and allow us to retrieve the data stored in those memories.
[page 18, 19] It is our life of feelings — with its joys, pains, pleasure, displeasure, tensions, and relaxations — that is the actual vehicle for the enduring qualities of the ideas and mental images that we can recall at a later stage. . . .
If in line with the convictions of most teachers today, we merely present to the children things to be looked at, to be accurately perceived by the senses, we are not giving them anything that will help them to remember later in life. Their memory will be greatly enhanced, however, if we put feelings into our words, if we teach with warmth, if we spice our lesson with the possibility of allowing the children to experience corresponding emotions, if we make them smile or feel sad, if we endeavor to go beyond the merely intellectual aspects to the life of feeling.Always the teacher should point to the unknown, to draw out the curiosity of the students by asking, "What might happen if?" or saying "Tomorrow we will do this." Every question the teacher raises without answering will plant a seed which will bring fruit in the child some days, years, or decades later when an answer appears in the child's mind. A librarian scanned through one book before letting me check it out at the age of ten. She never explained why, but allowed me to check out the book. The unanswered question spurred by her actions stayed with me a decade or so before I realized the adventures of the character Spiro, drawn in the pages of text (which I was unable to comprehend), involved the life cycle of the syphilis bug. I absorbed information about how the bug enters the human body, affects the eyes, and so forth at the tender age of ten and understood its importance at age 25 or so. The feelings that librarian stirred in me without saying a word led me to a revelation a long time later. Steiner suggests a teacher "add tension, expectation, and relaxation that will permeate and benefit the thought process." (Page 19) This is how teachers can provide a key to locating and unlocking important memories of our childhood education.
[page 19, 20] We ought to make use of the unknown or half known in order to facilitate the children's effort at fitting the details into a totality. We really must not ignore such matters.
There are two parts to teaching which I call process and content. Process involves activity and content involves contemplation, the first is external and the second is internal. Steiner emphasizes that these two must be intertwined with each other.
[page 20] Essentially our lessons consist of two interacting parts. We instruct, we exhort the children to participate, to use their skills, to be physically active. Be it in eurythmy, music, physical education, even writing or the mechanical processes of arithmetic — we try to engender activity. The other part of our lessons is concerned with contemplation. Here we ask the children to think about, to consider the things we tell them.
To focus only on contemplation in children creates "benumbed, confused adults." The teachers of history who must focus on content owe a lot to music teachers for the lively process which provides the balance needed in their children.
[page 21] In children who are merely listening to stories, organic processes are called forth that are identical to those occurring during sleep, when the metabolic processes ascend to the brain. Making the children sit and listen, we engender in them, in the organism, a delicate sleeplike activity.
Teachers always seem to want their children to sit and listen, unknowingly creating a sleep-like activity in their students. Sleep allows what is right or what is amiss to arise in the organism. What's a teacher to do if that's the case?
[page 21] And this rising upward of what is amiss in the organism is continuously engendered by our insistence on making the children listen, think, and contemplate. When, on the other hand, we teach them eurythmy, when we make them sing, or play instruments, when we employ them in physical activities, as in handwork and gymnastics, even when we make them write something — when they are in fact doing things, the organic processes thus stimulated are an intensification of waking activity.
Even in objective subjects, especially in objective subjects, we must find a way to relate the objective outside world to the inner human world of the children; only thus can we stimulate their feelings, helping them to incorporate the important objective material into themselves.
[page 24] We should always try to find such connections, and in fact, the most objective subjects are the ones that lend themselves most easily to our doing so, because all the world can be found within the human being.
If you, as an experienced teacher wonder how the world can be found within the human being, you would do best to study anthroposophical works on the evolution of the cosmos, and soon you will be able to discern the human being as a microcosm of the macrocosm in which we all live.
Ever have something happen to you about which you said, "I cannot stomach that." Deeply sad experiences paralyze our digestive processes causing food to feel like a lump in our stomach. Look at unhappy, sad, and depressed people: they look like people with bad digestion because they are having trouble absorbing the events of their life and this trouble disables their digestion. What's the cure? A good laugh will help! Norman Cousins was diagnosed with a deadly disease and he fired his doctors and sat home watching Marx Brothers movies. He healed himself by extended courses of belly laughing.
[page 25] In a healthy digestion, the food passes naturally from the stomach to the intestine, is absorbed by the villie, passes into the blood, then penetrates the diaphragm, so that it can be distributed in the upper organism. This physical process is, qualitatively understood, identical to the effect of laughing, when we artificially induce the vibrations of the diaphragm. Laughing is a process that makes us organically healthy; its effect is similar to that of a healthy undisturbed digestion.
An old saw is, "He who laughs last, laughs best." I prefer to state it this way, "He who laughs, lasts!"
How can a teacher relate the physical objective processes of rain, thunder, and lightning to the human being, some skeptics may be thinking. Steiner explains it simply:
[page 26] As soon as we imagine — when somebody is laughing, when somebody experiences laughter in the soul and spirit — that the event is connected with the diaphragm, we shall also gradually arrive at the idea of the effects of spirit and soul in rain, thunder, and lightning. We are led to these realizations by relating everything to the human being.
We cannot live forever in rain, thunder, and lightning, can we? No, there must be some alteration, some rhythm between violent forces and calming forces and where better to experience this flow and ebb than in music?
[page 27] The concepts we teach our students about stomach, lungs, and liver will produce in them a disposition that will again be offset in singing, in the way hunger alternates with eating — a rhythmic process. Only rhythm maintains life. The correct handling of the contemplative subjects will produce faculties that will correspondingly manifest in the other subjects.
The only way I could endure long teaching sessions without a lick of imagination or humor in grade school and high school through was through my doodling. I got a 'C' in conduct in the second grade, and my mother was so furious with me that I had to find some way to survive without disrupting the class from then on. Writing on a pad did not disrupt the class and was one of the few things teachers did not frown upon during a lesson. They assumed I was diligently taking notes on what they were saying, but if I had been taking notes on dull material, it would doubled my discomfort! No! I was drawing silly faces or war planes in dog fights in the sky. One technique I developed was to draw a long fractured and continuous line on the right side of the page and then, beginning at the top of the line, finding a person's face in a couple of the zigzag segments and complete the face. In the course of some delightful minutes of creativity, I had drawn 7 to 10 faces all connected along the randomly drawn line. If there was more dull class time to be filled, I could begin another line. I often chuckled silently at the funny faces which grew out of the randomly drawn line. Yes, occasionally I wrote down important points the teacher made, but always there were a lot more doodles on my page than notes about the teacher's lesson.
Even the dullest exercise given during class by the teacher, I could convert into fun. I remember Mrs. Dixon in my eight grade English class giving us this exercise: Write a sentence with each of these 17 words. She obviously intended us to write 17 sentences, one with each word, but I decided to write one sentence which incorporated all 17 words. Amazingly, she accepted my unique approach to following her instruction and appreciated the ingenuity it required.
I remember Carl Jung saying that a peptic ulcer is an unexpressed imagination. No one ever gave me a peptic ulcer, but unknowingly I may have given others one. There is apparently a mysterious connection between expressing one's imagination and being free of ulcers. Perhaps the laughing and even minor chuckling I did at my funny face doodles was enough to keep pepsin from getting stuck in a fold in my stomach.
[page 28] Such connections are as mysterious as those between hunger and satiation. Ignoring the connections produces different results. For example, if we teach for an hour without stimulating the imagination of the children, their stomachs will be filled with acid, will have excessive pepsin. This cannot be avoided in a contemplative lesson. It is, however, not only a matter of acidifying the food in the stomach; there is also a spiritual dimension. All matter is at the same time spirit. When the children are singing, the pepsins role is to produce in them the inner prickling they should feel during singing. This prickling cannot occur if the pepsin remains stuck in the folds of the stomach. And it does remain there if one only talks, without stimulating the imagination. When the imagination is stirred, the pepsin is distributed throughout the body, with the result that the singing teacher will be confronted by children whose organs are permeated by this prickling, this effervescent sensation. Without such experience — especially in the speech organs — the children will be lethargic and lazy, and they will sing without enthusiasm.
Is Steiner's spiritual science only a fantasy as many claim? Or does it reveal secrets to living as a full human being? Those who have studied Steiner's work to debunk it have often become great supporter of his spiritual science, often taking on a new career path as they came to understand the reality of matter and spirit revealed in his works. And nowhere is his work more revealing and important than in the field of education of our youth.
As a teenager, I delivered newspapers and it gave me many chances to enter subscribers' homes when I collected on Saturdays. Usually the woman paid me in her kitchen and so often I would notice these beautiful wax fruit in a bowl. They were pretty, but completely lifeless, a state which one never had to test by biting on the fruit because the slightest touch revealed its dead state. Unfortunately human anatomy and physiology is often taught in a way that one might use wax fruit to teach botany: using leathery, lifeless corpses.
[page 29] You must actually become pioneers in a certain sphere, must tell yourselves: "We have today, on the one hand, the abstract sciences — history, geography, even physics, and so on. They are practiced in the most abstract ways. People acquire concepts. On the other hand, we have the sciences of the human being — anatomy, physiology — by means of which we learn about the human being, as though the organs were cut out of leather and reassembled." Truly, as cut from leather — because there is really no difference between the descriptions of living organs presented by our anatomists and cut-out leather pieces. The human being is not described as a totality. The spirit is ignored.
Steiner closes Lecture One by explaining that you as a true teacher must have weight and wings, both in the wordy content you load upon them and the lively processes you lead children to experience as they acquire skills. This requires detailed advance preparation before a class begins. You must know the material all the way through, so your words are simply a road map you follow through your internal understanding of the material and that internal understanding flies from your soul to the soul of your children.(1)
[page 30] Thus you may enter the classroom in such a way that your words carry weight and, at the same time, acquire wings. You will not torture the children with words that merely fly away, nor will you teach them skills and aptitudes that weigh them down.
In Lecture Two Steiner reveals the process by which we as full human beings reach conclusions. We go through this process in three stages: 1) mental images, 2) judgments, and 3) conclusions. The mental images portion of the process happens in our head via our thinking process. The judgment portion of the process happen in our arms and hands via our feelings. The conclusion portion of the process happens in our legs and feet via our willing. Consider how we might speak about a man making a difficult decision: First, he mulls over all the possibilities (etheric memory function is active in his head). Second, he wrings his hands as he struggles with the alternatives; the decision is in his hands, we say, he's got a good grasp on it (astral function is active in his arms and hands). Third, he comes to a conclusion and stands up to put it into action (his I activates his will to implement the decision).
[page 31, 32 Head] Of the three stages — mental images, judgments, conclusions — only in the first is the head involved. We ought to be conscious of this: The head is concerned only with the forming of mental images, of ideas, and not with judgments or conclusions. . . . It is really only the etheric body — besides the physical — that is fully active in the head. . . . We really must get away from the materialistic view of the head that attaches too much importance to it. We need our head as a reflecting apparatus, no more.
[page 32, 33 Hands and Arms] The forming of mental images and ideas is indeed connected to the head. But not our judgments. These are actually connected to arms and hands. It is true — we judge with our arms and hands. . . the processes leading to judgments are carried out by the mechanism of arms and hands.
It is only the mental images of the resulting judgment which, as a reflection, take place in the head. The hands and arms are connected to the rhythmical organism residing in the middle of our body which mediates the world of feelings. Steiner says, "Judgments are, you will agree, deeply related to feelings, even the most abstract of judgments." We can hardly be aware our feelings because the feelings of confirmation or negation leading to a judgment are deeply embedded in our subconscious. (Page 31)
[page 33, 34 Feet and Legs] In considering conclusions, the drawing of conclusions, we must understand the connection to legs and feet(2). Our contemporary psychologists will, of course, ridicule the idea that it is not the head that draws conclusions but the legs and feet. But it is true. Were we, as human beings, not oriented toward our legs and feet, we could never arrive at conclusions. What this means is that we form ideas and mental images with the etheric body, supported by the head organism; we make our judgments — in an elementary way — with our astral body, supported by our arms and hands; and we draw conclusions in our legs and feet — because we do this with our ego, and the ego, the I, is supported by legs and feet.
In many places Steiner explains that our head is a product of our previous lifetime, arriving from the cosmos, formed out of our previous life's arms and legs. Our current life's arms and legs are inherited from parents and grandparents. We learn how our head, arms, and legs are involved in the three processes of choosing among options, making a firm decision, and effecting a follow-through.
This next passage is remarkable because Steiner pulls the rug from under materialists by accusing them by not studying material phenomena adequately, saying that if they did, they would recognize the absurdity of their own position and the reality of the spiritual underpinnings of the material world.
[page 37] When one stands firmly on the ground of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, it no longer matters if one is a materialist or a spiritualist. It really doesn't matter. The harm done by materialism is not the study of material phenomena. If this study were performed thoroughly, the phenomena would transform into spirit and all the materialistic concepts would be recognized as absurdities. The harm done is the feeblemindedness that results when we do not complete thought processes, when we do not concentrate enough on what the senses perceive. We thus lose sight of reality. If we were to pursue thoughts about the material world to the end, we would arrive at the picture, the idea of the spirit.
Similarly the spiritualists come under a similar criticism because they also accept incomplete thought processes.
[page 38] Be one a materialist or a spiritualist both perspectives will lead to the same result, provided the thought process is completed. Again, it is not the spirit that is the problem in spiritualism but rather this uncompleted thought process that so easily turns the spiritualist into an idiot, a nebulous mystic, a person who causes confusion and who can only vaguely come to grips with reality.
As Steiner closes out Lecture Two, he reinforces what he said earlier that teachers must work out of the totality of the human being to reach their children effectively. I see him pointing to how meanings fly from soul to soul on the wings of words(3), and teachers are most effective when they absorb material into their souls so that meanings can fly to their children in the classroom.
[page 44, 45] Again and again you will find that when you have spent long hours in preparing a lesson, when you have grappled with a subject and then enter the classroom, the children will learn differently than they would when taught by a "superior" lecturer or instructor who spent as little time as possible in preparation. I actually know people who on their way to school quickly read up the required material. Indeed, our education and teaching are deeply affected by the way we grapple not only with the immediate subject matter but also with all the other things connected to skills and methods. These things, too, should be worked and grappled with.
There are spiritual connections in life. If we have first heard a song in our mind, in the spirit, it will have a greater effect on the children when we teach it to them. These things are related. The spiritual world works in the physical. This activity, this work of the spiritual world, must be applied especially to education and didactics. If, for example, during the preparation for a religion lesson, the teacher experiences a naturally pious mood, the lesson will have a profound effect on the children. When such a mood is absent, the lesson will be of little value to them.People learn about the Waldorf School system of covering a single subject over the course of several weeks to exclusion of all other subjects and they discuss this practice. Is it healthy? Is it good for the children? Do they learn more? And they never come to a conclusion. One cannot come to a conclusion by discussion, only by absorbing knowledge. Steiner famously declared, "Discussion begins when knowledge ends." We could re-state it this way: "Knowledge makes discussion meaningless." The knowledge of the reasons for the single subject approach to education will make all discussion about it meaningless, rightly understood. I will do my best to summarize this knowledge which Steiner presents in Lecture Three.
When we sleep we learn deeply what we only experienced during the day. If our day experiences have been focused on one subject, the deep learning will be more powerful. What goes on within a child to create this enhanced learning?
[page 47] The children go home, they go to bed, they go to sleep; their egos and astral bodies are outside their etheric and physical bodies. What you did with the children in this roundabout way through the physical body and also the etheric body continues in the astral body and the ego. But the latter two are now, during sleep, in a quite different environment. They experience something that can only be experienced during sleep, and everything you taught the children participates in the experience. The effects of the lesson that remain in the astral body and ego are part of the experience during sleep. You must know that you let flow into the astral body and ego what you teach the children through this detour of the physical body and that you thus affect the children's sleep experience. The children will present to you on the following morning the results of what they experience between falling asleep and waking.
Waldorf education is the only one which can understand what happens in a child during night time after a day's worth of learning because it incorporates knowledge of the four bodies of the full human being: physical, etheric, astral, and I.
Next Steiner explains something that may seem counter-intuitive: that what we resist we absorb deeply. When I first learned this truth, I created a simple acronym to help me remember the process: EAT-O-TWIST(4). It's easy to say, eat-oh-twist, and it means everything always turns out the way it's supposed to. Resisting something is a strong way of supposing it to be true, so whatever we resist we systematically reinforce and make it stronger within us. Here's the process he explains: the astral and ego body (I) resist the movements of the physical and etheric body, and during sleep at night, they repeat the resisted activities, causing the child to enter school the next morning having deeply absorbed the experiences of the previous day.
[page 47] Let us think of a child who is doing eurythmy or singing. The physical body is active, and the active physical body and the etheric body impress this activity on the astral body and ego. The ego and astral body are forced into participating in the movements of the physical and etheric bodies. But they resist, because actually they have other forces to concentrate on. These forces must now, in a way, be subdued. And although the ego and astral body resist, they must accept what their own physical and etheric bodies mediate to them — in eurythmy it is more the physical body; in listening to a piece of music, it is more the etheric body.
Ego and astral body then enter the world we live in between falling asleep and waking up. Everything that has been impressed on them continues during sleep to vibrate in them. Ego and astral body actually repeat — in the more intricate and spiritualized way peculiar to their nature — what they experienced in eurythmy and music. They repeat all of it. And what they thus experience during sleep, this the children take with them to school on the following day.Even in a materialistic science like physics, there is a spiritual component of learning which goes on overnight as a child sleeps.
[page 51] Yesterday I experimented, and in reviewing the experiment I then appealed to the children's imagination. In today's lesson I add the contemplative element. In doing so, I not only meet the pictures in the children's heads, but also help to bring the pictures into their consciousness.
First you teach the experiment with the apparatus in class, next you review it without the apparatus, then you add the thinking dimension. Steiner explains.
[page 51, 52] Remember the progression: I teach a physics lesson, make an experiment, then recapitulate the stages of the experiment without the apparatus. On the following day, we discuss the previous experiment, contemplate it, reflect on it. The children are to learn the inherent laws. The cognitive element, thinking, is now employed. I do not force the children to have mere pictures in their heads, pictures they have brought with them from sleep, pictures without substance, without meaning.
Imagine a conventional school classroom, where physics is nestled between literature, history, geometry, and biology classes, each one hour long, imagine the chaos this creates in a child's head, a chaos which may be expressed outwardly as, "I hate school!"
[page 52] Just imagine the children coming to school with these pictures in their heads, of which they have no knowledge. If I were to immediately start with a new experiment, without first nourishing them with the cognitive, contemplative element, I would again occupy the whole of their being, and the effort they would have to make would stir up these pictures; I would create chaos in their heads. No, above all, what I must do first is consolidate what wishes to be there, provide nourishment. These sequences are important; they adapt to, are in tune with, the life processes.
The Waldorf system of concentrating on one subject each morning for several weeks eliminates the chaos because it harmonizes with the child's life processes.
[page 52, 53] When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.