If they are taught to read and write as two separate things it is just as though their milk were to be
separated chemically into
two different parts, and you gave them one part at one time
and the other at another. Reading and writing must form a
unity. You must bring this idea of “soul milk” into being for
your work with the children when they first come to school.
PA
And so between the change of teeth and puberty you must
educate out of the very essence of imagination. For the quality
that makes a child under seven so wholly into a sense-organ
now becomes more inward; it enters the soul life. The senseorgans
do not think; they perceive pictures, or rather they form
pictures from the external objects. And even when the child’s
sense experiences have already a quality of soul, it is not a
thought that emerges but an image, albeit a soul image, an
imaginative picture. Therefore in your teaching you must work
in pictures, in images.
Now you can work least of all in pictures if you are teaching
children something that is really quite foreign to them. For
example, the calligraphy of today is quite foreign to children
both in written or printed letters. They have no relation whatever
to what is called an A. Why should they have a relation to
an A? Why should they be interested in an L? These are quite
foreign to them, this A, this L. Nevertheless when children
come to school they are taught these things, with the result that
they feel no contact with what they are doing. And if they are
taught this before the change of teeth and are obliged to stick
letters into cut-out holes, for example, then they are given
things that are outside their nature and to which they have not
the slightest relationship.
But what you should appeal to is what the children do possess
now—an artistic sense, a faculty for creating imaginative
pictures. It is to this you must turn. You should avoid a direct
approach to the conventional letters of the alphabet that are
used in writing and printing. Rather, you should lead the children,
in a vivid and imaginative way, through the various stages
that humanity has passed through in the history of civilization.
In former times there was picture writing; that is to say, people
painted something on the page that reminded them of the
object. You do not need to study the history of civilization, but
you can show children the meaning and spirit of what people
wanted to express in picture writing. Then children will feel at
home in their lessons.
For example: Let us take the word Mund—(mouth). Get the
children to draw a mouth, or rather paint it. Let them put on
dabs of red color and then tell them to pronounce the word;
you can say to them: don’t pronounce the whole word at first,
but begin only with the sound “M”. And now you can form
the letter M out of the upper lip (see drawing). If you follow
this process you can get the letter M out of the mouth that the
children first painted.
You do not need to go back to these original characters, but
you can invent ways and means of your own. The teacher must
be inventive and must create out of the spirit of the thing.
Take the word fish. Let the
children draw or paint some
kind of fish. Let them say the
beginning of the word: “F”
and you can gradually get the
letter F out of the picture (see
drawing).
Lecture Two 25
And thus, if you are inventive, you can find pictures for all
the consonants. They can be worked out from a kind of painting-
drawing, or drawing-painting. This is more awkward to
deal with than the methods of today. For it is of course necessary
that after the children have been doing this painting for an
hour or two you have to clear it all away. But it just has to be
so, there is nothing else to be done.
So you can see how the letters can be developed out of pictures
and the pictures again directly out of life. This is the way
you must do it. On no account should you teach reading first,
but proceeding from your drawing-painting and paintingdrawing,
you allow the letters to arise out of these, and then
you can proceed to reading.
If you look around you will find plenty of objects that you
can use to develop the consonants in this way. All the consonants
can be developed from the initial letters of the words
describing these objects.
It is not so easy for the vowels. But perhaps for the vowels
the following is possible. Suppose you say to the children:
“Look at the beautiful sun! You must really admire it; stand like
this so that you can look up and admire the glorious sun.” The
children can stand, look up, and then express their wonder
thus: Ah! Then you paint this gesture and you actually have the
Hebrew A, the sound “Ah,” the sound of wonder. Now you
need only to make it smaller and gradually turn it into the letter
A (see drawing).
eurythmy, letting them take up one position or another, then
you can also develop the vowels in the way I have mentioned.
And so if you bring before
the children something of an
inner soul quality and above
all what is expressed in
THE KINGDOM OF CHI LDHOOD
Eurythmy will be a very great help to you because the sounds
are already formed in the eurythmy gestures and movements.
Think for instance of an O. You embrace something lovingly.
Out of this you can obtain the O (see drawing). You can really
get the vowels from the gesture, the movement.
Thus you must work out of observation and imagination,
and the children will then come to know the sounds and the
letters from the things themselves. You must start from the picture.
The letter, as we know it today in its finished form, has a
history behind it. It is something that has been simplified from
a picture, but the kind of magical signs of the printed letters of
the present day no longer tell us what the pictures were like.
When the Europeans, these “better men,” went to America
at the time when the “savages,” the native Indians, were still
there—even in the middle of the nineteenth century such
things happened—they showed these savages printed writing
and the Indians ran away from it because they thought the letters
were little devils. And they said: The palefaces, as the Indians
called the Europeans, communicate with each other by
means of little devils, little demons.
This is just what letters are for children. They mean nothing
to them. The child feels something demonic in the letters, and
rightly so. They already become a means of magic because they
are merely signs.
You must begin with the picture. That is not a magic sign
but something real and you must work from this.
People will object that the children then learn to read and
write too late. This is said only because it is not known today
how harmful it is when the children learn to read and write too
soon. It is a very bad thing to be able to write early. Reading
Lecture Two 27
and writing as we have them today are really not suited to the
human being till a later age—the eleventh or twelfth year—and
the more a child is blessed with not being able to read and
write well before this age, the better it is for the later years of
life. A child who cannot write properly at thirteen or fourteen
(I can speak out of my own experience because I could not do
it at that age) is not so hindered for later spiritual development
as one who early, at seven or eight years, can already read and
write perfectly. These are things that the teacher must notice.
Naturally you will not be able to proceed as you really
should today because the children have to pass from your independent
school into public life. But a great deal can be done
nevertheless when you knows these things. It is a question of
knowledge. And your knowledge must show you, above all,
that it is quite wrong to teach reading before writing. In writing,
especially if it is developed from the painting-drawing,
drawing-painting that I have spoken of, the whole human
being is active—the fingers take part, the body is positioned,
the whole person is engaged. In reading only the head is occupied
and anything that only occupies a part of the organism
and leaves the remaining parts impassive should be taught as
late as possible. It is most important first to bring the whole
being into movement, and later on the single parts.
Naturally, if you want to work in this way you cannot expect
to be given instructions for every detail, but only an indication
of the path to be followed. And so you can build on nothing
else but absolute freedom in this method of education arising
out of Anthroposophy, though this freedom must include the
free creative fancy of the teacher and educator.
In the Waldorf School we have been blessed with what I
might call a very questionable success. We began with one hundred
and thirty to one hundred and forty pupils; but these
pupils came from the industrial works of Emil Molt, so they
